Six rooms designed and outfitted by top interior decorators at the Animal Rescue Fund’s Thrift and Treasure Shop in Sagaponack will be on display at a designer showhouse, cocktail party, and sale on Saturday that will benefit ARF’s work on behalf of animals. 

The rooms, created by Sam Allen, Tracey Cavaniola, Nancy Corzine, Lynda Sylvester, Eldon Wong, and a team comprising John Stedila and Tim Button, will be created using furnishings from the shop and from the designers’ collections. All of the items will be for sale.

The designers are all animal lovers who donated their time and expertise for the sixth annual showhouse event. Mr. Allen, of Sam Allen Interiors, is known for a style described as “clean and comfortable,” touching on themes “from organic elegance to Parisian Hollywood glamour,” according to a press release.

Ms. Cavaniola, of Sag Harbor, is designing a front porch within her space at the shop, while Ms. Corzine is staging an elegant bedroom. John Stedila and Tim Button, from Stedila Design in New York City, will create a “writer’s summertime retreat.” 

The title of the room designed by Lynda Sylvester of Sylvester & Co. in Sag Harbor is “The Library Goes to the Dogs,” while Eldon Wong of Eldon Wong Designs has used the PBS series “Downton Abbey” as a theme for a canine-style “Dinner Party at Dogtown Abbey” vignette.

More than 200 guests are expected to attend the preview cocktail party, at which wine from Channing Daughters Winery and hors d’oeuvres from the caterer Peter Ambrose will be served. 

The event is co-chaired by Gordon Hoppe, Gigi Mahon, Lisa McCarthy, Alex Papachristidis, and Marshall Watson, with Mary McDonald as this year’s honorary chairwoman. 

Also on hand at the showhouse will be some ARF cats and dogs that are ready for adoption.

Tickets are $250 for an early-bird preview and cocktails, for which doors will open at 5 p.m., with $150 for general admission to the cocktail party and showhouse, beginning at 6. 

On Sunday and Monday, the thrift shop will suggest a $10 donation for members of the public to view the decorators’ rooms, with children admitted free. Items purchased will be available for pickup after May 31.  

Also coming up on the design scene is Hamptons Contemporary, an interior and exterior design and décor fair to be held at the Southampton Elks Club grounds from June 3 to 5. 

Founded by Rick Friedman, who created the art fair ArtHamptons, it will showcase the wares of more than 150 exhibitors in a 40,000-square-foot pavilion. The exhibitors include architects, interior decorators, luxury furniture and appliance manufacturers, artisans, home theater experts, and pool and landscape designers. 

Architectural Digest magazine and Hamptons Cottages and Gardens are among the fair’s media sponsors.

Nancy Hollister, the co-owner and chef of Breadzilla (now in its 20th year!), is self-taught. She and her business partner and ex-husband, Brad Thompson, used to be marine biologists. They work side by side at Breadzilla, where he does the baking, and are the best of friends. So much so, that when she hosts her bimonthly pizza parties at home, he is often a guest. To take it a step further, he even helped Nancy and her husband, Owen Jander (her high school sweetheart), build an addition to their 700-square-foot house in Springs to accommodate a beast of a pizza oven.

Encased in brick in the center of their small but super-efficient kitchen, the pizza oven was built from a Wildwood Ovens kit, with refractory cement inside to withstand 980 degree heat. It takes three to four hours, and plenty of firewood, to get up to temperature and continually requires feeding as cooking commences.

On this particular evening, guests arrived bearing gourmet treats and wine. I felt compelled to bring one of my favorite pizza toppings: Taleggio cheese and sauteed wild mushrooms, a la Cittanuova.

Nancy’s friend Steven Salzman, a jolly fellow and clearly a superb cook too, came with his home-smoked bacon. He cut it into thick slabs, placed it in a cast-iron skillet, and topped it with some turbinado sugar. The speed with which food cooks in this Luciferous furnace is staggering. Caramelized and crisped within a minute, the bacon was then cut into cubes and served with a variety of mustards for dipping: whole grain, honey, and others from Maille. 

Next up, fresh bay scallops took a turn in another cast-iron skillet. These cooked faster than it took you to read this sentence. They were slipped into a serving dish and doused with fresh lemon juice and a bit of salt and pepper. By this time, the Kampf family had arrived, as well as Kyle and Reed Karen, all the way from Shelter Island on this moderately snowy but very slippery evening.

