Ingredients
Anise Hyssop
Toss the flowers into miso at the last minute.
Apple
Apple is a temperate tree fruit with deep roots in Northeast orchards. Different varieties are grown for sharply different balances of sugar, acid, aroma, tannin, texture, and storage life.1
Asparagus
Asparagus is a perennial vegetable harvested for its young shoots. It originated in Asia Minor and has been cultivated for more than 2,000 years; in Maine, it is one of the first major spring vegetabl...
Autumn Olive
Autumn olives are found in the autumn in the Northeast United States, particularly in Northwestern, Connecticut. We have found them unripe in late September and fully ripe in early October. They have...
Barley
Barley is a chewy grain with a mild, malty sweetness. In the Northeast it matters both as a food grain and as one of the region’s core malting crops, so it sits at the overlap between porridge, bread,...
Bee Balm
Bee balm has a fresh citrus-mint aroma and flavor. It is a Northeast-native garden herb also known as Oswego tea.1
Beet
Beet roots are sweet and earthy, while the leaves have the mineral character of a cooking green. Root colors range from deep red to gold, white, and striped pink.1
Blackberry
Blackberries are juicy, dark, and a little tannic. Cultivated and wild brambles both grow in the Northeast, with wild berries often having a more concentrated flavor.1
Bloody Butcher Corn
Bloody Butcher is an open-pollinated heirloom dent corn with mottled dark-red kernels. It is field corn rather than sweet corn: the mature dry grain is the ingredient, especially after grinding.1
Broccoli
Broccoli is a brassica grown for its flower buds, but its stems and leaves are edible too. It has a clean green flavor that becomes more sulfurous and sweet with heat.1
Brussels Sprouts
Brussels sprouts are small, dense cabbage buds that grow along a tall stalk. Their flavor is more assertive and nuttier than head cabbage.1
Buckwheat Honey
Buckwheat honey is a dark honey produced when bees forage heavily on flowering buckwheat. Its flavor is usually stronger, maltier, and more earthy than pale clover-style honeys.1
Buckwheat Tea
Buckwheat tea, often sold as sobacha, is an infusion of roasted buckwheat groats. It has a toasted, cereal-like, nutty flavor and is naturally caffeine-free because it is not made from the tea plant.
Buckwheat
Buckwheat is not a wheat or even a grass. It is a broadleaf member of the knotweed family, making it a relative of rhubarb and Japanese knotweed.1
Burdock
Burdock is a Eurasian biennial now common in disturbed ground around the Northeast. The long first-year root is the main food part; cultivated great burdock is the vegetable known in Japan as gobo.1
Buttercup Squash
Buttercup is a dense-fleshed winter squash, commonly recognized by the small button or “cup” on its blossom end. It is one of the winter squash types grown, stored, and eaten across the Northeast.12
Cabbage
Cabbage is a long-keeping Northeast vegetable with a mild, mineral-sweet character. Dense heads give it good storage life after harvest.1
Calendula
Calendula petals bring warm yellow-orange color and a lightly tangy, peppery note. They are sometimes called “poor man’s saffron” for their color rather than for matching saffron’s flavor.1
Camelina Presscake
As part of our exploration of presscakes and byproducts, we’ve been exploring the utilization of oil presscakes. We received these presscakes from Hudson Valley Hops and Grains.
Camellia sinensis
The leaves of the tea plant make true tea: white, green, oolong, black, yellow, and related styles. The many categories come from leaf handling and oxidation, not from different tea species.1
Caraway
Caraway is a biennial in the carrot family. What is commonly called the “seed” is botanically a dry fruit containing the seed.1
Carrot
Carrots are taproots selected into a wide range of shapes and colors. Their roots hold well after harvest and range from orange to purple, red, yellow, and white.1
Catnip
Catnip is a hardy perennial in the mint family, with gray-green scalloped leaves and a spreading habit familiar from many other mints.1
Cauliflower
Cauliflower is a mild, dense brassica grown for its compact white curd: proliferating, undeveloped flowering tissue that has stopped before forming an ordinary loose flower head.1
Celtuce Juice
Blended celtuce leaves with a small amount of white vinegar to help slow oxidation and 5% water. After straining, the resulting juice still oxidized relatively quickly.
Chamomile
Chamomile is an aromatic flower best known as an infusion plant. The name covers more than one species, with German chamomile and Roman chamomile being the most familiar food and garden types.1
Cherry
A cherry is a stone fruit with concentrated sweetness, balancing acidity, and a single hard pit. In the Northeast, sweet cherries are the familiar fresh-eating type, while sour cherries are usually th...
Cleavers
Cleavers are part of the Rubiaceae family, the same family as coffee, and are said—though disputed—to contain trace amounts of caffeine. Their seeds have been roasted and used to make a coffee substit...
