New England Brunch: Seasonal Midday Meals for Leisurely Weekends

Let’s face it, weekends are precious. They offer a chance to slow down and unwind with family and friends. A relaxed brunch sets just the right tone. Sure, you can go out to your favorite diner or café, but waiting in a long line while starving is not always appealing, and the crowds make it awkward to linger at the table as long as you might like. Making brunch at home is fun and allows you to get creative with local and seasonal ingredients--like blueberries, black raspberries, cranberries, pumpkins, and maple syrup--which New England has in abundance. And straddling two meals (breakfast and lunch) means you can splurge without guilt while expending half the energy.

The other benefit of brunch is that it’s basically an excuse to have dessert as an officially sanctioned meal. Bring on the muffins, doughnuts, and cinnamon rolls! For someone like me, with a major sweet tooth, that makes it my favorite meal of the week. But I don’t just love the sweet stuff. Brunch is also about veggie-forward frittatas, coastal seafood, and creative uses for leftovers from the night before. Combine traditional Yankee cookery with vibrant culinary influences of Chinese, Portuguese, Italian, Irish, French, and Latin-American immigrants who’ve settled in New England, and you have a year of fantastic seasonal brunches ahead of you.

New England Brunch offers enticing recipes for homemade pancakes, muffins, doughnuts, cornbread, biscuits, scones, cinnamon rolls, bagels, oatmeal, hash browns, frittatas, stratas, and more--all year round. As with New England Desserts, this cookbook will feature classics like Boston Cream doughnuts and blueberry muffins alongside creative twists on traditional recipes--think Cinnamon Sugar Popovers, Cranberry Irish Soda Bread, and Apple Pie Cinnamon Rolls. And, of course, it will include savory seafood recipes from New England’s extensive coastline, like Lobster, Potato, and Chive Pot Pie and Cod Cakes.

These brunch recipes will be organized by season to allow the cook to coordinate the menu with the time of year when local produce is at its peak. In the fall, try Turkey and Root Vegetable Hash and the Native American porridge known as nasaump, which is similar to polenta, with fresh walnuts and cranberries. In the wintertime, use hearty whole grains to make regional favorites like Rhode Island Johnnycakes and Acadian Ployes (buckwheat crepes popular in northern Maine). In the spring months, try your hand at Cinnamon Sugar Popovers or Portuguese sweetbread, common in the coastal fishing villages and mill towns of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Then dress up these recipes with all manner of summer fruit compotes, quick jams, and syrups, not to mention other seasonal delights like Peach Ginger Coffee Cake and Zucchini Fritters with Dill Sour Cream. A festive selection of beverages and pitcher drinks featuring fresh seasonal fruit gilds the lily. There’s also a stand-alone chapter featuring all-season dim sum, which has become a Boston institution in Chinatown and beyond. Master some of your favorite Chinese brunch recipes like scallion pancakes, pork and cabbage dumplings, and steamed rice buns.

Needless to say, the book will include ample photographs of the region’s natural beauty, local ingredients, and casual recipes to appeal to the senses of an audience hungering for a collection of New England’s best brunch recipes.

Born in Maine, bred in New Hampshire, and a Massachusetts resident for more than 30 years, Tammy Donroe Inman is a New England food writer, photographer, trained chef, and Boston-based cooking instructor. A graduate of Tufts University (1995) and the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts (2001), her career started in the test kitchen of Cook’s Illustrated magazine, progressed to the newsroom of Boston magazine, and evolved into freelance writing and blogging. She has written dozens of articles for publications, including Fine Cooking, Parents, The Boston Globe, Yankee Magazine, Boston magazine, Cape Cod Life, and Serious Eats. Her first cookbook, Wintersweet: Seasonal Desserts to Warm the Home (Running Press, 2013) earned a starred review from Library Journal and was named one of the Top Cookbooks of the Year by The Boston Globe.＂ Her second cookbook, New England Desserts: Classic and Creative Recipes for All Seasons, was released on October 1 by Globe Pequot. She is also the author of Twitterati Cryptograms: 350 Snarky Ciphers for Social Media Junkies (Sterling, 2016). Currently, she writes and teaches cooking classes in the Boston area, where she lives with my husband and younger son (the eldest has flown the coop!). In her spare time, she likes to read, garden, forage for mushrooms, and camp in beautiful spots around New England with family and friends.