The bountiful produce of summer and early autumn has always been an inspiration for home cooks. The result has been jams, jellies and pickles which preserve the flavours of the seasons for the remainder of the year.

Today, the best of these traditional recipes offer great methods for making the most of local produce when it is plentiful, tasty and in season.

And when it comes to jams, jellies and preserves, there’s nothing better than home-baked bread.

In this collection, Alice Burdick features traditional east coast ingredients such as blueberries, cranberries, rhubarb, pumpkin, beets and beans, as well as some more unusual ones like crabapples, rose-hips and gooseberries.

The bread recipes in this book offer home bakers classics such as Cape Breton Brown Bread, Corn Muffins, Buttermilk Biscuits and Bannock.

The inspiration for this collection is an 80-year-old cookbook that gathered Nova Scotia recipes that dated back as far as the late 1800s. Alice Burdick has fully revised, updated and tested each recipe to yield delicious results using contemporary ingredients and preserving and baking equipment and techniques. Accompanying the recipes are colour photographs of the recipes that will inspire the browsing reader to action in the kitchen.

Alice Burdick lives in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. She is co-owner of Lexicon Books in Lunenburg, and serves on the board of the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia. In the early 1990s, she was co-editor of The Eternal Network, and assistant coordinator of the Toronto Small Press Fair. She is the author of many chapbooks and three full-length poetry collections: Simple Master (Pedlar Press, 2002); Flutter (Mans?eld Press, 2008); and Holler (Mansfield Press, 2012). Her work has appeared in many magazines, online and in print, and was shortlisted for the First Lemonhound Poetry Prize. Her poetry has been included in several anthologies, including Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the In?uence (The Mercury Press), Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press), Pissing Ice: An Anthology of New Canadian Poets (BookThug), To Find Us: words and images of Halifax (HRMP), and the forthcoming The Child Alone Anthology (Frog Hollow Press).

Alice Burdick's profile page

"Burdick has gone out of her way to assemble a plethora of interesting and delicious recipes from all over Atlantic Canada. My favourite recipe from this book (so far!) is the Nova Scotia Sandwich Bread, but the Autumn Spiced Apple Butter is also a perfect edition this Holiday Season!"

Atlantic Books Today

"[She] understand[s] that today’s home cooks may be food lovers and eaters, but they are not always food makers. [The author knows that] they are addressing a generation that lives on Instagram and recipe search engines, and moans about lengthy headnotes on food blogs.

Atlantic Books Today