Dinner recipes | Skillet & Sage

Baltimore Pit Beef, Charred Outside and Rare Through the Middle

A top round rubbed with salt and paprika, burned black over open charcoal in under an hour, shaved paper-thin and piled on a kaiser roll with raw onion and a cold horseradish sauce.

Total: 1 hr 30 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 520 per serving

Basque Beans with Chorizo

A pot of red beans cooked slowly with onion, garlic and Spanish chorizo, where the sausage fat and the paprika do all the colouring and nothing is fried first.

Total: 2 hr 35 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 548 per serving

Basque Chorizo with Beans

White beans cooked slowly with onion and garlic while whole chorizos poach in the pot, then come out to be split and crisped and laid back on top.

Total: 2 hr 20 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 542 per serving

Basque Lamb Stew

Lamb shoulder browned hard, then stewed down with onions, sweet peppers and paprika until the meat gives and the sauce turns the colour of the peppers.

Total: 3 hr
Serves: 6
Calories: 624 per serving

Bison Chili

Ground bison cooked with a purée of toasted dried chiles and enough added fat to carry them, then simmered with pinto beans until it is thick enough to stand a spoon in.

Total: 2 hr 10 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 455 per serving

Bison Stew

Bison chuck browned in fat it does not supply itself, then braised low and slow with onion, root vegetables and red wine until the collagen gives way and the meat stays short of dry.

Total: 3 hr 25 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 520 per serving

Diced sirloin, potato and onion mixed together, wrapped in plain pastry and baked hot, then eaten with brown gravy poured over it — the Butte version, written from the recipe a Cornish woman gave the Montana Writers' Project in 1943.

Total: 1 hr 35 min, plus 1 hour chilling the pastry
Serves: 6
Calories: 990 per serving

Carne Adovada

Pork shoulder buried overnight in a thick purée of whole dried red chile, garlic and oregano, then braised in the same purée until it falls apart under a fork.

Total: 3 hr 45 min, plus overnight
Serves: 6
Calories: 615 per serving

Cedar-Planked Salmon

A king salmon fillet salted, dried and cooked on a soaked cedar board over an indirect fire, pulled at 120°F while the fat is still in it.

Total: 2 hr 45 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 435 per serving

Chicken and Slippery Dumplings, Rolled Flat and Boiled in the Broth

A whole chicken simmered down to broth, then squares of unleavened dough rolled thin and boiled in that broth until the dumplings go slick and the pot thickens itself.

Total: 2 hr 15 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 470 per serving

Chislic

Cubes of lamb fried hard in deep fat, hit with garlic salt the second they come out, and eaten off toothpicks with saltines — the official nosh of South Dakota by act of the legislature.

Total: 40 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 460 per serving

Chocolate Gravy over Biscuits

Cocoa, sugar and flour cooked into a thin sweet gravy and poured over split hot biscuits — the Ozark breakfast that is built exactly like sausage gravy and tastes nothing like it.

Total: 40 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 745 per serving

Chuckwagon Sourdough Biscuits

An overnight sourdough sponge cut with cold fat and lifted the next morning by soda meeting the acid the night put there, baked hard and fast in a cast iron pan.

Total: 45 min, plus 8 to 12 hours fermenting
Serves: 12
Calories: 205 per serving

Cider Doughnuts

A cake doughnut leavened with soda and powder, where two cups of sweet cider are boiled down to half a cup before they go anywhere near the flour.

Total: 2 hr 25 min
Serves: 12
Calories: 375 per doughnut

Connecticut Steamed Cheeseburger

A thick beef patty cooked through in a steam cabinet instead of on a griddle, with a block of sharp cheddar melted to a sauce in its own tray and poured over it.

Total: 31 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 845 per serving

Crab Imperial, Bound with a Cooked Sauce Instead of Mayonnaise

A pound of lump crab folded into a thick cooked milk sauce, filled into shells or ramekins, glazed with mayonnaise and baked until the edges bubble and the top browns in patches.

