Yankee Fish Dinner for June

It was a June Sunday and I had some nice produce from farmstands in Maine, so I made this nice old-fashioned Sunday dinner with all local and seasonal ingredients.

The haul included three pounds of fresh peas in the pod, a pound of new red potatoes, broccoli raab, strawberries, and a pint of super-fresh local heavy cream. That would surely inspire any cook!

We opened with the delightful Chilled Mint & Pea Soup. That recipe has French roots, but so did some of our colonist forebears and everything in it was local to New England and it's great for June when the peas are just ripe, so I included it.

We had:

• Chilled Mint & Pea Soup
• A filet of Atlantic salmon prepared as for Boiled Fish
• The fish was topped with a traditional Egg Sauce
• Steamed New Potatoes
• Steamed broccoli raab
• Steamers
• A bottle of Dandelion Wine from Russell Orchards in Ipswich, MA.   
• We finished with Strawberry Shortcake.

The dandelion wine was a surprise! Not everybody liked it, but I loved it. Naturally dandelion wine is not like grape wine. It doesn't have the tannins of a red wine, and the mild acidity is very different from that of the white wines. It was not sweet, and what sweetness it had was warm and low-key. We had it chilled, and over the course of the feast it warmed up. I liked it both ways, but found the cold to be more refreshing. I would buy this again and keep it on hand for a special dinner.