Maritime cooking starts with great local produce--lobster, scallops, oysters, blueberries, apples, cranberries, maple syrup, and more. There are treasured traditional dishes--hodge podge, baked beans, gingerbread, blueberry grunt--as well as the simple but delicious lobster boil. Leading chefs like Craig Flinn of Halifax's Chives restaurant, Michael Howell of The Tempest in Wolfville, and many others have come up with wonderful new ways of cooking with fresh, local ingredients. Best Recipes of the Maritime Provinces brings the traditional and the contemporary together in one great collection.

During her many years as Canadian Living magazine's food editor, Elizabeth Baird was a great fan of Maritime cooking. She has visited every corner of the region to research and write about great local producers and cooks and their recipes. To prepare this collection, she started with well over 1,000 recipes published in cookbooks over the past three decades. From those, she has selected 400+ recipes by over fifty of the region's leading chefs, including Elaine Elliot and Virginia Lee, whose bestselling Maritime Flavours has sold more than 30,000 copies. Also included are tasty recipes from healthy eating champions Maureen Tilley and Sandra Nowlan.

This is the book that every Maritime cook will want--and that visitors will take home so they can explore the region's rich culinary traditions.

Elizabeth Baird has been helping shape Canada's culinary landscape for more than three decades. It was the cookbook Classic Canadian Cooking, Menus for the Seasons, published in 1974, that started her career in food writing. Elizabeth's column, "Canadian Cookbook" was a weekly feature in the Toronto Star, she was the food editor for Canadian Living magazine for 20 years and she has authored and co-authored many cookbooks, including the popular Whitecap title Canada's Favourite Recipes. Elizabeth continues to write a weekly column, "Baird's Bites", for the Toronto Sun and is a volunteer historic cook at Fort York. Bridget Wranich is one of the founders of the Culinary Historians of Canada and the program officer at Fort York. Her work and contribution to the food scene has been profiled in many newspapers and magazines, including the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. She is a feature speaker at almost every historical food event in Toronto and an expert in the cooking processes of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Elizabeth Baird's profile page

Featured as a "Book of Interest" in The Seniors' Advocate

Seniors Advocate

"Many of the 400 recipes Baird chose for the book are a blend of old and new. Readers will find Rappie Pies, an Acadian dish derived from the French word for "grate," referring to the method of grating potatoes for the top layer of the pie. This simple peasant fare can be made with nearly any meat, shellfish and, in the old days, sea birds. Yet she also chose more contemporary favourites such as smoothies and cream cheese crab cakes."

The Canadian Press

"What do you get when you take more than 30 cookbooks containing over 1,000 favourite Maritime recipes and stack them on the dining room table at Elizabeth Bairds house? Eventually, they get simmered down into one scrumptious collection called Best Recipes of the Maritime Provinces"

The Chronicle-Herald