Forward by Melissa Smith Abbott....

My name is Melissa Ann Smith Abbott and I live in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Years ago, my family on my father’s side ran the Anadama Bread Bakery, Blacksmith Shop Restaurant, The Cable House Bed & Breakfast, The Faraday Inn, all in Rockport, MA, and The Easterly Inn, in Gloucester. My grandmother, Melissa Collins Smith along with her husband William (Bill) P. C. Smith, ran food businesses on Cape Ann for 70 years. I have a collection of menus, recipes, photos, artwork, cookbooks, historic documents, and memorabilia from the family and the businesses I wish to share with you by way of this book. In addition to the recipes and remembrances shared here, this collection would be nothing without the acknowledgement of the strength of the beauty of Cape Ann and the people who live here.

Cape Ann is an island deposit of granite welled up in volcanic explosions from the center of the earth and carried on a great glacier during the Ice Age. Here, this granite rock island was carved into the midst of the Atlantic Ocean. Gloucester and Rockport are the names of the city and town that have grown up in the last 400 years on this large granite rock. Cape Ann is a binnacle, jutting her gnarled fist out into the deep cold Atlantic waters between Maine and Cape Cod. Upon its granite ledges and boulders, the sky blue and yellow shining light reflects in sharp and clear against an ever-present backdrop of the deep mother blue ocean. These images are caught in the vestiges of all vision, either in small scraps of view or panoramic vistas punctuated by a lighthouse, rocky shore, or miles of distant horizon from which vessels have appeared and disap- peared along with Gloucester and Rockport’s livelihood; Fishing holds, either empty or filled with cod, creatures great and small, harvested into the harbor and consumed by wharves.

Depending on which way the wind is blowing, the scent of Cape Ann carries different vibrational platitudes. From the northeast comes the cool brine and from the prevailing summer southwest wind comes warm decay. The easterly wind carries the heady and cool excitement of fresh open ocean and the promise of distant places. Paradoxically, the westerly wind feels like dusky continental earth that has blown through a million leaves on a million trees. In Cape Ann’s downtowns, you may mostly smell fish cooking, bread baking, or the hint of odoriferous wharves and tangy seaweed. The people of Gloucester and Rockport have always known what it is, to live a hard life, tuned to the tides. These oceanic folks have always counted on each other to be bold and strong. The Neptunian history is that these people are hunter-gatherers of the sea-born lottery, fish.

There is a hidden recognition of this deep inner force communicated between long-standing inhabitants. Cape Ann knows her own, and you don’t have to be born here to be owned by her. She claims you on her own with her compassion, laughter, and promise of hard work. When you are in relationship with her, you learn to trust her with your life and then some. It doesn’t take long to learn her moods and to anticipate them in the tide swooshing back and forth inno- cently seeking its own depths in the deep sand or kissing the clouds when reaching the Back Shore. The shape of her moods have the undated beauty of a schooner’s shear cutting through the harbor, past the Dog Bar Break- water, past Ten Pound Island through the Stream, and toward the inner sanctum of her harbor, welcoming those with forbearance and strength of character.

Cape Ann has faith in herself and is always conscious of the idea. She aspires to it, whatever the price, because her idea is simple god-force; the same force that sends the planet hurling through space around the sun, creating the easterly wind, bringing the highest excitement of what it is to be alive and live in harmony with your- self and her. The collection in this book epitomizes the history and strength of Cape Ann. It is only a small time capsule of the thousands of stories, peoples, and lives who have lived here face into the wind, sheets pulled tight, and rail in the water. Enjoy!

- from "The Legacy of Three Melissas: Authentic & Original Cape Ann Recipes", Copyright 2010 by Melissa Smith Abbott