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Portsmouth: Portrait of a Restaurant, by Brian Smestad. $30, Published by Blue Tree Publishers 

Beautiful pictures of fabulous food. What a perverse idea! I’m looking at a perfect replica of beef au poivre with brandy cream reduction, my favorite memory from the fabulous menu of the now-closed Lindbergh’s Crossing in Portsmouth, N.H., but I can’t eat it! It’s not fair.

Wait a minute, there’s a recipe: peppercorns, kosher salt, shallots, heavy cream. I’ll just make it myself, no problem!

Yeah, right. Maybe I’ll just call up and make a reservation at the Black Trumpet, where Lindbergh’s former chef is now owner, and still provides Lindbergh’s best for desperate foodies like myself.

Don’t get me wrong, I love to cook. My wife and I have a monthly supper club with three other couples, and we do our best to out-gourmet each other, and for Christmas last year I got a little torch to make my own crème brulee. However, when I look at Portsmouth: Portrait Of A Restaurant, I just want to rush out for dinner on the town. Portsmouth means fine dining; the great meals that tourists enjoy here become as engrained as their memories of the tugboats or Strawbery Banke. This book, by Blue Tree Publishers, is a perfect keepsake from a weekend on the Seacoast. One of a series that also includes Portland, Maine, and Newburyport, Mass., it combines recipes with artful photos of the food and beautiful pictures of the rivers, forests, and ocean that make this city so memorable. It is also popular with the locals who want to try the recipes themselves—or just meditate dreamily on the blackberry peach oat scones from Ceres Bakery  they love so much.

The book is a beauty. Nearly square, the black hardback features an inset photograph of the misty Piscataqua River with the Memorial Bridge in the background and tugboats in the foreground. The recipes are divided by season, and are accompanied by a photograph featuring either the dish or a scenic picture of the Portsmouth area.
My favorite feature of the book, however, is how local it is. A Portsmouth-based photographer who owns his own publishing company, Brian Smestad takes pictures of dishes made by local restaurants, many of whom source locally grown organic produce and meats from independent farmers. The result is a coffee table book that is as beautiful and professional as anything on the market today.

If you cross the bridge a few yards from where I am writing this in downtown Portsmouth, you find yourself heading Down East along the coast of Maine. While I’m proud of New Hampshire’s 17 miles of coastline, I have to admit that Maine may have a bit more breadth of knowledge when it comes to seafood and coastal cooking. From the classic lobster roll to blueberry pies, Maine has its own history and lore of cooking.

Dishing Up Maine: 165 Recipes That Capture Authentic Down East Flavors by Brooke Dojny. $19.95, Published by Storey Publishing.

Brooke Dojny’s book, Dishing Up Maine, has a similar format to Smestad’s book. Recipes from Maine restaurants are served up with pictures of Maine life and great shots of the food, taken by Scott Dorrance. Dojny’s previous book is The New England Clamshack Cookbook, so she is becoming an expert on this type of food writing. Less classic looking than Portsmouth: Portrait Of A Restaurant, but twice as thick, Dishing Up Maine regales with almost 300 pages on Maine’s natural history, its farming and hunting culture, and of course its seafood. The range of food covered in this book (while retaining a distinctive “Maine” feel) is amazing, and the brief descriptions of the restaurants, farmers markets, and fishermen Dojny encountered while putting the book together make it more than just a cookbook.

These two books are just the tip of the iceberg for New England cooking, but they are two that I find to be particularly fun and easy to sell to customers because they are both useful and beautiful—and that’s not easy to do. Enjoy!

Both books are available at Riverrun bookstore in Portsmouth, N.H.