Total: 45 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 320 per serving

Delaware Peach Pie, Drained and Reduced Before It Goes in the Crust

The state dessert of Delaware by statute: ripe freestones, sugar, lemon and a double crust, with the fruit drained and its juice boiled down first so the slice stands up instead of flooding the plate.

Total: 6 hr
Serves: 8
Calories: 530 per serving

Disco Fries

Twice-fried potatoes under melted low-moisture mozzarella and a dark brown gravy, finished under the broiler in a metal dish — the North Jersey diner order that exists for two in the morning.

Total: 50 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 546 per serving

Finger Steaks

Strips of beef in a thin beer batter, fried hard and fast and served in a basket with fry sauce, the way every Idaho roadhouse has sold them since at least 1964.

Total: 45 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 686 per serving

Fleischkuechle

Raw seasoned beef sealed thin inside a soft buttermilk dough and deep fried, so the meat cooks in its own steam while the pastry blisters — the fried filled pastry of German-Russian North Dakota.

Total: 1 hr 35 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 560 per serving

Fried Green Tomatoes

Mature green tomatoes sliced thick, salted until they weep, dredged in cornmeal and fried in bacon fat, with a cream gravy made in the pan they came out of — the way the syndicated columns had it a hundred years before the novel.

Total: 50 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 396 per serving

Fried Peach Hand Pies

Dried peaches stewed back to a stiff dark paste, sealed in a lard crust and fried in an inch of fat — the winter pie of the upland South, built to be carried.

Total: 3 hr 15 min
Serves: 12
Calories: 375 per pie

German-Russian Cabbage Borscht

A pot of pork broth thick with cabbage, potato and dill, finished with cream off the heat and a spoonful of sour cream at the table — the borscht of German-Russian North Dakota, which is not the beet soup the word makes you expect.

Total: 2 hr 10 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 430 per serving

Hartford Election Cake

A yeast-raised fruited loaf, spiced with nutmeg and mace, wetted with brandy and wine and frosted white — the Connecticut election-day cake, cut down from eight pounds of flour to one loaf.

Total: 20 hr
Serves: 12
Calories: 475 per serving

Huckleberry Pie

A double-crust pie of wild mountain huckleberries, set with tapioca and sweetened just enough to stop short of jam, because the fruit is not a blueberry and should not be treated as one.

Total: 1 hr 30 min, plus 1 hour chilling and 4 hours cooling
Serves: 8
Calories: 490 per serving

Ice Cream Potato

Vanilla ice cream shaped into a russet, frozen hard, rolled in cocoa and split open with whipped cream for butter and chocolate for the bacon bits.

Total: 3 hr 30 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 600 per serving

Indian Pudding

Cornmeal cooked into scalded milk, sweetened with molasses and ginger, and left in a slow oven for three hours until it sets dark and soft.

Total: 3 hr 30 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 205 per serving

Kansas City Burnt Ends

The point of a brisket cooked once for tenderness, cut into inch cubes, tossed with rub and sauce and cooked a second time until every face has its own crust.

Total: 10 hr
Serves: 8
Calories: 650 per serving

Knoephla Soup

Little flour dumplings cut off a rope and dropped into a thick potato and cream broth — the soup of German-Russian North Dakota, and a dish whose whole argument is how the dumpling gets into the pot.

Total: 1 hr
Serves: 6
Calories: 570 per serving

Kuchen

A sweet yeast base pressed into a pie tin, fruit laid over it and a cream custard poured on top, dusted with cinnamon — the official state dessert of South Dakota, carried through two legislatures by the town of Eureka.

Total: 2 hr 30 min
Serves: 12
Calories: 320 per serving

Lane Cake with Raisin and Whiskey Filling

Four thin white layers split by a cooked filling of eight egg yolks, sugar, butter, clipped raisins and a wine-glass of whiskey, iced in boiled white icing — printed under this name, by the woman whose name it is, in Clayton, Alabama, in 1898.

