Crawford was a "true New Englander," and one of her favorite suppers was codfish cakes and baked beans with chocolate pudding for dessert, according to her granddaughter.

Interspersed between the easy-to-follow instructions to make seafood delights from Lobster Stew to Old-Fashioned Salt Codfish Cakes to Creamy Cape Cod Clam Chowder are anecdotes, New England culinary trivia, quotable quotes, and much more.

Clark's food has been described as "'contemporary American." but she prefers to explain it as what you'd get "if Betty Crocker went to cooking school." Incidentally, the chef honed her skills at L'Academie de Cuisine in Maryland "It's all the things my parents and grandparents cooked for me: I re-create a lot of my good food memories." That means meat loaf with truffle gravy, homemade doughnut holes, codfish cakes, and what's arguably the best burger in town.

We spent two days in a frenzy of cooking, and George greeted the guests with rum punch while Euphita fried salted codfish cakes outside in a coal pot she'd managed to cram into her luggage.

She mashed them to a gummy pulp and buried them between layers of unsuspecting codfish cakes, and rolled them into tiny, glutinous globules surreptitiously concealed within the cores of mushy meatballs.