When chef Maria Lawton set out to write a cookbook, she never thought it would be for the public eye. It was simply her way of honoring her family heritage and processing her grief.
“It all began after a four-year period where I lost people I loved deeply in my family,” said Lawton, the award-winning host of the PBS cooking show “Maria’s Portuguese Table.” “My brother-in-law, my mother, my father, and my grandmother all passed in a short amount of time. With that, our family changed.”
Gone were the Sundays spent at her mother’s house, where her mom cooked for all her children and grandchildren.
“She was in charge of it all. Every holiday was at my mom’s. After she died, all of that ended, because no one could or wanted to take it over,” Lawton said.
As she began to process and grieve, she realized how much her three daughters were going to miss out on by not having these recipes and opportunities to gather.
“I needed to preserve these recipes, these memories for them,” she said. “I needed to make sure they have this part of our family’s story.”
Lawton decided to write down her family recipes. This proved tricky, since she had spent little time in the kitchen as a child.
Back to Her Roots
A cultural barrier added another element of challenge. Born in São Miguel in the Azores, a cluster of Portuguese islands about 870 miles west of Lisbon, Lawton moved to the United States with her family when she was 6 years old.“I lived in two different worlds,” she said. “Outside was American, but inside was Portuguese. Our language, our recipes, our way of being: It was all Portuguese.”
Her childhood was full of her mother’s Portuguese cooking, but as she tried to collect the recipes, she was working mainly from memory of the taste. Due to her mother’s tendency to improvise, the recipes were difficult to get right.
Lawton realized she needed not only the recipes, but also a new understanding of how to cook. She dug through her mother’s old recipe books and notes. To fill in gaps and learn how to make foods she didn’t understand, she asked anyone who was Portuguese for their family recipes. She struck up conversations in the grocery store, talking to Portuguese strangers about their kitchen tips. Eventually, she took a trip to the Azores and spent a month in the kitchens of several family members. She learned how to make the recipes of her childhood, her mother’s favorite foods, and new recipes from her culture.
The resulting cookbook, “Azorean Cooking: From My Table to Yours,” published in 2014, was like a homecoming for Lawton. The book included plenty of her family recipes, but there were also new ones she’d picked up. “I wrote this book for me, and for my daughters,” Lawton said, “so that we have something to hold onto.”
The book was a huge success. Lawton believes it touched so many people because of its relatability. “My story is their story,” she said, recognizing how loss, and the way food helps us grieve, is universal. “All those things I went through are relevant to everyone else.”
Ten years later, in 2024, Lawton released another book, “At My Portuguese Table: Azorean Cooking and More.” The book continues her effort to preserve her heritage and family recipes, this time for her grandchildren. “COVID hit, and I spent a lot of time worrying about my family and how everyone was doing,” she said. “So I just kept writing. I kept cooking and writing and taking photos, and then I had another book.”
The beautifully put together book is full of more family recipes and tributes to her heritage. She shared three of them with The Epoch Times.
3 Family Recipes
Notable are the bolos lêvedos, the Portuguese version of English muffins. The recipe comes from Lawton’s brother-in-law’s mother, Senhora Rosalina. It’s said to be several hundred years old, passed down from mother to daughter for generations. Senhora Rosalina shared the recipe with Lawton’s mom, and Lawton found it tucked in a notebook of her mother’s recipes. Next to it her mother had written, “This is the best recipe for this.”“It’s like an English muffin, except it’s also nothing like one,” said Lawton. “You let the dough rise all day, and then you cook it in discs on the skillet. No oil, no grease, just flour.” The muffin is flipped from side to side until evenly toasted.
The end result is a muffin that’s similar in size and shape to an English muffin, but denser and chewier, with fewer air pockets.
Senhora Rosalina made these for Lawton’s whole family. “She made enough to feed an army. And we would get them warm and they would be amazing.”
These days, Lawton adds her own trick to the recipe. She makes the dough the day before and lets it rise in the refrigerator overnight. The longer, slower rise gives the dough a deeper, richer flavor.
Lawton also included her mother’s bean soup recipe, a simple and comforting combination of beans, potatoes, and sausage, as a tribute to her father. “My dad had to have soup every day,” she said. He’d put bread in the bottom of the bowl and pour the soup on top, so that the bread would soak up all the broth, and then finish it with a splash of wine.
The beautifully glazed vanilla and cream bundt cake, simple but rich, reminds Lawton of weekends during her childhood, when her mother cleaned and baked for visitors. It was one of several cakes she made on rotation.
“My mom would always have company on Sunday after the big meal, which was served in the afternoon, or we would visit someone,” Lawton said. “On Saturday evening, my mom would bake a cake. We knew Saturday was for cleaning, laundry, and in the evening, cake. The house would always smell amazing, and I would always wish we’d have no company so we’d have the cake to ourselves.”
Lawton’s work and research has done more than give her family recipes to cherish for years to come. She’s restored her family’s central gathering point: a place to enjoy good food together, reminisce on the past, relish in the present, and pass on her heritage to the next generation. That might be the best gift any of us can hope to give our families.
Meet the Chef: Maria Lawton
Hometown: A village in Lagoa Island of São Miguel, Portugal, to Southeastern MassachusettsMost Beloved Kitchen Tools: Hand immersion blender, zester
Secret Ingredient: Cinnamon—even in meat, a little goes a long way
Best Advice for Home Cooks: Follow your heart. I’m a home cook. From one home cook to the other, all we try to do is put love in our food for our family.