Nancy’s kitchen is scrupulously organized, with space above, below, and in between utilized as if in a ship’s galley. When I arrived, little balls of pizza dough were gathered in a tub on the counter with an array of toppings — frisee, cheeses, pepperoni, more scallops, tomato sauce, herbs, apples, and red onions, among others. 

Owen was in charge of the oven, frequently checking the temperature with a digital thermometer, cleaning the “deck” inside, and sliding the pizza peel and paddle in and out. Nancy’s pizza dough is a variation of the “squishy” doughs she makes for Breadzilla’s popular lunches using King Arthur’s Sir Galahad flour, French instant yeast, olive oil, salt, and sugar. Her tomato sauce is simple perfection: San Marzano tomatoes, garlic, onions, marjoram, sugar, and salt.

Finally, the first pizza “baby” went in. It is small and covered only with a thin layer of sauce and cheese, and cooks in less than two minutes. Watching the dough blister and bubble is a thrill, eating it even more so. Then the real fun began.

  Frisee with more scallops, parmesan, and a little salt and pepper with a spritz of lemon to finish was next. The cheese turns to what might be described as napalm and we have to wait a few minutes before digging in. The mushroom and Taleggio version, I am thrilled to hear, is a hit with everyone. Steve then makes a pizza with homemade tomato jam, Halsey Farm buttercup squash cubes that have been roasted with sake and honey, more Taleggio, and some rosemary. At some point a calzone gets made but I forget what was in it.

I ask the gang what their favorite pizzas are: Brad loves clam and mushroom, Owen’s is sausage and peppers, Nancy’s is apple slices with red onion and Gorgonzola. I notice that she makes this one last, when most of the guests are full. She has also made a Thai-style dipping sauce, more sweet than salty or hot, with kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass, sirarcha, rice vinegar, garlic, cilantro, and scallions, kind of a nam jim-nam pla prik mash-up. It is surprisingly good with pizza!

If you’ve ever been to Breadzilla or read reviews of it online, you probably understand the juxtaposition therein. The breads, sandwiches, soups, cheeses, and pastries are divine, the signage throughout reminiscent of the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld. “Please! It’s cheese, not a T-shirt sale at the Gap!” and “Mean people not welcome.” All of this cracks Nancy up, especially the reviews that refer to her as “the wife” or “the one with no people skills.” Even her friend Steven says she may be better suited for forensic science than retail.

Maybe it was because they welcomed this stranger into their house for a story, or because we were giggling and sharing recipes within minutes, but my perception of this dynamo is more of a cross between Olga Korbut and Dorothy Parker, petite and pretty, relentlessly energetic, and witty as all get out.

And those were the best damned pizzas I’ve ever had.

All Durell Godfrey ever wanted in a career was an “art job,” one that would place her among the creative people she considered members of her “tribe.” That’s what she hoped for when she graduated in 1964 from Endicott College in Massachusetts, and that’s how it turned out.

After a brief attempt to live and work in Boston, where she was told that art studios didn’t like to hire women, Ms. Godfrey won a coveted job in New York City as an illustrator for Glamour magazine, a job she enjoyed for 31 years. 

Now a longtime contributing photographer for The Star, Ms. Godfrey said charm is the word she likes most to describe her style. Over the years her illustrations have been seen in Glamour magazine’s travel guides, fitness columns, and “Sticky Situation of the Month.” She incorporated the fashions and hairstyles of the time and would sometimes put herself, her friends, or even her cat into a scene.

Fast forward to March 2015, when a friend and East Hampton Ladies Village Improvement Society colleague showed her an article from The New York Times about a Scottish woman who had created a groundbreaking coloring book for grown-ups. “I can do that,” she thought, and she has. Calling on one of her contacts in the publishing world, she seized the opportunity. Two weeks later, she had signed the deal.

“Color Me Cluttered,” due out on Dec. 8 from Penguin Random House, features everyday scenes from much-loved, thoroughly lived-in houses. Awaiting its audience of adults are 40 line drawings, and Ms. Godfrey recommends colored pencils or markers as the medium.

Among its pages is a clothes dryer bursting open with socks, linens, and other washables. Jewelry spills over the sides of the drawers of a dressing table. A work desk is piled with papers and pens, and notes are taped to the windows and walls. In a kitchen, plates, cups, and food have been left all over the place. Simply put, Ms. Godfrey wants people to relate to, and enjoy, her work.

