When it comes to Portuguese cooking, Dartmouth resident Maria Lawton knows what she’s about.

Lawton was born on the Azorean island of São Miguel and is now working tirelessly to spread Portuguese cuisine here in the US.

With a successful cookbook, a podcast, and a recent PBS series under her belt, that message is resonating.

Her cookbook, called “Azorean Cooking: From my family table to yours” is now in its third edition — and some editions have been printed several times. “It has a life of its own,” said Lawton.

She originally wrote the book for her children and a few friends. “I was making copies and having a local printer pick it up for me,” she said. “And then it just grew.”

The more people requested the book, the more she printed — and she ended up working with a publishing house and distributor.

Her cookbook continues to sell throughout North America and all over the world.

“It’s just amazing just how far the little book has traveled,” she said. “I guess just like Portuguese discoverers, and fishermen — they’ve traveled all over the world. Well, my book does the same...it travels everywhere.”

In the cookbook, Lawton discusses her food memories with a personal story for each dish.

Most of these are associated with family — her parents and her grandmother.

“It is all about recreating food memories that we have,” she noted. “And it doesn’t matter what nationality you’re from...we all have food memories.”

While traveling the country on book tours, Lawton found pockets of Portuguese people everywhere — including out-of-the-way places like Idaho and Wisconsin.

“There are more [Portuguese] people that live outside of Portugal than actually live in Portugal,” she explained.

Portuguese is among the top ten most spoken languages in the world.

According to Lawton, Portuguese settlers had a massive influence on cuisine all over the world — particularly in the former colonies of Goa, Macau, and large parts of South America and Africa.

Vindaloo, for example — a classic of Indian cuisine — originally came from Portuguese sailors in Goa and their carne de vinha d’alhos, or pork marinated in wine and garlic.

“We’ve been influencing different culinary pockets here and there without people ever really noticing or speaking about it,” Lawton said.

So it was a mystery to her why no one had done a whole show dedicated to Portuguese cooking before.

“On American/US TV, there were no cooking shows that talked about Portuguese food,” she said. So she set about to change that.

Her eight-part series, called “Maria’s Portuguese Table”, aired in January on PBS Rhode Island.

But when she started the project she didn’t realize that she would have to raise all of the money for the show herself.

PBS agreed to air the show but didn’t provide any funding — so Lawton had to find sponsors and then produce it herself.

It took her two years to raise the money. “There was a lot of ‘No’,” she said.

She explained, “Whoever is facing that right now, in whatever they want to do in life, you’ve gotta get past those ‘No’s. Because if you listen to those ‘No’s, you’re never going to do what you are supposed to do.”

After Lawton managed to get enough funding, she hired Emmy award-winning producer Dean Camara in California.

It took them the better part of a year to film the series in locations all over the US, California, and in Maria’s birthplace, São Miguel in the Azores.

And it took even longer to put the whole thing together in post production.

“It was an education,” said Lawton laughingly. She had never tried to make a TV series before.

“It really is wild,” she said. “It’s funny, ‘cause when you’re in it, and doing it — you know, I was just having fun.”

Lawton noted that making the series was a lot of very hard work. But she’s happy with it.

“It looks beautiful, it absolutely did what I wanted it to do. And that is to introduce people to the Portuguese culture and traditions.

“I’m very proud of the work that was done,” she said.

As for next steps, Lawton has another cookbook in the works, and she’s still waiting for PBS to air the show on other stations across the country.

“I have to say this. For people who want to put things on PBS...you have to do it for the love of it. You will not be paid,” she laughs. “There is no money.”

But for Lawton, it was all worth it.

“Sometimes it isn’t about the money,” she said. “Sometimes it is about creating something that will be around and last longer than you will.”