PBS’ ‘Weekends With Yankee’ offers up an insider’s tour of New England
If you’ve been wanting to explore New England and its culinary destinations but have no idea where to begin, a new documentary series from WGBH and Yankee magazine offers up a few clues.
In “Weekends With Yankee,” premiering on PBS stations this month (check local listings), host and travel writer Richard Wiese and Yankee Senior Food Editor Amy Traverso take viewers on an insider’s tour of the six states that make up the northeast corner of the U.S. to give them a local’s perspective of the best the region has to offer, from activities and events to the arts and cuisine.
Over the course of 13 episodes, the hosts experience everything from harvesting scallops in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., and a clambake at Maine’s Acadia National Park to the WaterFire festival in Providence, R.I., a wildlife encounter in Kent, Conn., and a tour of the burgeoning culinary scene of South Boston.
For Traverso, a Massachusetts native and and nearlifelong resident of the region, the yearlong trek was a combination of the familiar and the new, with the Maine clambake falling into the latter category.
“We went to this place which was very hard to access because there’s no public parking, it’s not really a public beach,” she says. “It’s actually these geologic formations called the Ovens and basically they’re these cliffs on the northeastern side of the island ... and the waves have sort of carved in these little mini caves that almost look like beehive ovens, which is where they get their name. ... So it’s just this really dramatic backdrop place that normally we don’t get to up close, but you can kayak there, but it can be hard to get there.”
One of Traverso’s favorite experiences was also in Maine, where she took a cruise on a 100-year-old windjammer from the mid-coast town of Rockland. Here she lived in spartan conditions with no electricity and gravity-fed showers but dined on fresh-caught seafood prepared by the vessel’s chef and co-owner on a wood-fired cast-iron stove.
“Everyone has the initial thought of like, ‘You’re bringing fire on a boat?’ ” Traverso says. “But ... she is very safe, she is very careful with the fire and she makes the most incredible food. I mean, we ate so well that day and just to be out cruising Camden Harbor or Rockland Harbor smelling the salt air and eating fresh oysters and eating these biscuit buns that she had made for us in the morning, it was just a perfect day. I’m not even the best sailor but I just had the best time on that boat and we ate really well.”
“There’s something that does feel very New England about being on this boat where it’s kind of pared down but it’s luxurious in that you’re eating incredibly well and you’re seeing all this beauty and you have a comfortable, cozy place to sleep,” she continues. “I think that’s the kind of luxury that I really love.”
Other stops in the series include an apple farm in Dummerston, Vt.; Mount Washington, the Northeast’s highest peak, in New Hampshire; museums in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island; and a land-bound steamboat in Shelburne, Vt.
For Traverso, the odyssey through her native land was the most fun she’s ever had doing a work project.
“It was just so beautiful, so much fun and such a great crew,” she says, “and it kind of makes you fall in love with New England all over again.”