Ingredients
Anise Hyssop
Anise hyssop is a fragrant perennial in the mint family with leaves and flower spikes that smell distinctly of sweet anise and licorice when handled.1 In New England it turns up in gardens, roadsides,...
Apple
Apple is a temperate tree fruit with deep roots in Northeast orchards, where growers care as much about acidity, tannin, texture, and storage life as simple sweetness.1 The cultivated apple is a pome...
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 olive is a foraged fruit in the Northeast, but it comes with the complication that the shrub is aggressively invasive in New England and spreads readily through bird-dispersed seed.12 It thrive...
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 main 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
Birch Syrup
Birch syrup is a tree syrup made by concentrating the spring sap of birch trees rather than maples. It belongs in a Northeast larder because the same northern hardwood forests that support maple sugar...
Black Emmer
Black emmer is a dark-kerneled emmer wheat, one of the old hulled wheats that sits much closer to the earliest history of agriculture than modern bread flour does. McGee notes emmer among the first ce...
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 is an infusion made from roasted buckwheat groats, so it carries buckwheat’s cereal weight and nutty aroma without pretending to be a leaf tea. Buckwheat itself is not a grass but a fast...
Buckwheat
Buckwheat is not a wheat or even a grass. It is a fast-growing annual in the knotweed family, which makes it a relative of rhubarb and Japanese knotweed rather than of the cereal grains it often stand...
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
Canary Melon
Canary melon is a yellow-skinned type of muskmelon with pale, crisp flesh and a clean sweetness. It is a cultivar group rather than a separate species, so it belongs to the same broad melon species as...
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 storage taproots selected into a wide range of shapes and colors, and they fit the Northeast well because they handle cool weather, sit safely in the ground for a long season, and keep wel...
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.
Celtuce
Celtuce is a stem lettuce: a lettuce grown mainly for its thick crisp stalk rather than for a head of leaves.1 McGee describes it as especially popular in Asia, where the stalk is stripped, peeled, sl...
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 a spring annual in the coffee family, Rubiaceae, recognizable by the tiny hooked hairs that make their stems, leaves, and fruits cling to clothing and animal fur. The plant is widespread...
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
Concord Grape
Concord grape is one of the Northeast’s signature fruit flavors: dark purple, strongly aromatic, and more closely associated with juice, jelly, and cooked desserts than with table-grape crispness. Cor...
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 Bean
Cranberry bean is a large speckled common bean that can be eaten either as a fresh shell bean or as a dry bean. It makes sense here because the Northeast already grows dry beans seriously enough for U...
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, usually with a milder flavor and a much large...
Dandelion
Dandelion is an introduced perennial, but in the Northeast it now feels almost native to the food imagination because it turns up everywhere people walk: lawns, field edges, gravelly lots, and the fir...
Daylily
Daylily is one of the clearer examples of an ornamental plant that also has a real food tradition. UMaine’s edible-flower guidance describes the buds and blooms as having an asparagus-zucchini charact...
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 are the thick green cases around fava beans, and they matter as food in a different way from the shelled seeds inside. Vaughan and Geissler note that immature pods have long been eaten,...
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-seed form of the common pea, grown for storage and milling rather than for the sweet green stage. As a food they sit with other pulses: starchy, protein-rich, and better suite...
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...
Honey
Honey is flower nectar that bees have concentrated and stored, so it is both a sweetener and a record of whatever was blooming around the hive. That makes it especially Northeast-relevant: local honey...
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
Kohlrabi
Kohlrabi is the swollen stem of a cabbage-family plant, not a root, even though it looks like a turnip that forgot where to grow. It belongs in the Northeast because it is a fast cool-season brassica...
Koji Spores
Koji spores, or tane-koji, 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...
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 common wild green that shows up in Northeast gardens, field edges, and other disturbed ground, where it is usually gathered young and cooked like spinach.12 It is one of those vol...
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
Light Munich Malt
Light Munich malt is a more deeply kilned barley malt that still behaves like a base malt. It brings more color and a fuller toasted-grain character than very pale brewing malts, but it still carries...
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 family resemblance more than a single flavor. The true mints are Mentha species, and the ones that matter most in the kitchen are usually spearmint and peppermint, plus the many clones and h...
Mugwort
Mugwort is a strongly aromatic perennial in the daisy family. It is established throughout the Northeast and spreads through deep rhizomes, which is why a plant that can be gathered as an herb can als...
Nasturtium
Nasturtium is an edible garden annual with a broad range of usable parts: leaves, flowers, stems, and young seed pods all carry some version of the same peppery, watercress-like bite.12 In the Northea...
Nettle
Nettle is a vigorous perennial green whose sting is the main reason it is remembered and the main reason it is often overlooked as food. In northern climates, though, the young tops are a standard spr...
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 that fits the cool, wet Northeast unusually well. In Maine they remain a substantial field crop, and recent UMaine variety work points to continued interest in food-grade...
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, and in practice it covers several closely r...
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, and its growth habit is odd enough to feel almost fictional the first time you see it. After flowering above ground, the plant pushes its thin woody fruit capsules...
Pine
Pinus spp.; Northeast food use most often points to eastern white pine, Pinus strobus
Pineapple Weed
Pineapple weed is a low, rayless chamomile relative that shows up in compacted paths, yards, and other disturbed ground across New England.1 The rounded yellow-green flower heads look almost unfinishe...
Plum
Plums are stone fruits with juicy flesh, a taut skin, and enough acid to keep sweetness from turning flat. In the Northeast they are still less common than apples or pears, but cold-hardy hybrid plums...
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 raspberry is the familiar hollow-centered bramble fruit of northern gardens and hedgerows, and in the Northeast it sits close to the line between cultivated berry and wild foraged summer fruit.1 E...
Resinous Polypore
Resinous polypore is a shelf fungus that shows up on dead or decaying hardwood in the Northeast, usually late enough in the season that it feels more autumnal than the brighter summer bracket mushroom...
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 whiskey, but in the Northeast it also matters as a cover crop, a milling grain, and a base...
Santa Fe Pepper
Capsicum annuum ‘Santa Fe Grande’ and related Santa Fe types
Shiitake Mushroom
Shiitake is one of the few cultivated mushrooms that feels both ordinary and distinctive at the same time: familiar enough to buy anywhere, but still strong enough in flavor and texture to matter in i...
Shiitake
Shiitake is a cultivated wood-decaying mushroom valued less for delicacy than for how much savory depth it can generate in a small amount. It fits the Northeast cleanly because log-grown shiitake has...
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 the sugary juice in its stalks. That split matters beca...
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 the edible flowers of the same Cucurbita plants that give summer squash, pumpkins, and winter squash.1 They are soft, lightly floral, and neutral enough to take on richer fillings...
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
Sugar Snap Pea
Sugar snap peas are edible-pod peas bred for a thick, crisp pod that can be eaten while the seeds inside are nearly mature. They sit between shelling peas and snow peas: the pod is fuller and crunchie...
Sunflower Seed
Sunflower seed comes from a flower head that is really a packed inflorescence of many florets. The big yellow rays at the edge are there for show, while the fertile disk florets in the center are the...
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
Tofu
Tofu is bean curd: hot soy milk is coagulated with calcium or magnesium salts, then the delicate curds are gathered and pressed into anything from a custardy silken set to a firmer slicing block.1 In...
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, but wheat is also a set of grain classe...
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.