At the age of 25, up to her elbows in garlic and roux, Susan Herrmann Loomis was exactly where she hoped to be. She was young, in Paris, and toiling away happily in the boot-camp atmosphere of a French cooking school.

Just a year earlier, while in Seattle, Loomis had decided to live her dream and become a food writer. The career would offer her the chance to blend her twin passions: exploring the vast, pleasurable world of foods and sharing her discoveries with others.

With a journalism degree and some experience on newswpapers, Loomis already had a start on the writing part. So with $2,500 and a generous helping of ambition, she moved to the culinary capital of the world to learn the intricacies of food preparation. Whether chopping 600 cloves of garlic or combing the local boulangerie for the ingredients of a photography layout, she knew she had found her place.

“It was everything I wanted, a very exciting time,” Loomis said at her home in Belfast, where she now lives with her husband and 2-year-old son.

With two well-regarded cookbooks to her credit, another close to publication, and the next one in the works, Loomis is slowly nudging her way onto the bookshelves of American kitchens.

Her books, “The Great American Seafood Cookbook” and “The Great American Farmhouse Cookbook,” have each sold 100,000 copies. She is planning to return to France soon to write about the favorite recipes of farm families.

In such a crowded profession, where cookbooks tumble off the presses each year like so many assembly-line chocolates, Loomis manages to offer not only good recipes, but a journalist’s insight about the hardworking people who harvest our food from the land and the sea.

“Americans don’t seem to have a great deal of respect for their food,” said Loomis, whose kitchen window looks out over the blue-gray expanse of Belfast Bay. “But if they could meet the fishermen who get their food every day, they would better appreciate the things they eat.”

The idea of providing an anecdotal history to recipes began while she was a cooking student in Paris. An American journalist, Patricia Wells, asked Loomis to assist her on a book about the little known eateries of the city.

“Patricia and I would meet each morning at a cafe,” Loomis said. “We’d have coffee and make lists of where we would go that day. We tasted our way through a neighborhood a day.”

The research took the women into out-of-the-way butcher shops, bakeries, pastry shops, cafes, chocolate shops. If the food was good — the first bite of bread was a critical test — they interviewed the cooks and owners.

“We pried open the food secrets of Paris,” Loomis said. “We talked to butchers in their shops and visited bread kitchens at six in the morning to get their histories. We walked around Paris with bread hanging out of our purses.”

The result was “The Food Lover’s Guide to Paris,” a charming, photo-filled tourbook of the savory back streets of the city. Audacious as it might seem for Americans to tell proud Parisians about their native food, the French gobbled up Wells’ handy reference.

But Loomis was itchy to get her own career going. So was her new husband, a Seattle sculptor named Michael, whom she married in Paris. France, for all its beauty and charm, threatened to keep them broke.

Back in Seattle, Loomis made a living by free-lancing pieces for the New York Times and a few travel and food magazines. In 1988, she got a contract from a New York publisher to write a seafood cookbook. A participatory food writer to the core, Loomis spent the next two years aboard commercial fishing boats around the country.

“I wanted to find out how seafood got from the water to the table,” said Loomis, who included Spruce Head lobsterman Dennis Rackliffe in the book.

While living with her husband in Brooklyn, N.Y., Loomis hit the road again in search of the best recipes from farmhouse cooks. She roamed 20,000 miles by car, visiting small farms, orchards, ranches, and vineyards from Montana to Aroostook County. She ate homemade goat cheese, garlic grown in fields outside the kitchen window, Down East blueberries, and soups with more flavor than she thought possible. She sucked the nectar from fresh-cut sugar cane, ate almonds in the orchards they grew in, and learned the joys of tortilla-making from a Hispanic cook.

“If I found a good farmer, good food followed,” Loomis said. “But not always. I had my first Spam sandwich on a farm.”

When her husband was offered a job with a photographer in Belfast, the couple headed to Maine. Loomis was pregnant, and thought small-town life near the sea would be an ideal place to raise a child. And for the last 2 1/2 years it has been, except for the problem of finding a variety of fresh vegetables.

“I can’t find a leek anywhere,” she said with a chuckle. “Artichokes are also hard to come by. But I can get Belgian endive any day of the week. Strange.”

As a seafood lover, however, Maine offers a bounty. She gets lobsters right from the dock, oysters from Pemaquid, and scallops delivered to her door. To test a recipe for her soon-to-be-published book about regional seafood celebrations, she brought an Atlantic salmon to a friend who cooked it in the traditional Maine Fourth of July method — with new peas and egg sauce.

“I meet the most interesting people over food,” said Loomis, who has managed to remain remarkably slender despite her passion for butter and cream.

Lately, Loomis has been spending hours in her sparsely appointed kitchen, perfecting the 120 dishes that will go into her book. Between recipes she sits in her office, surrounded by 1,000 or more volumes on food, to judge the cookbook entries in an international professional cooking contest. She recently completed a free-lance travel article.

Loomis, her husband and 2-year-old son plan to leave Maine in a few months and move to France. There, where it all began for her, is a lush countryside yet to be explored, recipes to gather, farmers to interview, dinner tables to share.

“Good food is at the center of life itself,” Loomis said. “I have to say I’m so happy to have a job like this.”