“Flipping through it, they will be engaged,” Ms. Godfrey said. “They will be involved with who lives in this room. They have been in a room like that or know the person who lives there. Maybe they want to tidy up that room.”

“Color Me Cluttered” is full of domestic charm, although it won’t be the kind of aesthetic you would find in a house that’s been staged here for sale.

“I think things that are tidy are not fun to look at,” Ms. Godfrey said. “Messy is much more interesting to draw.”

 “Color Me Cluttered” is among a growing number of books meant not for tots but for their parents. Among more than 7,000 Amazon.com listings are meditative mandala books, flowers and butterflies, landscapes and seascapes, holidays, and at least one with pictures that stoners might find appealing.

Some of the adults buying these books are frazzled folks who are heeding the advice of psychologists who recommend coloring as therapeutic.  Dr. Ben Michaelis, the New York City-based author of “Your Next Big Thing: Ten Small Steps to Get Moving and Get Happy,” recently told The Huffington Post that “a specific and repetitive activity” such as coloring “increases your focus and activates portions of your parietal lobe, which are connected to your sense of self and spirituality.”

Ms. Godfrey worked on her book for about five weeks in the spring this year, producing 75 drawings. The publishers had asked for 60, but she just kept going. 

Almost immediately after they were submitted, Ms. Godfrey’s husband, John Berg, fell ill, and she began focusing on his care. Mr. Berg died in October. Ms. Godfrey said the support of her artistic tribe of friends and colleagues, along with the coming release of “Color Me Cluttered,” has helped her move on.

“This gave me something to look forward to. I’m sorry I can’t share it with him, but he looked at all of the drawings I did as I was doing them,” she said. “It helped me focus on the future instead of dwelling on my loss.”

The coloring book has also represented a career rebirth of sorts for Ms. Godfrey. She said the book was able to get her “back into the groove” she had when illustrating for Glamour.

During an interview in her studio, as she fiddled with a light box she has had since the 1970s, which still works perfectly, she said, “I’m 70 years old. I didn’t expect to have sort of a new career path. It’s totally gratifying . . . and I’m really, really lucky.”

The diminutive white frame house on Union Street in Sag Harbor is known both as the 1693 house and the “five-times-moved house.” Judith Auchincloss, who purchased it in 2010 from the tennis pro Guillermo Vilas, described it to a recent visitor as “sort of magical.” A real estate broker in New York City who has been a longtime summer resident here, she owned a house in Bridgehampton until 2002.

“I was a houseguest instead of a homeowner for eight years,” she said. “Then I happened to be walking on Union Street when they were having an open house. It was a beautiful day, the front door was open, and you could walk all the way through the house. And I thought this is cool. I was looking for something that wouldn’t be too much to take care of.”

From material unearthed at the Sag Harbor Historical Society, a consensus emerged that the house was built in 1693 and moved five times before settling on Union Street. One description, from 1959, states the house was originally in Poxabogue, but most others say it was put on rollers and hauled by teams of oxen from Sagaponack. 

Officially, Sag Harbor turned 300 in 2007, but Stephen Longmire, who wrote “Keeping Time in Sag Harbor,” ratified the 1693 date of the house and called it the oldest in the village. He wrote that its five moves were the result of “an old Yankee habit rich with the thrift that built such proud and simple dwellings.” 

The claim that it is the oldest in the village is arguable, however. The Umbrella House, the brick-and-shingle building on Division Street where Cavaniola’s Wine Cellar is today, is more often said to be the oldest house in the village, having sheltered British soldiers during the Revolutionary War and been hit by canon fire in the War of 1812. It’s unlikely that the truth will ever be determined beyond a shadow of a doubt. 

As Barbara Schwartz of the historical society said, “Sometimes a story gets told and retold often enough that it becomes accepted as fact.” She pointed out that when the society inherited the Annie Cooper Boyd House in 1998 from Mrs. Boyd’s daughter, it was believed that David Frothingham had published the Long Island Herald, Long Island’s first newspaper, there. Further research proved that the paper had in fact been published across the street.

There is no doubt that 64 Union Street is old. The snug living and dining rooms are the core of the original structure and retain the rough ancient beams and extraordinarily wide wood planks on the ceilings, and some of the floors and walls. Some, in the dining room, run parallel to the ceiling, some perpendicular.

