American Recipes
2885 recipes found
Berry Hand Pies
These hand-held pies are sold at breakfast time at Back in the Day Bakery in Savannah, Ga., but they are also a perfect summery dessert. Cheryl Day, an owner, said that she uses less sugar than many Southern bakers do, and likes to round out the flavor of sweet summer fruit with salt and lemon. The difference between a hand pie and a turnover is in the shape. (Hand pies are half moons, and turnovers are triangles.) You can make this recipe either way.
Pumpkin Corn Soup With Ginger Lime Cream
Potato Rolls
These extremely soft and fluffy potato rolls make excellent slider buns or a perfect accompaniment to just about any meal. Creamy and starchy Yukon Gold potatoes work well here, as do russets. Boil them until tender, then make sure to save the water you boiled them in, because you’ll use that in the dough, too. Eat the rolls warm, slathered with butter, or turn them into a delicious sandwich. Either way, they stay soft and delicious for a couple of days at room temperature.
Fudge
Peach Honey
Maple Breakfast Sausage
This classic recipe will come together in the time it takes to make a frittata or a stack of pancakes for brunch. You could also try frying the patties in a cast-iron pan alongside eggs in a hole. As the maple-and-sage-tinged fat renders out of the sausage, the bread will thirstily absorb it. You might even want to drizzle a tiny bit more syrup over the whole thing as you sit down to eat, so that each bite of sausage, bread and runny yolk has the perfect blend of savory and sweet. Be sure to use ground pork with enough fat or you'll end up with dry, flavorless hockey pucks. Twenty percent by weight is a good ratio, though 25 doesn’t hurt. If the ground pork available to you is too lean, ask the butcher to replace two ounces or so of the lean meat with ground pork belly or bacon. For variations on the sausage, check out these recipes for Italian fennel sausage and Nem Nuong, Vietnamese sausage.
Scrapple
Most recipes for scrapple, a dish popular at diners in eastern Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic, call for offal rather than cooked pork. But ours, first published in December 1953 and later in the Food News Department’s booklet “Encore for the Roast,” was devised as a way to use up leftover pork loin. You can substitute in 1 1/2 cups puréed pork loin or start from scratch with ground pork. You’ll need a food processor and a double boiler for this recipe. The latter will save you 45 minutes active stirring time.
No-Bake Blueberry Cheesecake Bars
There are those who may not find this sweet enough, and if that’s the case I recommend adding a quarter cup or so of sugar instead of increasing the honey, because you don’t want the honey flavor to become overpowering. Other flavor possibilities to add with the blueberries: any citrus you like; a teaspoon or so of very finely ground coffee or cocoa; or chopped raisins or, I suppose, chocolate chips. I prefer the straight honey-lemon combination, unadulterated.
Soft Corn Pudding
Mark Bittman’s Bourbon Apple Cake
Soaking a cake in liquor or syrup is an old concept. Bake a standard cake, like this golden one, and when it's done, pour enough sweetened, butter-laden alcohol over the top to really saturate it. The result is strong and juicy and makes frosting superfluous.
Whole Roasted Cauliflower With Black-Garlic Crumble and Parsley-Anchovy Butter
The chef Sean Brock came up with this first course after making Craig Claiborne’s Bagna Cauda. Instead of bathing the garlic and anchovy in the oil, Mr. Brock has you bathe a whole head of cauliflower in it. You use a ring mold to hold up the cauliflower in a sauté pan, then brown it by spooning over bubbling oil and butter — a process that’s fun and a little hairy — and finish it in the oven. In place of garlic, you use fermented black garlic (which is soft and woodsy in flavor) and milk powder to make a “crumble.” You slice the cauliflower into large slabs, like cross-sections of a tree, and top them with an anchovy butter and the crumble.
Bourbon Balsamic Syrup
Consider this a recipe for a classic steak sauce, updated; that’s bourbon syrup, made with real ingredients in a flash. Sure, you could buy a sauce at the grocery store, but making it yourself is quicker and tastier. Serve it alongside a grilled rib-eye.
Chocolate Pudding With Raspberry Cream
This rich, creamy chocolate pudding is a comforting dessert for two that comes together in no time at all. Use Dutch-process cocoa powder for the richest chocolate flavor, but natural cocoa will work too, if that’s what you keep around. This pudding is also easy to dress up for any occasion. Raspberry cream and a handful of fresh raspberries adorn this version, but you could also top with a dollop of whipped cream or crème fraîche.
Pasta and Bean Soup
The chef Tom Valenti channels his late grandmother in his cooking, utilizing her ''stove top approach to life'' by braising and stewing and slow cooking the kinds of food that snowstorms were made for. Her pasta and bean soup, a treat for carb-lovers with its addition of mashed potatoes to thicken the broth, was one of many old-country comfort foods that she fed Mr. Valenti during his childhood.
