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The beloved Vineyard author built a cottage industry out of sharing her love of New England, old homes, thrifted finds, and hearty recipes.
At the very top of the “T” where Franklin meets Spring Street in Vineyard Haven, a house sits. It’s a typical white colonial, with glossy black shutters and door; its small front porch is mere feet from the street. The narrow facade belies the fact that the house stretches back, back, back into a yard that also features a pergola, a barn with a loft, and gardens beginning to fade into autumn.
The house, which is for sale, is now empty of its people, but bears the pedigree of having been the home of bestselling author Susan Branch, meaning that this is no ordinary house, but a character in the story of Susan’s life. Within its walls, she built something of an empire, selling not just books, calendars, vintage glassware, and tea towels, but also a dream, a real-life fairy tale that she lived on Martha’s Vineyard for roughly 35 years, until a year or so ago, when she and her husband found the West coast beckoning again as they move into the next season of their lives.
Susan arrived on the Island newly divorced. A California native, she’d long loved the idea of New England, and so she left behind the familiar comfort of her parents and seven younger siblings for a different kind of comfort — one she’d found in a childhood steeped in magazines, movies, and Louisa May Alcott, one that featured snowy Christmases and old houses with long lawns, arbors, and picket fences. “When I finally got myself to New England, I felt like I was coming home,” she would write later on her blog.
Her first home on the Vineyard was a one-bedroom, one-bath, one-story house near Lambert’s Cove for which she paid $52,000. Despite her aesthetic familiarity with the East Coast, “New Englanders scared me,” she tells me from her new home back in California. “I didn’t know if I’d say the wrong thing. I knew that California was weird, you know, I had to learn a new culture, really.” Or, perhaps more accurately, she had to acclimatize to a culture that she had spent a childhood absorbing from a distance.
And then, serendipity appeared, in the form of a red-covered copy of Barlett’s Familiar Quotations that she found in her little home. What she discovered in that book, she says, was “all the truths and the secrets of the world… That’s what I was looking for when I moved to Martha’s Vineyard — how to make a wonderful light, and I didn’t know how to do it.” Those quotes — from Mark Twain, from Louisa May Alcott, from Eleanor Roosevelt — told her, she says, that we must make our own happiness. And so she did.
Susan had always loved to cook and wanted to write down her recipes, in part so that her younger siblings would have them. She began writing, expanding the recipes with stories and illustrating them with watercolor sketches — a watermelon, perhaps, or a flower. Though it might have made more sense to type everything on her IBM Selectric, she decided to just put them down in her distinctive handwriting. Already imagining them being published, she determined that if the publisher decided they didn’t want her handwriting, they could use whatever font they wanted.
In 1986, Heart of the Home: Notes from a Vineyard Kitchen (available on her site from Amazon, and Thriftbooks) was published. The book was an homage to homemaking, she explains. To our mothers, to her mother especially, and to her girlfriends. The recipes themselves were “very much home cooking,” she tells me, “very old fashioned.” Though she was a fan of Julia Child, she found that living on an island didn’t lend itself to umpteen exotic ingredients, at least in those days. And so, her 30th Anniversary Edition of this first book (reissued in 2016) still features an Herb Roasted Chicken, her grandmother’s turkey stuffing, and blueberry pie, but Susan also added, among other recipes, an orange-lavender polenta cake, quinoa salad, and a coconut, ginger, and lime soup — things few of us were eating 30 years ago.
That first book struck a chord, and a devout audience formed. Long before Instagram and Substack, Susan followed up by writing a newsletter — she named it “Willard” after her grandfather — to her new fans. “I think the first Willard might have gone to around 2,000,” she says, “but by the end of the 12 years of doing it once a year, the last one went to about 25,000.” It was starting to “cost a pretty penny for printing, but mostly postage,” she explains. “We collated it ourselves at the dining table, plus we always included a couple of gifts, a page of stickers and a bookmark, something like that.” So, in 2006, “the computer took over,” and Willard went digital. The email Willards were about four to six pages long and Susan included links to allow recipients to print out recipe cards or stationery pages. “I still hand-wrote them,” she says. “In it for love!”
She started her blog in November of 2010, just in time to get her readers ready for Thanksgiving with her cranberry sauce recipe. Her newsletter crowd of “girlfriends,” which is what she’s dubbed her fans, now numbers 65,000.
But while the technology changed, Susan’s message did not: Your home can be where you create beauty and comfort, simply and sustainably. “I have a lot of creative juices in me, and there's plenty of places to put them around the home, with the garden and the colors,” she says. “I could cheer myself up by just putting a flower in an old jar, and it just perked up my day.”
