For Mary Dysart Hartt, who runs the show at Dysart’s restaurant and truck stop in Hermon, baked beans are a quintessential “Maine” dish. And they were the perfect fit when she was trying to decide what to serve at the National Folk Festival.

“I feel that we’re famous for our beans,” Hartt said. “We’ve always had it as a major part of our menu. In my mind, it’s one of the best recipes we have. They’re your typical Maine baked beans.”

The Dysart’s Cookhouse, which also will serve potato salad and coleslaw, will be located in the logging area of the festival – an industry that helped Hartt’s father, the late David Dysart, build his business more than 30 years ago.

“Our business is very much from what Maine produces – the paper industry, the potato industry,” said Hartt, who plans to donate all proceeds from the cookhouse to Eastern Maine Medical Center’s Campaign of Hope, which will fund equipment to detect and treat cancer. “Just being involved with the trucking business, a lot of our customers were involved in the logging business, so it kind of connects.”

David Dysart loved to eat, and he especially loved it when his friends would invite him to their logging camps. The first chef at Dysart’s was originally a logging-camp cook who promptly put baked beans and homemade bread on the menu. Many things have changed since the first year, 1967, but the beans and bread have stayed the same. Today, Dysart’s goes through 1 ton of yellow-eye beans every couple of months.

A few miles away in Winterport, the only beans Bich Nga Burrill is interested in are string beans, a key ingredient in one of her favorite Vietnamese beef dishes. Burrill, who fled Vietnam shortly before the fall of Saigon, moved to Maine more than two decades ago after marrying a man whose family lived here. In the years that followed, she incorporated local ingredients into her native dishes and started a catering company, Far East Cuisine. She will give a cooking demonstration at the festival on Saturday.

While her cooking is rooted in her Vietnamese heritage and influenced by cuisine of Thailand and China, she considers herself first and foremost a Maine cook, part of the culinary landscape here – as local as lobster and baked beans.

“This is my home now,” she said as she rinsed off a giant wok and scrubbed it with a bamboo brush. “We live in the best place in the world.”

And, she added, “I cook fiddleheads in a way you never dreamed of. My mother-in-law says you can’t put garlic in fiddleheads. I said, ‘You want to bet?’ ”

If Burrill and Hartt are any indication, the food of the National Folk Festival will show the changing face of Maine cuisine – a cuisine that holds on to tradition while embracing new flavors.

“We didn’t have specific vendors in mind, but we knew we wanted as good an ethnic and regional flavor as we could possibly attain,” said Heather McCarthy, the festival’s assistant director. “There are going to be people who come to the festival and they don’t want to try something else and that’s fine. We just want to make sure they’re fed.”

More than 30 vendors and demonstrators will cook up a range of foods, from doughboys and hot dogs to English bangers, Indian curries and Finnish coffee cakes.

“Maine probably took a little bit longer than other places, but it is definitely a melting pot of different cultures,” said David Leighton of Bangor, the chef who will sell English bangers – sausages wrapped in puff pastry – at the festival. “Everybody brings their own ethnic foods, customs and traditions.”

Though Leighton has a little English blood in him, he’s primarily Scottish, and he was born in Bangor. The idea for the bangers came from a trip to London.

“English food is world-renowned for being really bland, so I’m going to take that but add a little twist to it to jazz it up a little bit,” Leighton said.

Anyone who attends Burrill’s cooking demonstration can be assured that Vietnamese cooking is anything but bland. Cilantro, hot pepper, garden-fresh vegetables, fish sauce, caramelized sugar, meats, seafood and a handful of other ingredients come together artfully in her dishes.

During a recent visit to her kitchen, baskets and bowls full of produce from her garden looked like still life paintings on the counter. Red and green bell peppers contrasted with bright yellow summer squash, while okra pods stuck out among small heads of cabbage and cauliflower.

As her daughter Samantha peeled shrimp at the sink, Burrill took a pack of pork out of the refrigerator, trimmed the fat and sliced it thinly. Burrill grabbed a handful of purple perilla, an herb with a delicate, fruity flavor. She held the herb in one hand and yellow and red plum tomatoes in the other, to see how they would look together. She already knew how they’ll taste with the pork.

“Tomato will give this a totally different taste,” she explained, starting a cooking demonstration in miniature. “But the dish has to be pretty. That means you have to have color.”

After 20 minutes, Burrill had cooked pork with purple perilla, tomatoes and squash in a spicy sauce, along with shrimp, peppers, cilantro and lemongrass in a sweetly piquant sauce. Along the way, she offered bits of advice: You need a very hot wok for stir-fry. Cooking with gas is the only way to cook. A little oil goes a long way. And you never use soap to clean a wok.

“I like to tell people a stir-fry is like a play,” she said. “You have a main character and supporting roles. The supporting role has to be good, but not so good that it’ll overwhelm the main character. The first supporting role has to be a little stronger than the second supporting role. And in my play, there’s always more than one supporting role. Cooking is about artistry, about chemistry and balance.”

Sometimes, the chemistry part fails, but that isn’t always a bad thing. Take the Bangor Brownie, which the Convention and Visitors Bureau will sell at the folk festival. According to cooking lore, the brownie originated in Bangor, and some say it was the result of a fallen chocolate cake. Others say it is an American version of the English cocoa scone. Either way, brownies are something the city can be proud of.

“A Bangor cookbook is the first place that recipe ever appeared,” McCarthy said.

Brownies aren’t the only sweet treat that festival-goers can sample. Greg and Norma Shorey of Springfield, about 20 miles away from Lincoln, will serve up one of Norma’s favorites: funnel cakes made from Pennsylvania Dutch batter.

“The funnel cake is more like cake batter,” Norma explained. “We use a circular mold in the fryer, but it looks like a bunch of pieces of dough stuck together.”

Greg works at the Eastern Paper mill in Lincoln, but on the weekends, he and Norma pack up their cart and hit the festival circuit, which they love.

“We do a little bit of everything, but this is what my husband always loved to do,” Norma said.

For Elizabeth Baldwin and her husband, Matt Rowe, who own Downeast Seoul in South China, a catering company that specializes in Korean and Japanese dishes, their trip to the National Folk Festival will be like a vacation.

“We’re really excited to be up in Bangor,” Baldwin said. “When you’re at a festival, it doesn’t really feel like work.”

Rowe, who was born in Korea and brought up in the Midwest, met Baldwin while the two were working at a Chinese restaurant. She “dragged” him back to her home state, and the two “food people” set up shop cooking dishes such as Korean Chicken and Bulgogi beef, which Baldwin calls “the national dish of Korea.” But while their cooking has a distinctively Asian flavor, they give it a Maine twist.

“Actually, a huge part of what we do is local food,” Baldwin said. “Almost everything we cook is from farmers that we know. … It’s food with a different ethnic tradition, but we try using Korean and Japanese styles with what’s available in Maine.”