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Anne Mahle: 'At Home, At Sea'
By Brooke Holland
ROCKLAND (June 30): Anne Mahle wants families to sit down at the dinner table over a good nourishing meal. Encouraging family time is one of the reasons she wrote her cookbook, "At Home, At Sea--Recipes from the Maine Windjammer, J. & E. Riggin."
Anne Mahle.
"One of the things I am hoping the family will get from this book is that making good food doesn't have to be hard," said Mahle. "The recipes are easy to follow and ones that you can come back to over and over again."
Mahle's recipes rely upon fresh, local ingredients such as greens, blueberries, salmon, shrimp and rhubarb.
"It's impossible to make a dish any better than the ingredients you start with, which is why the herbs, and fresh vegetables that we grow are so integral to our food," said Mahle in her cookbook.
A sampling from Mahle's cookbook.
Her recipes run the gamut from breakfast to dessert and everything in between. Standards include sticky buns, creamy blue cheese dressing and Mom's spaghetti with meatballs. The cookbook also includes some unusual recipes that are sure to become favorites: banana salsa, lemon lobster with sun-dried tomatoes and ginger shortbread.
Mahle sums up her recipes by calling the collection "comfort food that you will want to make for your family and for guests."
Mahle has been serving guests her tried and true dishes for several years now. She and her husband, Jon Finger, own the schooner J. & E. Riggin. Finger captains the schooner while Mahle whips up one culinary creation after another from the boat's wood stove. They have two daughters, Chloe, 6, and Ella, 3, who join their parents on the ocean during the summer.
Anne Mahle with her husband, Capt. Jon Finger and daughters Ella, 3, and Chloe, 6, on the stern of the J. & E. Riggin. (Image courtesy of Frank
Chillemi)
The guests on the schooner have been encouraging Mahle for years to put out a cookbook.
"The passengers kept nagging me," said Mahle. "I had a passenger who was in marketing; she was in my face and shaking me saying, 'If you make a cookbook people will buy it.'"
Anne Mahle cooking breakfast on the J. & E. Riggin.
Mahle grew up in a Detroit suburb and graduated from college with a major in sociology. She never dreamed she would be married with a family and co-owner of a schooner. She met her husband when she came to Rockland to work on another boat, the Stephen Taber, as a cook.
In an excerpt from her cookbook, Mahle said, "My plan was to sail for one summer, then get a real job, something 9 to 5 where I'd be wearing a navy blue suit, and start working toward a PhD. . . . Never happened. I'd fallen in love with sailing, Maine and Jon Finger."
After several years on schooners she apprenticed with Hans Brucher who owned the former Jessica's Restaurant, which is now Primo Restaurant.
"He was an amazing mentor," said Mahle.
Mahle learned the fine art of cooking and made each dish her own. But she wanted to further her knowledge of baking and pastry, where one needs to know the chemistry before they can start experimenting, so she attended the Culinary Institute of America.
"Before attending the baking and pastry course at the CIA the creations I made were ridiculous," said
Mahle.
Mahle then furthered her talent by becoming a cook on a yacht. Her husband captained the vessel and they worked on it for three years to save enough money to buy a home and start a business.
The family resides in Rockland and together they run the schooner < E. &>, which they bought in 1998.
"We are running the boat as a family," said Mahle. "If it doesn't work out we don't do it. Family comes first and the business and this cookbook come second."
Mahle is set on that idea as well as helping her readers go back to their roots and remember the value of a good meal and the traditions that are wrapped around them.
"The food is about home, comfort, New England, cozy fires and warmth," said Mahle. "Those were the words we came back to over and over again while designing the book. The stores and recipes reflect that."
What makes her cookbook special, Mahle said, is that there are people behind the book, making it more real and personable. Stories and photographs in the cookbook paint portraits of those people.
Stories and pictures of Mahle and her family and schooner living are included in the cookbook. (Photos by Brooke Holland)
"Recipes aren't just about being recipes," said Mahle. "It's so much bigger than that. It is about nourishment and soul and the recipes provide the road map to get there."
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