It isn’t about making do without, it’s about making do with what we have.
She has little time for perfection. Her love of old things extends, almost by definition, to a love of the imperfect, of the charmingly disheveled. If Susan’s ethos was a snapshot, it would be a table set with antique linens centered with a vintage vase tucked with wildflowers from the garden and plates full of hearty, home-cooked food. The floor might be crooked. The fireplace might have a crack in its marble. And the chairs — bearing the weight of many guests — would undoubtedly creak.
“We don’t ever, hardly ever buy anything new,” Susan says. “We recycle by going to antique stores, yard sales, and there’s hardly anything new in our house …,” including, she says, a 1955 stove in the Vineyard kitchen.
She claims her dedication to sustainability is really about practicality. But it’s more than that. She’s rarely in a rush, which means that, instead of flying back and forth between the coasts, she routinely takes the train. When she and her husband Joe visited England to see Beatrix Potter’s home, they took a boat. “It’s just the way we like to live,” she says.
It’s a message that, perhaps surprisingly, continues to resonate in the face of our not-enough-hours-in-the-day lives and Instagram posts of curated, minimalist interiors. More is more in Susan Branch’s world, though her version of more comes from salvaging and saving, including a collection of rubber bands and safety pins and twist ties that she keeps in old glass jars to ensure they don’t end up in “that swirling dervish of little pieces of plastic, those ocean garbage patches.”
Susan Branch’s world, the one she has sold so effectively (and authentically) to her legions of “girlfriends,” isn’t complicated. It doesn’t require us to think about climate change so much as to embrace its principle solutions of reduce, reuse, and recycle simply because they make sense. It isn’t about making do without, it’s about making do with what we have. Because what we have, Susan Branch insists, is enough. A fistful of roadside flowers. Our grandmother’s (or someone’s grandmother’s) embroidered pillowcase. Raspberries turned to jam. It’s a good life, she says, and all of us girlfriends nod because she’s right. “And it took so little,” she insists. “It didn’t take wanting the world. It didn't take all of that. It took thrift stores. It wasn’t difficult … It was all just about the little things.”
Go to Susanbranch.com to find Susan Branch calendars, books, and other fun items, and to sign up for her newsletter. Most calendars and books are also at Edgartown bookstore and Bunch of Grapes.
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RECIPE: Cranberry Marmalade
- Yield: Makes 2 cups 1x
Description
I discovered this by accident one Christmas with some leftover cranberry sauce — it’s so good, now I make it on purpose. Beyond easy; such a pretty gift; make extra for a friend. Amazing on hot, buttered biscuits.
Ingredients
- 1 cup fresh or frozen cranberries
- 1/3 cup sugar
- 1 cup good quality orange marmalade
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350°F.
- Put the cranberries into a small ungreased baking dish. Sprinkle the sugar over the cranberries; don’t stir. Bake until berries begin to pop, about 30 to 35 minutes, stirring 3 times while baking. Remove from the oven and cool.
- Combine the cranberry mixture with the orange marmalade and chill.
Notes
- What to do with it: Spread it over sourdough toast with butter, try it on English muffins, cream scones for tea, or on fresh baked biscuits with a roasted chicken dinner. Yuuum!
- Make extra for a friend: Vintage coasters make the perfect jam jar toppers. Just secure it with a rubber band and cover it with a ribbon.
RECIPE: Crème Caramel
- Yield: Serves 8
Description
Light, delicate, and elegant — also, totally delicious. This is my favorite dessert. When inverted into a serving dish, the caramel surrounds the custard like an island.
Ingredients
- 3 eggs
- 2 egg yolks
- 1 1/4 cups sugar, divided
- 2 cups milk
- 1 cup cream
- 1 1/2 tsps vanilla extract
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 325°F.
- Beat eggs and yolks together, just to blend. Stir in 1/2 cup of sugar. Then, in a heavy-bottomed saucepan, heat the milk and cream together over medium heat until almost boiling, but do not boil. Remove from the heat and slowly add the hot milk and cream to the egg mixture, stirring constantly. Then, add the vanilla.
- To make the caramel, put the remaining 3/4 cup of sugar into a dry skillet over medium heat. Swirl the pan, but don’t stir. Cook until the sugar has melted and turned a deep caramel color.
- The caramel dries as it cools, so work quickly to divide it among 8 buttered ramekins, swirling each to coat the bottoms. Pour the custard into ramekins, filling to about 3/4¾. Set the dishes into a roasting pan. Pour boiling water into the pan to about 1-inch deep. Put the roasting pan into the oven for 45 minutes, or until a knife, inserted in the middle, comes out clean. Chill, covered in the refrigerator.