Clover
Clover is a legume. Red and white clover are both familiar in Northeast fields and lawns, where the plant’s low growth can hide how important its roots are to the surrounding soil.1
Corn
Corn is a grass grown for large, starchy kernels borne on a cob. In the Northeast it spans fresh sweet corn, dry grain, nixtamalized preparations, and historically much older Indigenous food systems.1...
Cranberry
Cranberries are intensely tart berries native to North America. Their vivid acidity gives them a strong identity among Northeast fruits.1
Cucumber
Cucumber is clean, watery, and crisp, with a mild green flavor. It is a warm-season cucurbit whose high water content makes it feel especially refreshing.1
Daikon
Daikon is a long-rooted East Asian radish. It is the same species as small red and breakfast radishes, selected into a very different root shape and size.
Dandelion
Dandelion is an introduced perennial now deeply familiar in Northeast fields, lawns, and disturbed ground. Its greens are among the earliest edible wild leaves in Maine, often appearing while snow sti...
Daylily
Daylily buds and flowers have a soft asparagus-zucchini character. Only some people tolerate them well, so they are worth trying in a small amount first.1
Dried Cucumber
Inspired by an old post from the Nordic Food Lab, we’re testing the drying of fruits and vegetables for use as spices in Northeastern cuisine.
Dry Bean
Dry beans are mature, dried seeds valued for their long storage life and rich, creamy texture. Maine-grown types include Yellow Eye, Jacob’s Cattle, Soldier, Navy, Black Turtle, and Vermont Cranberry...
Elderberry
American elder is a native Northeast shrub with flat-topped clusters of flowers followed by dark berries. It commonly occurs along wet ground, stream edges, and roadsides.1
Fava Bean Pods
Fava bean pods contain substantial pectin, making them candidates for structural reinforcement and subsequent preservation. Reported pectin content reaches about 17% at peak maturation, comparable to...
Fiddlehead
Northeast food use of “fiddlehead” normally means the young coiled frond of ostrich fern. Nearly every fern makes a fiddlehead as it unfolds, but that does not make every fern edible.1
Fiddleheads
Fiddleheads are the tightly coiled young fronds of the ostrich fern, a classic Northeast spring vegetable with a green, vegetal flavor often compared with asparagus.1
Field Pea
Field peas are the dried, starchy side of the pea family. They have a nuttier, more substantial character than fresh garden peas and store well.1
Fireweed
Chamaenerion angustifolium (also Epilobium angustifolium)
Garlic
Garlic is the most pungent common allium, with a sharp heat that mellows dramatically with age or heat. Its early-season scapes are also an important Northeast market ingredient.1
Grape
Grapes are long-lived perennial vines that fruit on shoots arising from one-year-old canes. That growth pattern is central to how vineyards are trained and pruned.1
Green Bean
Green beans are crisp, tender pods, including green and yellow wax types. They are an easy Northeast garden crop and a familiar summer preserve.1
Hawthorn
Hawthorns are thorny members of the rose family with small apple-like fruits called haws. Depending on the species, the fruit can be red, orange, yellow, or nearly black and ranges from dry and mealy...
Honeynut Squash
Honeynut is a small butternut-type squash developed through Cornell’s vegetable breeding program in New York. It is a modern cultivar, not an old miniature squash rediscovered under a new name.1
Hungarian Wax Pepper
Hungarian wax is a long, tapered pepper that begins pale yellow and ripens through orange to red. It resembles a banana pepper, but many strains carry appreciable chile heat.1
Irish Sea Moss
Irish sea moss is a red seaweed used for its gentle marine flavor and natural thickening power. In the kitchen, it is best known for setting or giving body to puddings, broths, desserts, and other sof...
Japanese Knotweed
Reynoutria japonica (also published as Fallopia japonica)
Jerusalem Artichoke
Jerusalem artichoke is a sunflower-family perennial grown for its knobbly underground tubers. It is native to North America and has a long Northeast food history.1
Kale
Kale is a sturdy, slightly bitter brassica green. It tolerates cool Northeast conditions and remains structurally leafy rather than forming the dense head seen in cabbage.1
Koji Spores
Koji spores, or koji tane, are the inoculum used to begin a fresh batch of koji. They are sold either as a concentrated powder or on dried grains of rice or barley; both forms can inoculate a differen...
(A) Koji
Koji is made by cultivating a mold on a cooked grain or legume substrate. It is central to traditional Japanese fermented foods like Miso, Soy Sauce, Sake, Amazake, Shochu, and Mirin. This exploration...
