American Recipes
2884 recipes found
Ina Garten’s Bourbon Chocolate Pecan Pie
This is a classic Kentucky Derby Pie in half the time. I tested this recipe with both homemade pie crust and store-bought pie crust and amazingly, the store-bought was better. The homemade pie crust was too rich for the filling. Be sure you buy a regular pie crust, not a shallow one, so the filling doesn’t overflow.
Easy Cornbread-Brown Butter Stuffing
For many people, Thanksgiving is one big excuse to eat lots of stuffing. This one is particularly easy to make. Prepare cornbread using any recipe you'd like, then let it sit out until it gets a little stale. Crumble it into large pieces and then sauté with aromatics in deeply browned butter. Be sure to really let the butter brown: that's where much of the flavor is. Drizzle any remaining brown butter over the top of the stuffing once you've transferred it to the baking dish — that will make the top nice and crispy.
Cranberry-Orange Jelly
This is the cranberry sauce for cooks who secretly (or not so secretly) like the kind that comes in a can, a quivering ruby mass with an unexpected dash of orange and spice. Guests can scoop it out of a pretty glass bowl, but it’s more fun to unmold it onto a cake plate and serve it in slices. Make sure the water your use to unmold your jelly is quite hot, not just warm. The idea is to melt the outer jelly layer just enough so that the whole mold can slip right out.
Giblet Gravy
While the turkey is in the oven, get some rest — and make the gravy. Giblet gravy requires the cook to use the neck, gizzard and heart of the bird to make deeply flavored stock, which is then combined with the pan drippings, a bit of flour and wine or brandy. Finally, the cooked neck, gizzard and heart are finely chopped and added to the rich, savory gravy, to make for a more interesting texture.
Stuffed Standing Rib Roast
A juicy, beautifully pink rib roast is one of the most impressive dishes imaginable for a holiday spread. (It's also one of the most expensive. Invest in a digital, oven-safe thermometer and there will be no reason to worry you're overcooking it.) This recipe elevates the classic by adding a stuffing of spinach, sausage and mushrooms that is most appropriate for use with the lean beef of grass-fed steers.
Cranberry Sauce
Cranberry sauce should be sweet but not cloying, and tart without causing pucker and anguish. It should have a jelly-like quality, but should owe more to the appearance of jam. The key element to making cranberry sauce is to understand that cranberries are high in pectin, a carbohydrate that exists in many fruits and which is released by the berries when they are heated and the cells of the fruit break down. In the presence of sugar, the pectin molecules bond to one another, forming a kind of gel. The longer you cook a cranberry sauce, the more pectin is released and liquid is evaporated, and the stiffer the result will be. Science! Sometimes it's helpful. So is spice. Some like a clove or two added to their cranberry sauce. (I am not one of them.) Others, a whisper of ginger and a small handful of nuts, for texture. Of this, I approve.
Turkey Gravy
Here is a simple, elegant pan gravy that lends itself well to cooking in the very pan in which you've roasted your turkey. It calls for whisking flour with the fat in the bottom of the pan to create a light roux (no lumps!), then hitting it with stock and wine, salt and pepper. Some may wish to add cream, or other spices. Decant the gravy into a warmed boat or beaker, rather than into a cold one, and serve immediately.
Blackberry-Peach Cobbler
Peak summer fruit is best prepared simply, especially in warm desserts like cobblers. In this recipe, the tartness of blackberries (or raspberries) balances the sweetness of yellow peaches (or nectarines), and the filling only needs the tiniest amount of sugar to get the juices flowing. Topped with a thin layer of fluffy cornmeal batter, the berries boil up to form juicy pockets, and a finish of raw sugar adds a satisfying crack. Serve this cobbler warm, or enjoy it any time of day, even for breakfast.
Turkey BBQ Sandwiches With Pickles and Slaw
Most turkey sandwiches are best made with slices of white meat stacked neatly between two slices of bread. Not this one. With a saucy, spicy filling piled onto a hamburger bun, it’s perfect for dark meat and any scraps you may have leftover from the carcass. The cabbage slaw adds crispness and tang to the soft turkey, and bread-and-butter pickles give the sandwich a touch of sweetness. If you don’t have leftover turkey in your refrigerator, this recipe works just as well with the meat torn off a rotisserie chicken.
Vegan Mushroom Make-Ahead Gravy
This excellent vegan gravy features caramelized mushrooms and a little soy sauce for depth of flavor, making it good enough to serve to your meat-eating guests, too. Just be sure to use a good-quality vegetable stock, preferably one you’ve made yourself. You can simmer the gravy up to five days ahead and store it in the fridge. Reheat just before serving.
Whole-Orange Snack Cake
It may strike you as curious, but adding an entire orange to this easy snacking cake, rind and all, imparts a wonderful flavor reminiscent of orange marmalade, pleasantly bitter and sweet. A high-speed blender is the best way to process the orange, but a food processor works too. You want the purée to be as smooth as possible. While the cake bakes, prepare an easy orange glaze. For that step — or any recipe requiring both orange zest and juice — be sure to zest your orange before juicing it, as it’s much more difficult the other way around.
Thanksgiving Dressing
This classic Thanksgiving dressing, made with bread, celery, onions, apples, chestnuts, thyme and sage, is relatively simple to execute. It would do well at almost any time of the year as an accompaniment to roast chicken or pork. The copious use of turkey broth, or a good chicken broth, is crucial to help meld the flavors together. Also necessary is an understanding that the cooking should last long enough to crisp the exterior without burning it, while not going on so long as to dry out the dish. When in doubt, add a splash more broth.
Chunky Cranberry Sauce
Of course, you could buy fresh cranberries and clean them carefully, but if you start with canned whole berry cranberry sauce and add some fresh ingredients, it will taste just as good!
