Incredible as it is to believe, before the 20th Century, chocolate had hardly any place in baked goods. At that time, this sweet brown confection was something a person drank, according to Food Historian Sandy Oliver. The chocolate pastry was the non-brown delicacy nibbled upon as consumers drank their cocoa. Slowly, as the years went by, chefs found ways to create the powders and chips that would soon revolutionize the entire world of baking.

For today’s consumer, Oliver believes the latest trends are in artisanal meats, cheeses, mushrooms, ciders and beers. Despite what people from away may assume, Maine is keeping pace with this modernization.

“We’re doing some really sophisticated bread baking in Maine now,” she said. “Even a few years ago, some friends of mine came from Cambridge to visit me. They thought they would rescue me from what they believed was a great loss in anything good in the way of bread.”

The friends brought a specialty loaf that was good, according to Oliver, yet was no better than the Borealis, Little Ladd, and Little Notch, which are already in Maine markets.

Oliver, herself, is invested in a culinary lifestyle that stretches the entire century between old and new.  

Living on Islesboro, she cannot simply pop over to the supermarket whenever a craving surfaces. Instead, the majority of her meals come from the ingredients in her larder — the foods she spends at least eight months of the year planning, researching, ordering and tending.

Miles from the ferry landing, in a farmhouse dating back to the mid-1800s, Oliver is submerged in a world of food preservation and cooking from scratch. For the general public, this way of life was the norm until the generation in which Oliver’s mother was responsible for meals. To the mothers of that era, ready-made entrees profoundly changed the daily dynamics. Opening a can of Chef Boyardee meant less work, less expense, and less time in the kitchen.

The food revolution that ushered in frozen dinners and boxed cakes also minimized knowledge of cooking basics and familiarity of food origins. For Oliver and others of later generations, this meant learning anew the cooking, gardening, slaughtering, preserving, and experimenting of their forebears.

“When I was growing up, it wouldn’t ever occur to me to cook a butternut squash for a length of time, add olive oil, season it, and put it on crackers,” she said. “But there’s something now called squash butter. We spread it on breads and crackers and crostini.

“We used to put meat things and cheese things on toast years ago. And now there are people who are stacking up vegetables on them. The whole crostini thing with the tomatoes, that’s of the past 20 years, or so.”

Oliver attended an event in New York City a few years ago where she sampled sliced beets and feta cheese on crustinis.

“It was delicious,” she said. “But I thought, ‘am I eating a beet on bread?’” 

Old world meets new as Oliver fills her garden with mail-order herbs, vegetables, flowers, and nut and fruit trees. This year, she and her neighbors ordered six hens, though two of those were found to be roosters, instead.

More local foods are secured in the form of moose, venison, duck and rabbit meats, and other bulk items which either aren’t conducive to Oliver’s land, or didn’t survive the experimentation process, or the weather restrictions.

On a day in mid-Autumn, peach and walnut trees shift and shake in the island breeze. Chicken feet release abundant flavors in the kitchen stew pot. Garlic bulbs harden behind the stove, and dried apple rings, cloves and beans flash color variations in the cupboards. All require an extreme labor of love, commitment, patience, and stress.

Oliver admits that she sometimes questions her future commitments to this earth-to-hearth endeavor.

“There have been years when I just thought, ‘oh please, can we have a frost? Because I am really fed up with dealing with all of this stuff’,” she said.

But then comes the fun part. The cooking. Oliver, after all, is a foodie. She may live in a 150-year-old farmhouse. She may heat her stove by dropping kindling through one of the stove holes. But she also has internet. Tomatoes don’t just become stewed balls. They also turn into salsa. Basil sometimes turns into Italian spread. Cucumbers become sweet and sour.

And potatoes. Oliver and her assistant, Kate, reaped 210 pounds of potatoes this season, and the race is on. The household needs to digest four pounds of this root vegetable each week over the winter in order to make room for next year’s crop.

Rest assured, though. Neither of them sees a problem in this gastronomical duty.