Lamb's Quarters
Lamb’s-quarters is a mild, tender wild green, often treated as a local spinach stand-in. It is common in Maine gardens and disturbed ground.1
Leek
Leeks are the gentler, sweeter allium, with white and pale-green layered stalks. Their mildness comes between onion and garlic, without either ingredient’s sharpest edge.1
Lemon Balm
Lemon balm is a lemon-scented mint-family herb. Its soft leaves have a volatile citrus-herbal aroma that fades with prolonged drying and storage.1
Lilac
Lilac blossoms are perfumed and faintly bitter. Their aroma is striking but can turn soapy or heavy quickly, so they read best as a small accent.1
Linden
Linden flowers are small, cream-colored, and distinctly honey-scented. The flowers and their pale leaflike bracts are the part usually gathered for infusions.1
Maple Syrup
Maple syrup is concentrated maple sap, most often from sugar maple (Acer saccharum) and sometimes red maple (Acer rubrum). Maine law defines finished syrup as 66–69% soluble solids by weight (degrees...
Meadowsweet
Meadowsweet is a damp-ground perennial with frothy cream flowers and a powerful sweet-almond, haylike scent. It is European rather than Northeast-native, but is hardy enough to grow in the region and...
Mint
Mint is a group of strongly aromatic herbs, not a single flavor or species. Many cultivated mints spread by runners, which explains both their persistence and their tendency to escape a small planting...
Nasturtium
Nasturtium is an edible garden plant whose leaves, flowers, stems, and young seed pods all have a peppery, watercress-like bite. It grows easily in Northeast gardens.1
Nettle
Nettle is a vigorous perennial green whose hollow hairs deliver the familiar sting. Once handled with care and processed, its young shoots are an established spring food in northern climates.1
New Jersey Tea
New Jersey tea is a deciduous shrub native across New England. It has unusually deep roots and is adapted to persist after fire.1
Oat
Oats are a mild, creamy grain. Steel-cut, rolled, and quick oats all begin as the same whole grain, then are processed differently for texture and preparation time.1
Okara
Okara is the damp pulp left after ground soybeans are filtered to make soy milk or tofu. It is mostly the insoluble part of the bean, so it carries fiber, some protein and fat, and a mild cooked-soy f...
Onion
Onions are a long-keeping Northeast storage vegetable with a balance of sweetness, sharpness, and sulfurous aroma. Variety and maturity make a real difference: spring onions are green and mild, while...
Orache
Orache is a soft, mild leafy green with leaves that may be green, red, or purple. Garden orache is an old cultivated vegetable; several wild Atriplex species also occur around saline ground.1
Orange Peel
Orange peel is two ingredients held together. The colored outer epidermis contains glands of aromatic oil, while the white, spongy albedo beneath is rich in pectin and protective bitter phenolics.1
Oyster Mushroom
Oyster mushrooms are wood-decomposing fungi that form layered, shelf-like clusters. The “oyster” name refers to the cap shape, not to a marine relationship.
Parsnip
Parsnips are sweet, fragrant roots with a flavor between carrot, celery root, and warm spice. They are especially associated with cold-weather growing and storage.1
Pea
Peas range from sweet shelling peas to crisp snap peas and starchy dried peas. They are all forms of the same cool-weather crop, but with very different textures.1
Peanut
Peanut is a legume, not a tree nut. Its seed develops underground after the flower stalk bends into the soil, which makes its growth habit unusually different from other familiar beans.1
Pine
Pinus spp.; Northeast food use most often points to eastern white pine, Pinus strobus
Pineapple Weed
Pineapple weed is a low-growing aromatic relative of chamomile. Crushing the yellow-green flower heads releases the pineapple-like scent behind its common name.1
Potato
Potatoes are starchy tubers and a longstanding Maine field and storage crop. Aroostook County became especially closely associated with commercial potato production.1
Pumpkin Seed Milk
A basic pumpkin seed milk can be made by soaking pumpkin seeds overnight and grinding with twice the amount of water by weight as soaked seeds, followed by straining.
Pumpkin Seed
Pumpkin seeds are the mature seeds of Cucurbita fruits. Hull-less “pepita” types and ordinary hulled pumpkin seeds are related but visually quite different.1
Purslane
Purslane is a juicy, lightly tart green with crisp stems and fleshy leaves. Its texture is more succulent than spinach, even after heat.1
Radish
Radishes are quick-growing, peppery roots in the mustard family. The roots and greens are edible, and varieties range from mild breakfast radishes to dense winter storage radishes.1
Red Currant
Red currants are translucent, sharply acidic berries carried in dangling clusters. They belong to Ribes, the same genus as black currants and gooseberries.
Red Raspberry
Red raspberries are aggregate fruits made of many drupelets. Unlike blackberries, ripe raspberries separate from their core, leaving a hollow center.1
Resinous Polypore
Found in late September, growing on old-growth trees. It has a texture similar to Chicken of the Woods.