Honey-Cured, Hickory-Smoked Shoulder Ham
A true ham, weighing 15 to 20 pounds, comes from a hog’s hindquarters. It’s a formidable piece of meat, requiring several weeks of curing and 24 hours or more of smoking. A shoulder ham (sometimes called picnic ham) has a similarly magisterial appearance and profound umami flavors, but in a size that will fit in your refrigerator and can be cured and smoked inside a week. When possible, buy a heritage pork breed, like Berkshire or Duroc, preferably from a local farmer or butcher.
Coquito
Coquito, which means “little coconut” in Spanish, is an eggnog-like mixture of coconut milk, eggs, sweetened condensed milk and rum or pitorro, a sort of moonshine rum. Coconut and rum cocktails are made throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, but coquito is unique to Puerto Rico. This recipe, which is adapted from the 1975 cookbook “Puerto Rican Cookery” by Carmen Aboy Valldejuli, was created by her husband, who tended bar during the couple’s holiday parties at their home in San Juan. His recipe calls for shelling and pressing fresh coconuts to make your own coconut cream, but canned coconut cream makes an excellent substitute.
Creamed Greens Potpie
This one-skillet, vegetarian pot pie trades the traditional chicken filling for creamy, garlicky greens. Hearty greens turn silky in a mixture of heavy cream, garlic, shallot, thyme and Parmesan under a lid of flaky puff pastry. Using store-bought puff pastry in place of homemade pie crust ensures a perfect result every time. It also steers pot pie into the weeknight-possible category. Greens and heavy cream require a good amount of salt to taste like their best selves, so taste and season well when the recipe says to do so.
Fancy Canned Cranberries
The ultimate high-low condiment your table didn’t know it was missing. These dressed-up canned cranberries become tart, juicy and a little bit savory thanks to some fresh citrus, thinly sliced red onion and a little flaky salt. With or without whole berries suspended in them? That’s dealer’s choice, but the rounds will be much easier to slice without them.
Mushroom and Gruyère Bread Pudding
Bread pudding is my go-to alternative to traditional stuffing, which tends to dry out your turkey. To make bread pudding, you need to dice the bread, season it and bake it until the cubes are nicely toasted. Here, I start with Pepperidge Farm Herb Seasoned cubed stuffing mix — be sure to buy the cubed mix! — and then add lots of fresh ingredients. Delicious bread pudding in half the time!
Flag Cake
Layered with whipped cream, raspberry purée, saltines and fresh fruit, this easy icebox cake balances bright, fresh flavors with tangy cream cheese. The saltines add a nice saltiness, but you can substitute graham crackers or even chocolate wafers if you prefer things on the sweeter side. The addition of cream cheese makes the icebox filling thicker and more stable. And, while the cream firms up, the saltines absorb its moisture, becoming tender and making the cake easy to cut into impressively striped slices.
Chocolate Banana Icebox Cake
Banana pudding with a twist, this icebox cake embraces chocolate wafers instead of the classic vanilla. After a bit of time in the fridge, the cookies soften into thin layers of chocolate cake. Add some mini chocolate chips to the vanilla custard, if you like, but be sure to cover the bananas completely to keep them from oxidizing. This pudding is best the day it’s made, or up to 24 hours later — but it’s so delicious that it may not last that long.
Creamy Lemon Pops With Basil
Both refreshing and satisfying, these creamy lemon pops are just the thing for a hot summer day. Steeping the zest in the sugar syrup releases the essential oils, and the fresh lemon zest brightens everything up. Although unexpected, basil’s sweetness pairs nicely with lemon, but feel free to experiment with another fresh herb, like bay leaves or thyme. A few fresh raspberries or blueberries would be nice if you’d like a little texture, but the bars are luxurious as is.
Cranberry Jelly Salad With Lime-Sugared Nuts
Chopped nuts and fruit bound by a wobbly sweet-tart gelatin, often called Jell-O salad in the Midwest, form a beloved side dish full of potential. Serve this gleaming cranberry variation at Thanksgiving or any holiday meal, and feel free to swap out the apple here for peeled and chopped oranges or canned diced pineapple, or use a mix of your favorite fruits. (Note that certain fruits like fresh pineapple, mango, kiwi and papaya contain enzymes that prevent gelatin from setting.) To make the lime-sugared walnut garnish even more surprising, toss it with a smidge of citric acid to give it an incomparable sourness that citrus juice alone can’t provide.
Mac and Queso Fundido
This recipe, adapted from “Chicano Eats: Recipes From My Mexican-American Kitchen” (Harper Design, 2020) by Esteban Castillo, is less dip than it is pasta — a smoky, spicy version of the best boxed macaroni and cheese you’ve ever had. Make a very simple roux, to which you add smoked paprika and three types of grated cheese (mozzarella, Mexican cheese blend and Parmesan). Stir in the noodles until they are glossy and coated. You could stop there or take it over the top by finishing the dish with crumbled, cooked chorizo and sautéed mushrooms.
Will Horowitz’s Watermelon Ham
When Will Horowitz, a chef and an owner of Ducks Eatery in Manhattan, unveiled his watermelon ham in 2018, he sparked an Instagram revolution, inspiring foodies from as far away as Germany and Japan to try incarnadine slabs of his brined, smoked watermelon. It sure looked like ham, right down to the crosshatch scoring on the surface. It sure smelled like ham, fragrant with the smoky scent of hickory. It even had some of the briny umami tang you associate with ham. Though it didn’t really taste like ham, it did firmly establish plant-based charcuterie as a big thing. This watermelon “ham” starts with a tamari-herb brine, is smoked low and slow for the first four hours, then seared. This recipe is adapted from “Salt Smoke Time” by Will Horowitz, Julie Horowitz and with Marisa Dobson (William Morrow, 2018).