Recipes, memories of Maine

By Andrea Pyenson, Globe Correspondent, 8/20/2003

After nearly 20 years at restaurants in Manhattan and Kennebunkport, Maine, Rebecca Charles opened the Pearl Oyster Bar in Greenwich Village. Charles, who grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y., and spent summers with her extended family in Kennebunkport, says she modeled the restaurant on "the many lobster shacks that have passed through my life."

"Lobster Rolls and Blueberry Pie," written by Charles and Deborah DiClementi, is part memoir, part cookbook. It begins with the story of Charles's "young, liberal, cosmopolitan, Jewish" granduncle's, then grandparents', first visits to Kennebunkport in 1919, when the seaside community wasn't particularly welcoming to Jews. It ends with Charles's account of planning and opening the Pearl Oyster Bar, in 1997.

More than 70 recipes, including several "Pearl classics," are woven throughout the narrative, with instructions for oyster and clam shucking, buying and grilling fish, grilling corn in the husk, and lobster picking (getting meat out of a cooked lobster).

Charles writes that her childhood summers "were synonymous with two food items: lobster rolls and blueberry pie." The recipe for lobster rolls relies on picking lobster meat, never using prepackaged or frozen. The secret to her mayonnaise is Hellman's.