Rhubarb
Rhubarb is a long-lived perennial grown for its tart leaf stalks. In the Northeast it is one of the first garden crops to arrive after winter, and old plantings often persist around former home sites....
Rose Hip
Rose hips are the fruits that remain after rose flowers are pollinated. Depending on species, they range from small and firm to the large orange-red hips of beach rose.1
Rye
Rye has a darker, earthier flavor than wheat and a gentle bitter edge. It is often associated with bread and brewing, but is also an important Northeast grain in its own right.
Santa Fe Pepper
Capsicum annuum ‘Santa Fe Grande’ and related Santa Fe types
Shiso
Shiso is a mint-family leaf native to China and India and established in Japanese food culture by the eighth or ninth century. Its defining fatty, herbaceous, spicy aroma comes from perillaldehyde, th...
Sorghum
Sorghum is a warm-season grass with distinct grain, sweet-stem, and forage types. Grain sorghum is often called milo; sweet sorghum is grown for sugary stalk juice.
Sour Cherry
Sour cherries are smaller, softer, and much more acidic than familiar supermarket sweet cherries. They are a separate species, not simply sweet cherries picked before ripening.
Soybean
Soybean is a legume grown for protein- and oil-rich seeds. Its food role is unusually broad: the same mature bean can become oil, flour, milk, curd, meal, or a fermentation substrate.1
Spelt
Spelt is a hulled wheat: the husk stays tightly attached after threshing and requires an extra dehulling step. It contains gluten and is not a wheat-free grain.
Spicebush
Spicebush is a native shrub at the northern edge of its range in Maine. It has aromatic leaves, twigs, bark, and red fall berries; the berries are sometimes used as a local spice.1
Spruce
Spruce tips are the soft, pale new shoots at the ends of branches. At that stage their flavor is brighter and less woody than mature needles, often reading as resin, citrus peel, and green fruit.
Squash Blossom
Squash blossoms are lightly floral, soft, and edible; both male and female flowers can be eaten. They are the flower of the same plants that give us summer and winter squash.1
Staghorn Sumac
Staghorn sumac is a native Northeast shrub recognizable by its velvet-covered young branches and upright clusters of deep red fruit. The fruit’s tart surface gives it its food interest.1
Strawberry
Strawberries are fragrant, sweet-tart aggregate fruits with a short, delicate post-harvest life. Fully ripe fruit is aromatic and soft, two traits that also make it quick to bruise and decay.1
Sunflower Seed
Sunflower seed comes from a flower head that is actually a dense inflorescence of many tiny flowers. Each fertilized disk flower can develop into one seed.1
Sweet Corn
Sweet corn is a high-summer crop with notably sugary kernels. Its sweetness begins converting to starch after harvest, which is why local corn tastes so different from corn that has traveled.1
Tomato
Tomatoes range from bright and sharp to deeply sweet, depending on variety and ripeness. In the Northeast, they are a frost-tender crop whose fruit quality changes quickly with maturity.1
Turnip
Turnips are crisp and peppery when young, becoming sweeter and more earthy as they mature. Their roots and greens are both edible, and they are well suited to cool Northeast growing conditions.1
Unripe Peach
Prunus persica, harvested before ordinary eating ripeness
Unripe Plum
Prunus spp., harvested before ordinary eating ripeness
Verbena
For culinary use, “verbena” usually means lemon verbena: a powerful lemon-scented leaf used in tea, cold drinks, fruit, sauces, fish, sweets, and creams.1
Violet
Violets are sweet, perfumed spring flowers with a delicate flavor and a deep purple-blue color. They are a small, distinctly seasonal accent rather than a main ingredient.1
Wheat
Wheat is the grain most closely associated with flour and bread. Its gluten-forming proteins are what give wheat dough its characteristic stretch and structure.
Wild Blueberry
Maine wild blueberries are small, sweet-tart berries with concentrated flavor. Their lowbush plants spread naturally across barrens and fields.1
Woodruff
Sweet woodruff is a low, shade-tolerant perennial with whorled leaves and small white flowers. Its characteristic hay-and-vanilla aroma becomes more apparent as the leaves wilt or dry.1
Yarrow
Yarrow is a strong, aromatic herb used in small amounts in tea blends and occasional savory cooking. Its leaves and flowers are often described as tarragon-like, mildly sweet, and bitter.1
Zucchini
Zucchini is a tender summer squash, usually harvested young while its skin is thin and its seeds are small. It is productive in Northeast gardens and shares a plant with edible squash blossoms.1
Lovage
A working ingredient note for lovage in the Northeast Larder.