The bountiful produce of summer and early autumn has always been an inspiration for home cooks. The result has been jams, jellies and pickles which preserve the flavours of the seasons for the remainder of the year.

Today, the best of these traditional recipes offer great methods for making the most of local produce when it is plentiful, tasty and in season.

And when it comes to jams, jellies and preserves, there’s nothing better than home-baked bread.

In this collection, Alice Burdick features traditional east coast ingredients such as blueberries, cranberries, rhubarb, pumpkin, beets and beans, as well as some more unusual ones like crabapples, rose-hips and gooseberries.

The bread recipes in this book offer home bakers classics such as Cape Breton Brown Bread, Corn Muffins, Buttermilk Biscuits and Bannock.

The inspiration for this collection is an 80-year-old cookbook that gathered Nova Scotia recipes that dated back as far as the late 1800s. Alice Burdick has fully revised, updated and tested each recipe to yield delicious results using contemporary ingredients and preserving and baking equipment and techniques. Accompanying the recipes are colour photographs of the recipes that will inspire the browsing reader to action in the kitchen.