Total: 2 hr 15 min, plus overnight
Serves: 16
Calories: 565 per serving

Lefse

Riced potato worked cold with a little flour, rolled paper thin and baked dry on a hot griddle until it freckles — the Norwegian half of North Dakota, in a soft grey sheet.

Total: 5 hr 20 min
Serves: 16
Calories: 150 per serving

Loose Meat Sandwich

Ground beef steamed apart in its own liquid until every crumb is separate, spooned into a steamed bun and eaten with a spoon in the other hand.

Total: 40 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 370 per sandwich

Maine Whoopie Pies

Two soft domed chocolate cakes baked like drop cookies and sandwiched around a white filling beaten from butter, shortening and confectioners' sugar.

Total: 1 hr 20 min, including cooling
Serves: 12
Calories: 486 per serving

Maine Wild Blueberry Pie

A double-crust pie built on small sharp lowbush berries, sugared lightly and thickened with a spoonful of starch, so it sets without turning into jam.

Total: 5 hr 45 min, including cooling
Serves: 8
Calories: 496 per serving

Maryland Crab Soup, Red and Built on the Shells

A beef broth run through crab shells, loaded with corn, lima beans, cabbage, potato and tomato, and given its crab meat in the last five minutes.

Total: 3 hr 45 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 300 per serving

Memphis Barbecue Spaghetti

Chopped smoked pork shoulder simmered into a tomato-and-molasses base, with spaghetti boiled, drained and finished in the pan until it has drunk some of it.

Total: 1 hr 15 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 660 per serving

New Haven White Clam Apizza

A thin, blistered, coal-dark crust with no tomato on it at all: littleneck clams shucked raw over the dough, their liquor, garlic, oregano, grated cheese and olive oil.

Total: 24 hr 50 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 605 per serving

New York Cheesecake

Two pounds of full-fat cream cheese, a little cornstarch and five eggs baked slow in a water bath until the middle still wobbles, then chilled overnight so it sets dense rather than fluffy.

Total: 12 hr
Serves: 12
Calories: 533 per serving

New York System Hot Wieners

Small veal-and-pork wieners in steamed buns under a dry, dark, tomato-free meat sauce, yellow mustard, raw chopped onion and celery salt, dressed three and four at a time.

Total: 1 hr 35 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 600 per serving

Newark Italian Hot Dog

Deep-fried hot dogs and deep-fried potato rounds packed into a quarter of a round pizza bread with fried peppers and onions, built as a pocket rather than a sandwich.

Total: 50 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 946 per sandwich

Philadelphia Roast Pork with Broccoli Rabe and Sharp Provolone

Pork shoulder rubbed with garlic, rosemary and fennel, roasted slow, sliced thin and wetted with its own pan juice, then packed into a long roll with bitter greens and sharp provolone — the other Philadelphia sandwich, and the one the city's own agency says is exactly as old as the famous one.

Total: 4 hr 30 min, plus overnight
Serves: 6
Calories: 840 per sandwich

Posole

Whole lime-treated corn simmered with pork until every kernel bursts open, with red chile stirred in for the last hour rather than the first.

Total: 4 hr 25 min, plus overnight
Serves: 8
Calories: 510 per serving

Rhode Island Doughboys

A flat round of risen dough pulled thin between the hands, dropped into deep fat and thrown hot into sugar. Four things in the dough and nothing at all in the middle.

Total: 2 hr 45 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 510 per serving

Roast Pheasant with Cream Gravy

Two young birds blanketed in bacon, roasted hot and fast so the breast does not dry out, and a gravy built in the pan with cream — the method South Dakota's own extension service wrote down in 1960.

Total: 1 hr 30 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 590 per serving

Rocky Mountain Oysters

Calf testicles peeled of their outer membrane, sliced, soaked in salted water to draw the blood, and fried in a cornmeal crust until they are crisp outside and pale and firm within.