Chicken and Rice Soup
This soup is simultaneously cozy and fresh. It’s just the kind of thing you want to eat when you’re sick and seeking something that’ll perk you up and get you through it. The soup simmers long enough for the rice to start to break down so it thickens the soup. If you prefer a brothier soup that’s predominantly chicken and rice floating in broth, cook just until the rice is tender. Or if you want thick porridge, just keep simmering. (You can’t really overcook chicken thighs.) Lemon juice adds brightness, as does the lively mix of parsley, lemon, garlic and celery leaves strewn on top.
Elaine's Scrambled Eggs
Pork Chops in Lemon-Caper Sauce
Here’s my favorite recipe in Toni Tipton-Martin’s excellent and invaluable “Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking” (2019). It’s a remix of one that the chef Nathaniel Burton collected into his 1978 opus, “Creole Feast: Fifteen Master Chefs of New Orleans Reveal Their Secrets,” and one that Tipton-Martin glossed-up with lemon zest, juice and extra butter, a technique she learned from the restaurateur B. Smith’s 2009 collection of recipes, “B. Smith Cooks Southern-Style.” It’s a dish of smothered pork chops, essentially, made into something glorious and elegant. “The food history of Blacks in America has been a story of the food of survival,” she told me in an interview. “We need to start celebrating the food they made at work."
Cheesy Baked Orzo With Marinara
A vegetarian weeknight pasta that’s as comforting as it is easy, this dish will win over adults and kids alike (red-pepper flakes optional!). While fresh mozzarella can become tough and chewy when baked, shredded low-moisture mozzarella melts beautifully. Serve this with a simple, lemony arugula salad or a Caesar salad for ultimate weeknight comfort.
Roasted Mixed Vegetables
Make this your go-to recipe any time roasted vegetables are on the menu. The technique will work for any high-moisture vegetable, and the process of cutting your selected vegetables into 1-inch pieces allows them all to cook at the same rate. The optional garlicky yogurt sauce turns a pan of roasted veggies into a light meal, especially when paired with some crusty bread or a bowl of rice or other grains, or you can serve these as a colorful side dish.
Tuna Melt
Legend has it that the tuna melt was accidentally invented in the 1960s at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Charleston, S.C., when the cook didn’t notice that a bowl of tuna salad had tipped over onto a grilled cheese. We may never know if this story is true, but there’s no doubt that the tuna melt has become a classic American diner food. This recipe adds chopped cornichons and whole-grain mustard for a satisfying crunch and vinegary element. Extra-sharp Cheddar is a must, and as with grilled cheese, the key to achieving perfectly melted cheese and golden bread is to toast the sandwich over medium-low heat. If you prefer an open-face tuna melt, skip the top piece of bread and place the sandwich on a sheet pan under the broiler until the cheese melts.
Grilled Chicken Caesar Salad
Depending on your appetite, this variation on a classic Caesar salad with grilled chicken makes an excellent first-course or a full-on meal. Hitting the lettuce with a little fire is an unexpectedly brilliant trick; the green leaves char and crisp and the insides become slightly tender, but you still get the satisfying crunch everyone loves about romaine. If you're a pescatarian, try it with grilled tuna, salmon or scallops.
Beet and Arugula Salad With Berries
Berries and beets: a salad of dark green, blue and purple hues if there ever was one. I threw this together because I had these ingredients on hand – beets that I’d roasted several days earlier, arugula that was bolting in my garden, and berries from the market – and it worked. The sweet-tart flavor of the berries contrasts beautifully with the earthy sweetness of the beets and the pungent arugula.
Pasta With Cauliflower, Bacon and Sage
A comforting dinner for a cold night, this hearty pasta has all the makings of a crowd-pleaser like fried sage leaves, crispy bacon and nutty roasted cauliflower. This recipe demonstrates the magic of starchy pasta water: Swirled with lemon juice and Parmesan, it creates a luxurious sauce without the addition of cream or butter. Add more pasta water than you think you need, so the pasta stays moist as it absorbs the sauce.
Stone Fruit Caprese
A standout caprese starts with great fruit. You need ripe tomatoes to weep juices, which then mingle with grassy olive oil and milky cheese to make your dressing. Basil adds freshness, black pepper and flakes of sea salt add crunch, and that’s it, a perfect combination. But if the stone fruit options are looking better than the tomatoes at the market, you can use them instead. They’re similar in flavor to tomatoes, but need cajoling to relinquish their juices. By letting sliced fruit macerate with salt, sugar and lemon juice, their fruitiness becomes more electric and their juices pool on the plate. Start with fruit you can smell and pair it with equally quality ingredients. Caprese is more about shopping than cooking.