Author Sharon Joyce details the rich and delicious history of food in Downeast Maine. Maine's Downeast culinary history begins well before explorers arrived in the 1500s. Some of the food preparation and preservation techniques used by the Wabanakis and early colonists are still in use today. Lobster and other seafood from the Gulf of Maine and the area now known as Acadia National Park paved the way for a vibrant tourist food scene. The "rusticators" like the Rockefellers, Pulitzers, Astors, Vanderbilts and other wealthy families created a mixed environment of fashionable food trends and simple foods like fish chowder. Locals like the 40 Hayseeders used food as a statement to make fun of the "summer people."

 Sharon Joyce is a trainer/educator/chef and author who graduated from Northwestern University in Chicago. She studied Advanced French Cooking and Pastry at Cordon Bleu in Paris in 1981 and operated a catering business and cooking school in Chicago and in the Virgin Islands. She has taught various types of cooking classes, including French, International, Regional American, Downeast Maine Cooking and Cruzan cooking in such locations as Chicago, Bar Harbor, California and Christiansted, St. Croix USVI. She was fascinated by the abundance of local foods when she moved to Bar Harbor more than thirty years ago. She operates Ambrosia Cooking School in Bar Harbor, Maine.