Total: 55 min, plus 2 hours soaking
Serves: 6
Calories: 270 per serving

Scotcheroos

Peanut butter and boiled sugar syrup stirred through puffed rice cereal, pressed flat and covered with melted chocolate and butterscotch chips.

Total: 1 hr 25 min
Serves: 24
Calories: 240 per bar

Scrapple

Pork scraps simmered to shreds, the broth thickened with equal weights of cornmeal and buckwheat, seasoned with sage and summer savory, set in a loaf overnight and fried in slices — printed in Pennsylvania in 1880 and defined by the federal meat regulations in 1970.

Total: 4 hr 15 min, plus overnight
Serves: 8
Calories: 455 per serving

Seattle Teriyaki Chicken

Boneless thighs soaked in soy, mirin and brown sugar, grilled until the sugar blackens at the edges, then sliced across and laid over short-grain rice with a heap of vinegared cabbage.

Total: 40 min, plus 2 hours marinating
Serves: 4
Calories: 839 per serving

Sheepherder's Bread

One enormous round loaf baked in a greased Dutch oven, where the dough rises until it lifts the lid and then browns against the iron on every side.

Total: 3 hr 15 min
Serves: 16
Calories: 218 per serving

Sour Cream Raisin Pie

A cooked custard of sour cream, sugar, yolks and spice, thick with plumped raisins, poured hot into a baked shell and sealed under meringue — the pie South Dakota gave a state contest and a crowned queen.

Total: 4 hr 15 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 565 per serving

St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake

A thin yeast-raised coffee cake base under a topping of butter, sugar and corn syrup that sets soft and stays soft, baked until the edges are firm and the middle still moves.

Total: 3 hr 45 min
Serves: 12
Calories: 470 per serving

Tex-Mex Cheese Enchiladas with Chili Gravy

Corn tortillas rolled around grated cheese and raw onion under a gravy that starts as a roux: fat and flour cooked together, chili powder bloomed in the fat, beef stock whisked in after.

Total: 1 hr 10 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 530 per serving

Trenton Tomato Pie

Cheese on the dough first, then uncooked crushed tomatoes dropped over it in ladlefuls — a thin pie built in the opposite order to a pizza, and baked hot enough to finish in twelve minutes.

Total: 3 hr 30 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 738 per serving

Vermont Cheddar-Crusted Apple Pie

Six ounces of two-year cheddar grated into the pastry instead of laid on the plate beside it, over sour apples sweetened with maple sugar the way the state's own 1915 bulletin does it.

Total: 5 hr
Serves: 8
Calories: 530 per serving

Vermont Maple Baked Beans

Yellow-eye beans baked six hours with salt pork and dark maple syrup, half the syrup in at the start and half in the last hour, because maple loses its flavour long before beans lose their chalk.

Total: 6 hr 25 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 410 per serving

Vermont Maple-Glazed Ham

A bone-in ham warmed gently over cider, then finished in three coats of maple syrup reduced with vinegar and mustard until it is thick enough to stay where you put it.

Total: 3 hr 20 min
Serves: 12
Calories: 390 per serving

Wet-Bottom Shoofly Pie

Molasses, boiling water and soda poured into a pastry shell and buried under flour-and-brown-sugar crumbs, so the bottom stays dark and sticky while the top bakes to cake — the construction printed in a Pennsylvania German recipe book in 1915, under a different name.

Total: 1 hr 15 min, plus 3 hr cooling
Serves: 8
Calories: 555 per serving

Apple Butter

Sliced apples cooked down in sweet cider until the two stop separating, sweetened late and spiced off the heat, dark enough to stand up on a saucer.

Total: 2 hr 30 min
Serves: 32
Calories: 65 per serving

Banana Pudding

Boiled custard poured hot over vanilla wafers and sliced bananas, with the leftover whites beaten into a meringue and browned on top — the dish as the southern church cookbooks printed it in the 1920s.

