Here in Maine, you can find sour cherries on sale.

They sell sour cherries at the farmers market as well as along the road.

The only other place where I have seen sour cherries on sale is Isola del Giglio, the small island off the coast of Tuscany where I come from. There are some different details: the period is different, as up here, the summer comes later. The sour cherries come on june in Giglio and on august in Mount Desert Island. Besides, the last time I saw sour cherries on sale in my Tuscan island was about twenty years ago. They seem to be out of fashion, there. So, seeing them up here, so far away, gives me a little, pleasant choc. I believed them extinct, like many animals or plant species, killed by pollution and evolution that wants things, living and not, to  be able to go to Mars.

Here you can find all the doors open.

Not only figuratively. Another common point that makes me to fall in love, every day a little more, with this American island is the fact that the doors are always open. 24 hours a day. All the doors: main doors of gorgeous, rich manors and humble ones; back doors and doors of garages. Women go out in the morning for their shopping and leave the door open. Anybody is, not only allowed to enter, but is welcome. What this means to my eyes is a un-limited trust in everybody. These people know and trust each other. Both the all the year round dwellers and the so called “summer community”, mainly constituted by the same families which first came here to establish their summer houses sixty years ago. Nobody expects something wrong: they leave their door open for anybody who wants to drop a message, a bunch of flower, a borrowed object. Also this remind me how my island used to be since ever and stop to be just a few years ago, when an un-controlled mass tourism started to overcrowd it in summer time, and, along with good people, also thieves came and local people did not feel sure any more.

So, up here, in Maine,  I find missing things of my past.

MUSSELS, CHERRIES, STONES, CLAMS written on an panel out-door a small wooden house almost hidden behind pine and maple trees on the way to Bar Harbour.

What the hell do they sell there?

The first time I noticed it I was driving and could not stop. I thought that it might have been possible that there mussels, cherries, stones were sold. Clams and mussels match, both sea foods. Cherries because it was the season. Stones because this is a natural park: there are advices to not pick the rocks. These nice, smooth, round stones are the jewels of the beaches, shaped by the caresses of the ocean. So it might have been possible that, where ever it was not forbidden to pick them, someone had taken them to make a market.

Although this panel sounded strange, I made a reason of it.

Second time I stopped, but the shop was closed. There was an old lady at the window of the humble grey house, with a wonderful white shiny hair and, at my question, she answered:

-Oh, he sells sea food.-

I did not ask anything more, intimidated by the contrast of her cheer and serene smile and the poverty of her house. I did a few minutes turn around the house and I saw a couple of plants of tomatoes climbing from one bucket upward something that looked like a well. I thought: they earn their living as they can. I went away. But not happy. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know better the place and the people.

The next day I was driving around the place. The shop was open. There was an advice written on a piece of cartoon on a chair, just off the road. I decided that I had to stop the car, insert the reverse, beg pardon to the incoming cars, see what it was. Maybe they could suggest me an idea for the dinner…. Stones in sweet and sour sauce…..? cherries in Caesar’s salad?

A man welcome me inside the hut. He opened an antiquate refrigerator and finally I knew what the sale was about. No cherries. No stones. Only sea food. Never seen before sea food. A variety of clams named “cherry stone clams” because of their shape resembling  the cherry pit. Now the panel made sense: mussels and cherry stone clams.

I realized I had been  keeping my mouth wide open since the man opened the refrigerator showing me his goods: cherry stones clams divided by size in different buckets. From one inch to 6 inches and more. I bought a few, took a picture of the man with a big cherry stone clam in his hands, paid a little money – compared to the treasure they seemed to my eyes- thanked him for the explanation and went away, back to the rich house where I was welcome, with a kind of amazed bitterness.

FRIED CLAMS AS FINGER FOOD

Ingredients:

20 cherry stone clams, medium size, about 2 ½  inches each

1 cup al purposes flour

¼ cup dry white wine

¼ cup clams (or mussels) water

1 tbs fresh minced parsley

1 garlic clove, finely minced or passed through the garlic crusher

frying oil

Put the clams in a pot with half cup of water, cover with a lid and put on the heat. Cook until they are all open. Take off from heat and let them cool. Take out the mollusc from the shell and keep aside.

Filter their jus (or mussel jus) with a cheese cloth.

Put the flour in a bowl and whisk it while pouring the two liquids, wine and shell jus. Mix in the minced parsley and garlic. Let the mixture set half hour, then mix it again.

Heat the oil to frying temperature – 170°C, 340 F – .

Immerse the mollusc in the batter and deep fry until slightly golden. Drain on absorbing paper.

Serve them with a toothpick as finger food or return them inside half shell.

Marcella Ansaldo