Tiny island's bounty inspires cookbook
ISLE AU HAUT, Maine -- This prickly porcupine of an island in the outer reaches of Penobscot Bay is only a 7-mile steam from the mainland but feels eerily and completely disconnected from the rest of the world. It's a lonely place, salty and windswept, clad in spruce and fir, bound with granite, pulled by the tides, and lit by porch lights and fireflies.
On a Saturday afternoon in August, Linda Greenlaw and her mother, Martha, are about to make lunch. Linda, a former swordfish boat captain, became known when she was at the helm of the Hannah Boden, a sister ship to the doomed Andrea Gale, and survived what came to be called ''the perfect storm." As usual, almost everything on the table was either grown or fished on the island.
Mother and daughter are home for the first time in weeks. They've been off promoting their book, ''Recipes From a Very Small Island," and seem glad to have a few days off. Martha, 71, has been tending to the Sea Urchin, the island's tiny gift shop, which she runs with another daughter, Beth Shissler. Linda, 44, has been working on the Mattie Belle, a lobster boat from which she and her father haul traps in Penobscot Bay.
Linda had her austere little house built on family land and installed an old-fashioned kitchen with a reconditioned Glenwood cook stove, a large soapstone sink, and a granite work counter. A large deck on the side looks out over the bay to the outer islands and Camden hills. There, a gas grill is set up for cooking fish and a kettle on a propane burner for boiling lobsters.
Dessert is already made: a fresh blueberry pie Martha brought from her kitchen sits on the counter. The main course is crab-meat salad on toasted soft rolls. ''Isle au Haut crab is the sweetest anywhere," she says. ''The lobster fishermen throw whatever crabs they've caught in crates down by the town landing. When she has a chance, our neighbor Brenda Hopkins goes on down there, picks up a bunch, brings them home, cooks them, and picks them cleaner than you would believe. She's fast at it and has good eyes."
''Recipes From a Very Small Island" is deeply rooted in the daily cooking of this remote and beautiful place, which is home to generations of Greenlaws. ''Around here, cooking's more than a hobby," says Linda. ''There aren't any restaurants, so if you want to eat you're just gonna have to cook."
For Linda, having to cook means first rounding up ingredients. ''In the summer this is a cook's paradise," she says. ''Dad and I always bring home a bucket of lobster after we've been out hauling traps. We've got wild blueberries and cranberries, steamer clams out on the mudflats at Head Harbor, tinker mackerel off the docks, and mussels along the shore outside my parents' house. Lately the general store has even started stocking things like good cheese and ripe peaches."
The only time Linda slacks on the cooking is during the winter -- when her parents go to Florida and her siblings live off island. She's by herself a lot. ''I can get into some bad habits," she says. ''You know, like eating a couple bowls of cereal or just popcorn for dinner." Her boyfriend, who is an orthopedic surgeon from Vermont, also has a house on the island.
The summer after her first year at Colby College, Linda fell in love with fishing. Her face lights up when she talks about it. ''I was 19 years old, and I got a job as a cook and deck hand on the Walter Leeman, a swordfish boat out of Portland. Right away I knew it's what I would do for a long time."
For the next 17 years Linda fished for a living, moving from harbor to harbor and boat to boat, toting around a garbage bag full of clothes and spending weeks at a time tub-trawling for halibut, dragging for squid, and harpooning and longlining swordfish.
When she was 31, Linda was named captain of the Hannah Boden, a 100-foot swordfish boat out of Gloucester, which she ran for six seasons, lived through the devastating storm of 1991, and became known as one of the top commercial fishing captains. By the time Sebastian Junger's book ''The Perfect Storm" was published, making a celebrity of Linda, she had quit the business, moved back home to Isle au Haut, and bought the Mattie Belle. The movie version of ''The Perfect Storm," starring George Clooney as the captain of the Andrea Gale and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Linda Greenlaw, was released in the summer of 2000. ''It was strange to read about myself in a book, but even stranger to see someone playing me on-screen," Linda says. ''Usually you have to be dead before that happens."
Linda, who majored in English in college, never planned on writing her own book. ''After 'The Perfect Storm' came out, I started getting offers from publishers" she says. '' 'The Hungry Ocean' came out in 1999, and I've written three more books since then, so I guess writing is just part of what I do now."
The cookbook, of course, is different from the other volumes, which centered around the sea. This book is filled with family recipes that have a simple, fresh appeal.
Martha mixes the fresh crab meat with lemon juice, mayonnaise, and chopped celery. ''It's very simple," she says. ''But with some things you don't have to do too much." While Martha warms the rolls, Linda fills a bowl with rosemary-and-olive-oil potato chips and another with bread and butter pickles.
''This is a typical quick little lunch that we have on summer days," says Martha. ''It's nothing fancy, but it's something that we love very much." She grew up on a dairy farm in Winslow, Maine, and learned to cook from her mother, whom she calls ''the best cook in the world.
''Every Sunday Mother did the baking for the week," says Martha. ''Bread, rolls, fruit pies, meat pies. She made her minced meat with venison neck and stewed it all day long with raisins and spices. She always made six pies, but they were all gone by Tuesday. My favorite was apple."
After lunch, Linda meets up with her towheaded nephews Aubrey, 7, and Addison, 4, for an afternoon of bluefishing from Moore's Harbor. They're the children of a brother who is building a house next door to her. For half an hour they bounce up and down the island's single 13-mile dirt road in Linda's beat-up Range Rover. She shows off Isle au Haut and talks about the island with glowing pride. She points out the one-room schoolhouse (still the only school) and the codfish weathervane on top of the church steeple. She calls out to neighbors and cousins, explains how the natural salt pond serves as the island's lobster pound, and laughs as we drive by the site of a tiny house where her great-great-grandmother was raised with a dozen rowdy siblings.
When her book tour is finished, Linda will settle back into the quiet rhythms of life here. She'll rig the Mattie Belle for tuna fishing and start work on a mystery novel. She enjoys the writing life, but her biggest dreams still relate to the sea.
''Fishing is fishing, and I love any fishing, but the ultimate thrill would be to go out and harpoon swordfish," she says. ''You sight the big fish on the surface and put the iron to them. It's so pure and primitive. I'd never make any money at it, but it would be so fun."