Total: 50 min plus 1 hr resting
Serves: 8
Calories: 418 per serving

Beef on Weck

Top round roasted rare and shaved thin onto a hard roll baked under coarse salt and caraway, the crown dipped in the roast's own jus, horseradish underneath.

Total: 3 hr
Serves: 6
Calories: 455 per serving

Beer Cheese Soup

A roux carries the cheese, the cheese goes in off the heat, and the beer goes in last of all — which is the order the oldest printed version of this soup already gave in 1962.

Total: 45 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 465 per serving

Bierock

An enriched yeast bun sealed around beef, cabbage and onion and baked shut, from the Volga German villages of Ellis and Rush counties.

Total: 2 hr 45 min
Serves: 12
Calories: 380 per bierock

Boiled Peanuts

Green peanuts simmered in heavy brine for hours until the shells go soft and the kernels inside turn savory and beanlike, eaten hot out of the pot.

Total: 4 hr 45 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 245 per serving

Boston Baked Beans

Pea beans boiled soft before anything sweet touches them, a scored block of salt pork buried rind up, and six hours in a slow oven with the lid off for the last one.

Total: 6 hr 50 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 450 per serving

Boston Cream Pie

A butter cake baked in two pie tins, split by a cooked cream filling, with powdered sugar on top — the way every nineteenth-century book that prints it prints it.

Total: 2 hr 30 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 465 per serving

Bourbon Chocolate Walnut Pie

A single-crust pie with a butter-and-brown-sugar filling set just firm enough to slice, loaded with toasted walnuts and chocolate and cut through with bourbon.

Total: 4 hr 15 min, with cooling
Serves: 8
Calories: 592 per serving

Bratwurst Simmered in Beer and Onions

Browned first, then held in a pan of beer and sliced onions kept deliberately under the boil, so the casings stay whole and the onions become the sauce.

Total: 1 hr
Serves: 6
Calories: 610 per serving

Breaded Pork Tenderloin Sandwich

A slice of boneless pork loin pounded out to twice the width of its bun, breaded in cracker crumbs and fried until the crust is rigid — the sandwich Indiana names after a muscle it does not contain.

Total: 40 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 690 per serving

Brunswick Stew

Chicken and pork simmered down with salt pork, onion, tomato, corn and butter beans until a spoon will nearly stand in it, the way the stew sheds at a Georgia barbecue have always made it.

Total: 4 hr
Serves: 8
Calories: 628 per serving

Buckeyes

Peanut butter and powdered sugar rolled into balls, frozen hard, and dipped in chocolate all the way but for a circle at the top — a portrait in candy of a nut nobody can eat.

Total: 50 min, plus 1 hr chilling
Serves: 48
Calories: 143 per piece

Burgoo

Mutton, beef and chicken boiled off the bone and cooked down with corn, limas, potatoes and tomatoes until the meat is in shreds and a spoon stands in it — the stew Kentucky cooks by the barrel at political gatherings and race meets.

Total: 5 hr
Serves: 10
Calories: 516 per serving

Calabash Fried Shrimp

Small shrimp through a milk dip and a thin flour-and-cornmeal dredge, fried two minutes in hot peanut oil so the coating shatters and the shrimp inside is barely set.

Total: 35 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 462 per serving

Central Texas Brisket over Post Oak

A whole packer brisket, salt and coarse black pepper and nothing else, cooked over post oak the way the Central Texas meat markets cooked what they could not sell raw.

Total: 9 hr
Serves: 12
Calories: 505 per serving

Chicago Deep-Dish Pizza

A short, oily dough pressed up the walls of a steel pan, lined with sliced mozzarella, filled with sausage and covered with barely cooked tomato — built upside down so that half an hour in the oven does not burn the cheese.