Next to the fireplace in the dining room is a brick “beehive” oven, where meals were cooked over firewood. If not original, the two small panes of the front door seem to be crown glass, which was common until the 19th century. The glass was blown into a hollow globe, then flattened and spun into a flat disk with a bull’s-eye at center. The front door and several others downstairs have old latchkey handles.

Ms. Auchincloss said that her friend and neighbor, the artist Donald Sultan, suspected the roof had been raised at some point because there is space between the top of the pilasters on the façade and the roofline. Indeed, a 1973 photograph at the historical society confirmed Mr. Sultan’s observation and the fact that it had been done sometime within the last 40 years.

Like the other changes, the adjustment of the roof height s subtle. Respect has been paid to the historical character of the structure. The original roofline of the second story, reached by a narrow and steep staircase typical at the time, can still be seen in the upstairs bedroom, but a wide dormer facing the backyard is a more recent addition.

There is a partial basement, now reached by Bilco-type doors, whose stonewalls and old wooden beams suggest it dates from when the house first arrived at its final destination, presumably during the 18th century.

Much of the furniture in the house came from antique fairs (in Brimfield Mass., or the Mulford Farm in East Hampton) and from a great-aunt’s barn in Milton, Mass. It had been stored after the Bridgehampton house was sold. 

Ms. Auchincloss also found furnishings locally: the French farm table in the dining room at English Country Antiques, the small desk in the downstairs bedroom at Marika’s on Shelter Island, and a pair of armchairs at a tag sale in Southampton. The Ushak living room rug was acquired at a Sotheby’s auction.

One of the previous owners, Susan Mead, had modified the kitchen, adding cabinets, countertops, and new appliances. “The primary work I did was create a studio/garage,” Ms. Mead said. “In the winter I parked my car there, and in the summer it was open and I used it for entertaining when it was raining outside.”

Ms. Auchincloss, who said the dining room was “a bit limiting” — it can accommodate only eight people, at most — also finds that “dining outside in the summer, with candles and a full moon, is just wonderful.”

 It is unlikely that those who lived in the house in the 17th century took advantage of outdoor dining, but there is no question that the 21st century has found the house settled at last. 

Well, it’s not a shoe box exactly. But Barbarajo Howard’s one-room Montauk condominium certainly is small — officially, 483 square feet, or 683 if you count the balcony deck that runs the entire width of her top-floor apartment in the 30-acre Rough Rider Landing development. 

Yet confined it’s not. It’s in one of the development’s three-tiered buildings with multiple balconies that are set back farther as they get higher, a fairly common feature in locations with sweeping views. The complex was built in the late 1980s after considerable controversy and concessions  to meet local environmental concerns. The architect, Gary Cannella, created 21 buildings with 147 apartments, all with full balconies facing Fort Pond Bay. Their views, over greenery protected by raised walkways, are spectacular, with the bay’s far (western) side the Hither Hills State Park. 

Clearly Albert Barone, the developer, had a keen eye for a site, even though he had to surmount the difficulties of building over low-lying land that once held the old fishing village of Montauk, which was swept away by the Hurricane of 1938. All the buildings start on the second floor, the ground level or first floor consisting of poured concrete units that support those above and hold heating and air-conditioning equipment. They are enclosed in walls of wooden lattice so storm waters can rush right through. With good luck, the buildings will survive.

“Everyone who lives here says their view is the best,” Ms. Howard said, “including me.” She added that a hobby of most residents is taking photographs of the ever-changing sunsets, the angles of which noticeably move right or left with the changing seasons as the earth’s orbit puts the sun in a slightly different part of the sky.

Ms. Howard has arranged every inch of her tiny apartment to take advantage of the giant view. She has relished the sweep of Montauk’s open spaces ever since she began going there in the summer, staying just down the beach from her present home at the Port Royal motel, which is now a condominium complex as well. She bought the studio in 2001 after the 9/11 terrorist attacks rained debris on her New York City apartment, and she began looking for a way to live in the area permanently. That dream came true when she leveraged her experience in public relations into her present job as director of marketing and communications at Guild Hall in East Hampton.

A complete view-centric renovation followed her purchase. She completely covered one wall with mirrors, extending them behind the sink in the kitchen area so both the cook (“I cook a lot,” she said) and her guests can see a reflection of the panorama even when seated at the small kitchen counter with their backs turned. She replaced a rough-textured ceiling with plaster, the better to blend with the brightness from a large skylight in the high ceiling.  She eschewed curtains (“I like to see the stars at night”). She made sure her bed, couches, and even the small backs of the tall chairs at her kitchen counter are off-white to match the paint on the walls. 

