Book excerpt: Seventy-five miles southeast of Washington, D.C., in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, accessible only by boat, is tiny Smith Island, where a 300-year-old culture has survived in singular isolation. For a quarter of a century in this unique setting, Frances Kitching operated a small, widely renowned restaurant and inn. Susan Stiles Dowell, working closely with her, gathered more than one hundred of her recipesmany of them from the generation-to-generation oral tradition. This is more than just a regional cookbook. In Mrs. Dowells sensitive and luminous telling of the lore and lure of this remote island, and in forty evocative photographs, colorful people and places come to life.