The oldest feast in America is a clambake—clams and corn layered in seaweed over hot stones—a recipe the Pilgrims learned from the native Algonquin. Ensuing cooks added fish and sausage and lobster and chowder and clam cakes and Indian pudding and strawberry shortcake to the formula, creating the mighty, multicourse shore dinner that was a common summer banquet in Downeast eating halls well into the twentieth century. Greatest among them was the Rocky Point Park Shore Dinner Hall of Warwick Neck, Rhode Island, which sat 4000 people at long, paper-topped tables and offered a choice of meals, either a smaller all-you-can-eat deal of clam cakes, chowder, and watermelon, or the complete dinner of lobster, chowder, clam cakes, steamers, baked fish, bread, boiled potatoes, corn, and warm Indian pudding. Rocky Point Park closed in 1995 and today, while many restaurants along the Northeast coast offer some kind of shore dinner, the big-bore Yankee banquet is, with rare exception, a thing of the past.
Lobster, potatoes, corn, steamers, and lots of melted butter: A nice shore dinner along the coast of Maine.