The only visual competitors with the view are a faintly Asian armoire by her bed concealing a small TV, a dark wood coffee table between the two couches, decorated by an off-white ceramic tray she made at the nearby Edward Albee Foundation studio, and a photograph and two drawings by her late mother, an artist, the largest of which is a Picasso-esque drawing that is mostly white space. 

Ms. Howard’s artistic family background, she said, influenced her choices of décor. Another helpful influence was having grown up spending summers aboard a 40-foot sailboat, where small cabin space dictates that every item is stowed in precisely chosen locations. (The apartment has a built-in “California” closet with drawers, where she keeps scripts from her local acting career.) The Web has helped her minimalism, too. She keeps all her books on her Kindle and streams her music from the cloud. For all that, she says the apartment sleeps eight during family visits — two on the standard double bed, two on each of the couches, which convert to beds when the coffee table is folded and pushed back, and in a pinch, two more on blow-up floor mattresses.

Ms. Howard said she makes one concession to tight living by renting one of the development’s storage lockers near the beach. There, she keeps three bicycles, two paddleboards, and, in winter, cushions for the four chairs and two chaise longues that go with a small dining table on her balcony. 

“Living small allows one to live large,” she said. “It frees up space in one’s life for doing stuff rather than maintaining it.”

Thanksgiving means turkey, stuffing, potatoes, cranberry relish, and 5K “trots,” and in East Hampton, it also means the joy of peeking into houses both grand and historical, courtesy of the East Hampton Historical Society.

Each year on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the historical society offers a house and garden tour of properties that are unique examples of contemporary and historical architecture. This year’s group of five show how history can live with contemporary comfort — classical design enhanced by Modernism’s clean lines.

Such is the case at a house on Dunemere Lane constructed in 1897 by George Eldredge, a prominent builder with his hand in several historic houses in the area. The modern update of an original summer cottage retains the traditional details while bringing open-plan living to the first floor. A liberal use of windows, along with a white and light palette, keeps the foyer and other rooms light-filled and airy.

In a similar grand spirit is a compound on Egypt Lane, with a gambrel-roofed main house close to the Maidstone Club and the ocean. The property boasts a guest cottage and a pool house, with a pergola and tennis court.

On Drew Lane, a shingled guest cottage now stands alone as a private residence. It was once part of a nearby Lily Pond Lane estate that included a stucco main house designed by Albro and Lindeberg. Its relatively diminutive scale, according to the society, highlights a taste for smaller houses toward the end of the 19th century. Its grounds include an English-style garden.

In Amagansett, two houses on Main Street make up a single property. Rather than tear down a small Cape Cod-style cottage associated with the lot, the owners added an entirely new structure and kept the tinier house on the property. Tom Samet and Nathan Wold designed the interiors.

Also on Amagansett’s Main Street is a late-19th-century house built for Isaac Mulford. Samuel Babcock and Lyman Babcock, descendants of Samuel Schellinger, who was a respected builder and millwright, constructed the house, which had been neglected over time. Now rescued, restored, and brought up to date, it retains much of its original flavor, both structurally and with its interior design.

For those who have been curious about the ongoing work at the Studio, the house and workspace of Thomas and Mary Nimmo Moran on Main Street opposite Town Pond, the tour will offer a look inside. The Queen Anne-style Victorian building, a national landmark dating from 1884, is being brought back to its original state.

The tour, which lasts from 1 to 4:30 p.m. and is self-guided, costs $65 for advance tickets and $75 for same-day purchases. A cocktail party on Friday, Nov. 27, will also benefit the historical society; tickets, at $200, include the following day’s tour. This year’s party, from 6 to 8 p.m., will be held at the oceanfront residence of Elie Hirschfeld and Dr. Sarah J. Schlesinger, situated where Lily Pond Lane meets Georgica Beach. The imposing house, designed by John Custis Lawrence and built in 1920, has quirky Arts and Crafts details and Swiss-style balconies.

Tickets are available from the historical society’s website or its office at 101 Main Street. Tickets will also be sold on the Friday and Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend at Clinton Academy, 151 Main Street, between the hours of 10 a.m. and 3:30 p.m.