- To serve, cut tightly around the edge of the ramekin, place a small bowl over it, and turn both upside down so the custard releases into the bowl.
Extra Egg Whites or Yolks?
There’s no need to pitch an egg white or yolk when a recipe only calls for one of them. For either, add extras to egg dishes (like a frittata), swirl into a soup, or fry into leftover rice. If you just have one white, you can use it as a binder in homemade granola or use it to add a foamy, frothy head to a cocktail (like this vodka-based Morning Glory). If you have a few left over whites, consider making meringue (here’s a fancy dessert or you can just do the meringue part and bake them into cookies!) Yolks can be used in homemade pasta or a creamy sauce as well as in desserts like lemon curd.
RECIPE: My Grandma’s Turkey Stuffing
- Yield: Makes enough for a 20-pound bird
Description
I guess you could say this is the old-fashioned way to make stuffing — my great-grandmother also made it this way. It’s so moist, and you can change it any way you like with additions of your own, but we like it plain and simple. Makes great sandwiches with sliced turkey and cranberry sauce.
Ingredients
- 2 loaves white bread
- 1 loaf whole wheat bread
- 1/2 lb butter (2 sticks)
- 2-3 onions, chopped
- 6 stalks celery, chopped
- 1 spice jar (.65 oz) sage leaves
- 1 Tbsp salt, or to taste
- Freshly ground black pepper
Instructions
- Set the bread out to dry a couple of days before you make the stuffing.
- Put more than 6 inches of the hottest water you can stand to touch into your clean sink. Dip each slice of dried bread into the water; wring it out well, and put it into a large bowl. The bread will be kind of chunky, doughy, chewy.
- Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Turn the heat to low, and very slowly, sauté the onions and celery in the butter until soft — do not brown the butter. Meanwhile, over the sink, rub the sage leaves between your fingers and remove any woody stems, then put the leaves in the bowl with the bread.
- Pour the butter mixture over the bread and mix well with your hands (but don’t burn yourself!). Add salt — it needs a lot of salt, so they say — and then add pepper to taste. Now for the tasting, the tasting always goes on forever …is that right? More salt? More sage? More butter? So taste, and don’t worry — we’ve never measured a thing and it’s always delicious!
Notes
My Grandma’s stuffing is a very old recipe. There never was any written recipe that I ever saw. There was only one size jar of sage back then, about 0.65 oz, one regular spice jar from the supermarket. And then it’s all about tasting it. When you cook stuffing inside a turkey, the turkey will absorb some of the salt and flavoring, so my Grandma said you should add slightly more than seems right to you.
RECIPE: Blueberry Corncakes
- Yield: Serves 4
Description
Crisp on the edges with a cornmeal crunch in the tender middle. Perfect for a winter day.
Ingredients
- 2/3 cup flour
- 1/2 cup yellow cornmeal
- 2 Tbsps sugar
- 1 Tbsp baking powder
- 2 tsps cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1 egg
- 1 cup milk
- 2 Tbsps canola oil, divided
- 1 Tbsp butter
- 1 cup blueberries, fresh or frozen (not thawed)
Instructions
- In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt.
- In another bowl, beat the egg well, then whisk in milk, then 1 tablespoon canola oil. Pour into the dry ingredients and stir until just blended. Gently fold in the blueberries.
- Heat a skillet with 1 tablespoon each of canola oil and butter. Drop the batter by spoonfuls into the pan; use the back of a spoon to spread the batter into 4-inch rounds. When the cakes are crisp and brown, flip them and cook the other side. Keep them warm in a 250°F oven until you’re ready to serve them.
- Serve the cakes in a puddle of hot maple syrup; butter is optional. You will be fortified and can now go out and play in the snow…
RECIPE: Mayonnaise
- Yield: Makes 2 cups 1x
Description
With a food processor, it takes about 5 minutes to make your own mayonnaise, and you won’t believe the difference. Use it as is. For a special chicken salad, add a little curry and chutney to taste.
Ingredients
- 1 whole egg
- 2 egg yolks
- 3 Tbsps fresh lemon juice
- 1 Tbsp Dijon mustard
- Freshly ground pepper to taste
- Salt to taste
- 1 cup olive oil
- 1 cup vegetable oil
Instructions
- Put the egg and egg yolks, lemon juice, mustard, pepper, and salt into a food processor and blend for 1 minute.
- Mix the olive oil and vegetable oil together; then, with the machine running, pour in the oil in a very slow, steady stream. That’s it! Feel free to add any herbs you like to make flavored mayonnaise.
