The top 25 US recipes of the past 100 years

November 22, 2024 by
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Choosing a handful of recipes from an entire century as the representatives of a country’s culinary landscape seems like a Herculean task, but Dan Kois and J. Bryan Lowder of Slate did just that. They assembled a list of 25 recipes that represents the best the US has to offer over the last 100 years. Kois and Lowder didn’t do this all by themselves, instead they asked dozens of chefs, food writers, and historians to answer this question: “Which written recipes were the most influential, pivotal, or transformative for American home cooking between 1924 and 2024?”

Closeup of several golden brown chocolate chip cookies.
Toll House chocolate chip cookies from The New York Times Cooking by Ruth Wakefield

The authors admit that there might be room to quibble about what ended up on the list, but feel strongly that the 25 chosen recipes “profoundly and deliciously” changed the way Americans cooked and ate over the last century. The list begins in 1924 with the invention of the Caesar salad. Of course this recipe originated just south of the border so we are already on sketchy ground for this being a list of US recipes, but it can’t be denied that the recipe proved much more popular on the northern side of the border than to the south of it.

I think the next recipe will be unanimously approved: Ruth Wakefield’s 1938 creation of the Toll House cookie, which paved the way for today’s iconic chocolate chip cookies (chocolate chips weren’t invented for several years after the original recipe was published). Naturally, flavors from around the world influenced this list, because US cuisine borrows heavily from immigrants to our country. A mostly French recipe from Julia Child (boeuf bourguignon) makes the cut, as does Marcella Hazan’s Italian-inspired Tomato Sauce III, and garam masala from Madhur Jaffrey. A couple of the recipes were questionable (at least for me), such as zucchini quiche, which I don’t consider to be particularly American. I can think of one recipe I would have included, not least because it’s in a song about things that are quintessentially American: apple pie. What do you think of the list?

Category: Antipasto

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9 Comments

  • LeilaD  on  November 22, 2024

    Hmmm… Tollhouse cookies might have been the first thing I ever made in the kitchen as a kid, and chicken Caesar salad is one of my “I need to make dinner in five minutes” standbys. I guess I use garam masala in my cooking about once every couple of months and I eat baklava out, but I don’t consider those ‘American’. I’ve been eating pancakes since well before 2001, so that hasn’t affected my kitchen at all. Likewise, biscuits date to well before 1976 and my dad has always been a biscuits and gravy fan.

    And I haven’t eaten anything else on this list, so it clearly didn’t affect my American kitchen…

  • Rinshin  on  November 23, 2024

    I agree with Leila on baklava and garam masala. The listed dishes seem biased and strange. Caesar and toll house for sure. Where is the hamburgers and fries? Apple pie? Where is the fried chicken? Never heard of gochujang cookies, Roberto and others. Logan’s cucumber is the same style cucumber dishes made all over Asia but here who watches TikTok is done in a jar by a young guy – and that does not equal 25 recipes.

  • cookbookaddict2020  on  November 23, 2024

    baklawa is American but not bagels & cream cheese? sounds very Slate.

  • janecooksamiracle  on  November 24, 2024

    I’ve never eaten one but the Tollhouse cookies are known the world over after the Friends episode ?

  • FuzzyChef  on  November 24, 2024

    The list was weird and haphazard, but made for interesting reading.

  • lean1  on  November 24, 2024

    What about roast turkey, baked yams, apple pie, tomato pie, NY pizza slice, cranberry jelly, Jello. Garam Masala doesn’t fit in top 25.

  • averythingcooks  on  November 25, 2024

    “Which written recipes were the most influential, pivotal, or transformative for American home cooking between 1924 and 2024?”
    This quote taken from above (particularly the word “transformative”) perhaps does explain the inclusion of things like garam masala which one could argue did have a big impact on American cooking. Just a thought!

  • StokeySue  on  November 25, 2024

    It’s really interesting from over here in England how similar and different that list of recipes is from a similar one of recipes that made an impact on the way we we cook. We are puzzled by Green Bean Bake/Casserole, we agree on Caesar Salad, I think we got to Boeuf Bourguignon a bit sooner courtesy of Elizabeth David and the accessibility of France via ferry, personally I’m pleased to see How to Cook and Eat in Chinese there, I actually made the recipe recently, been cooking it for decades.

  • JimCampbell  on  November 26, 2024

    I’d say the list is suspect. It does not represent dishes developed in the US. One might say the 100 year limit keeps apple pie out of the list, but if we are to consider the blending of a multi-cultural society, this list seems slanted, and not particularly focused on dishes native to America.

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