Some people buy cookbooks for the recipes, some people buy them for the pictures or narrative. And some people buy them for all of those reasons and more. I used to collect regional cookbooks, but the massive quantity of cream of mushroom soup and spinach dip recipes became distressing so I sold them all at a yard sale.

“Cookbook Book,” a compilation by Annahita Kamali, an art director, and Florian Bohm, an artist, which was published by Phaidon, is a coffee table book that covers all the bases. Almost. The authors gathered 125 cookbooks spanning hundreds of years. Each page opens up to an actual-size color photograph of a chosen recipe from each book. As this is an international volume, the back of the book gives translations for such recipes as Kogebog for Hvermand’s mashed tripe and minced sausage, and Housewife’s Friend (1936, Tokyo), Yoshino tofu with prawns, should you be so inclined.

From a dedicated cook and cookbook collector’s perspective, this book has some serious flaws and misses some major culinary talent. But, it was delightful to see that some local chefs and authors made the cut. Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey are included, as they should be. Myrna Davis’s 1972 “The Potato Book” is included, with Truman Capote’s amusing foreword. He waxes poetic about foraging for unharvested potatoes and chilled Russian vodka, and laments the “new houses that are steadily popping up to mar the long line where the land ends and the sky begins.” He also gives a shout out to the then Hampton Day School, saying “it is as open in spirit as its surroundings and for that we can be grateful.”

 The local watercolorist and illustrator Lauren Jarrett’s exquisite work can be seen in “Catalan Cuisine.” It’s a shame that some other “locals,” such as Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin and Sheila Lukins of Silver Palate fame didn’t make the cut. Surely, the 1980s fame of Silver Palate and New Basics cookbooks deserved a place in this tome?

Since this is a British publication, however, it is heavy on British authors. While I admire Jamie Oliver a great deal, I’m not sure his “30 Minute Meals” is a worthy addition. There is also quite a bit of infatuation with totally kitschy cookbooks, mostly American, natch. There is “The Mafia Cookbook,” “The Special Effects Cookbook,” “White Trash Cooking,” “The Astronaut’s Cookbook,” “Singers and Swingers in the Kitchen,” “I Hate to Cook Book,” “DC Super Heroes Super Healthy Cookbook,” and worst of all, “Bridget’s Diet Cookbook.”

Do you remember the brief, sad fad of the ’70s with calendars, cards, and, yes, a cookbook with a fat, nude girl named Bridget? The chosen illustration for “Cookbook Book” is Bridget eating a plate of bird seed. Sooooo politically incorrect nowadays. Probably even better (or worse) is the “Super Heroes” recipe for Invisible Banana French Toast. The comic strip shows Batman wondering where the banana is. Robin replies, “You get that taste by putting the banana in the Batman . . . er, I mean the batter, Batman.” There have been sniggering jokes for decades about Batman and Robin’s sexuality, but such innuendo in what is supposed to be a children’s cookbook?

The book is divided into chapters/categories such as “Design Mavericks,” “Enduring Classics,” and “World Flavors,” but these, too, contain flaws. Sylvia (Queen of Soul Food) Woods, the owner and proprietor of the eponymous Sylvia’s of Harlem, is a true blue American, not African. However, it is heartening to see that Yotam Ottolenghi gets a page from his “Plenty” cookbook, and there are some single subject books that enchant, such as Rose Levy Beranbaum’s “The Bread Bible,” Pierre Herme’s “Macarons,” and Myrna Davis’s aforementioned “The Potato Book.”

There are also books for cooks that may not catch your eye at a Barnes and Noble. “Visual Recipes: A Cookbook for Non-Readers” is an example. “The Eskimo Cook Book,” written by the students of Shishmaref Day School, was published by the Alaska Crippled Children’s Association in 1953 and has charming drawings by the children, along with some very regional recipes for seagull eggs, dried salmon eggs with berries, conch, and tomcod.

As Colman Andrews says in the introduction, “Volumes like these bring us not just cooking lessons but inspiration, insight, and context.” And even a touch of our own local flavors.

Click for recipes

Potato Pancakes, Milwaukee Style

    Elaine Ewing, East Hampton, N.Y.

    These potatoes are thin and crisp, and especially good with poultry and poultry gravy.

2 cups raw grated potatoes

2 whole eggs

11/2 teaspoons salt

1 Tbsp. flour (rounded), breadcrumbs may be substituted

1 Tbsp. finely chopped onion

1/2 cup boiling milk

    Mix all ingredients together well and bake on greased griddle.

Quahog Chowder for 100

    Helen and Everett Rattray, Amagansett, N.Y.

1 bushel chowder (quahog) calms, opened and minced

15 lbs. dressed-weight striped bass fillets, chunked

13/4 gallons clam broth plus 1 quart, reserved from steaming open clams

18 medium-size onions, minced fine and squeezed

2 lbs. salt pork, diced

1/2 lb. butter

10 lbs. potatoes, pared and diced

3 quarts milk

1 cup white wine

Thyme, one bunch minced

1 cup parsley, chopped

    Try out pork, add onion, and cook until just slightly brown. Add butter if necessary. Add clam broth. Bring to boil. Add potatoes, cook until tender. Add fish, cook until half or three-quarters done. Add clams, simmer briefly. Add thyme and parsley. Add milk and wine. Simmer all awhile.

Potato Pie Crust

    This is a good pie crust for hearty fillings of meat, fish, or chicken.

1 cup sifted flour

1/2 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. sugar

1/2 cup cold mashed potatoes, without seasoning, butter or milk

6 Tbsp. solid shortening

    Resift flour with salt and sugar. Blend in potatoes with a fork until mealy. Add shortening, cutting in with pastry blender or two knives until mixture consists of small crumbs. Form pastry into a ball, put into plastic bag and chill in refrigerator for about half an hour. Then roll out dough on lightly floured board to one-eighth-inch thickness. Press into eight-inch pie pan, trim edges, pricking several places, and bake at 400 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes. Allow crust to cool before filling.

“Shines for All,” the motto of The East Hampton Star, goes back to the origins of this enterprise in the 19th century, when doing so was surely easier. The community some 130 years ago was quite homogeneous, comprised of farmers, fishermen, merchants, and a small group of professionals (along with a very small sprinkling of folks “from away” in fine weather).

The huge variety of people living here, and visiting here, now is so complex and kaleidoscopic that it could be the subject of an anthropological dissertation. But as I look at the houses at which we shine a light in our second seasonal HomeBook supplement today, I realize that we have taken our old motto to heart. This HomeBook is a celebration of eclecticism and idiosyncrasy.

We feature a house that needs almost no furnishings as it immerses those inside in a unique, surrounding native plain. We take a peak at an estate that allows its owner to retreat from the outside world into a meditative environment that juxtaposes Accabonac Harbor and the Far East. A house we stop at in Wainscott is a virtual museum of treasured artifacts from the owners’ travels and earlier American life. And we take a look at a cottage where a resident has made a home for all the books gathered in a literary career. 

Homogenization may seem an almost overwhelming force in our lives in 2015, in architecture as well as other arts. But East Enders, and their nesting places, are invariably worth a visit. 

You might say that this edition of The East Hampton Star HomeBook is dedicated to teardowns. 

No, not because any of the houses we are featuring are about to be demolished, or because any of them rose from the ashes of demolition, but because they have survived this 21st-century trend toward extinction.

So, here’s to houses worth saving!

One survivor comes by the word “cottage” historically. Some 200 years old, it rests not far from the ocean in Sagaponack, where most of the other old, salt-air summer cottages that were constructed relatively recently, in the 1940s and 1950s, have been expanded and reconfigured beyond recognition. 

Another is the only house remaining on the South Fork designed by the renowned late architect Andrew Geller. The 1968 Geller house, in Springs, was recently purchased by a television producer and his wife, who respect its playfulness and plan to restore certain aspects of the original that had been altered under previous owners. 

 Then there’s an abode, jammed full of needlework and other artistic handiwork by one of its owners, that started out as a 19th-century barn. Yet another place of interest we feature is what you might call a South Fork folly: Hidden from view — except from the  houses at Ludlow Greens, a subdivision north of the highway in Bridgehampton — it isn’t a house, in fact, but a covered wooden bridge of the kind you may have seen in the Meryl Streep/Clint Eastwood film “The Bridges of Madison County.”

The newest house in this HomeBook is fascinating (among other reasons) as an example of how to make creative use of awkward building lots, as open space dwindles. The architect Blaze Makoid and the landscape designer Jack deLashmet devised a way to make beautiful use of what others had found troublesome: a small lot shaped like a slice of pizza.

In the spirit of good stewardship, we hope you find this issue of HomeBook not just entertaining but inspiring.