Total: 2 hr 30 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 880 per serving

Chicago Italian Beef

A lean round roast cooked rare, chilled hard overnight, shaved to the thickness of paper against the grain, then warmed through in its own seasoned juice and loaded into a roll that gets dipped in the same juice on the way out.

Total: 3 hr, plus overnight chilling
Serves: 6
Calories: 790 per serving

Chicken-Fried Steak with Cream Gravy

Cube steak dredged twice, fried in half an inch of oil until the crust blisters, and served under a milk gravy built on the crumbs left in the pan.

Total: 45 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 735 per serving

Chili with a Cinnamon Roll

A thick beef-and-bean chili with a soft iced cinnamon roll on the same plate — the Kansas school-lunch pairing, built the way the federal meal pattern built it.

Total: 3 hr
Serves: 8
Calories: 750 per serving

Cincinnati Chili

A fine-grained meat sauce simmered three hours with cinnamon, clove and unsweetened chocolate, chilled overnight and skimmed, then ladled over spaghetti under a mound of shredded cheddar.

Total: 3 hr 20 min, plus overnight chilling
Serves: 6
Calories: 735 per serving

Cleveland Polish Boy

A smoked kielbasa in a soft bun under a load of hot fries, a thin sweet-hot barbecue sauce poured over them, and cold slaw on top — assembled in that order and eaten standing up.

Total: 1 hr
Serves: 4
Calories: 960 per serving

Crawfish Étouffée

Peeled crawfish tails and the orange fat from their heads smothered in butter and onion, thickened with flour cooked pale rather than brown, and spooned over rice.

Total: 55 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 420 per serving

Czech Kolache

A soft egg-yolk dough pressed into wells, filled with thick stewed prune and buried under posypka, the crumb topping that keeps the fruit from drying out.

Total: 3 hr
Serves: 16
Calories: 295 per kolache

Delta Hot Tamales

Small cornmeal tamales rolled in shucks, tied three to a bundle and simmered standing up in seasoned liquid, then served in that liquid with saltines.

Total: 2 hr 15 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 712 per serving

Detroit Coney Dog

A natural-casing beef frank in a steamed bun under a loose beanless beef sauce, a stripe of yellow mustard and a handful of raw onion, built in that order and no other.

Total: 1 hr
Serves: 8
Calories: 440 per serving

Detroit-Style Pizza

A wet dough pressed into an oiled steel pan, brick cheese laid to the walls so it fries into a lace of crust, and the sauce striped over the top after it comes out.

Total: 3 hr 45 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 500 per serving

Eastern North Carolina Chopped Pork with Vinegar Sauce

Shoulder and belly cooked slowly over low heat, chopped together with their crisped skin, and dressed with nothing but vinegar, salt and two kinds of pepper — the eastern sauce with no tomato anywhere in it.

Total: 7 hr 45 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 612 per serving

Friday Night Fish Fry, Yellow Perch

Small perch fillets in a cold beer batter, fried hot and short, with tartar sauce, rye bread and a wedge of lemon — the plate a Wisconsin Friday is built around.

Total: 40 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 745 per serving

Fried Biscuits with Apple Butter

A plain yeast dough cut small and dropped into deep fat, where it puffs hollow in ninety seconds, served hot by the basket with cold apple butter to put inside it.

Total: 45 min, plus about 1 hr 40 min rising
Serves: 8
Calories: 420 per serving

Fried Catfish with Comeback Sauce

Pond-raised fillets in a fine cornmeal crust, fried hot and drained standing up, with the orange garlic dressing that Jackson's Greek restaurant families put on everything.

Total: 45 min plus rest
Serves: 4
Calories: 812 per serving

Fried Cheese Curds

Cheddar stopped halfway through its own making — salted, never pressed, never aged — chilled hard, dropped in a cold beer batter and fried for ninety seconds.

Total: 50 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 540 per serving

Georgia Peach Cobbler

A deep dish of sliced freestone peaches under one sheet of butter pastry, baked until the juice boils up through the vents and sets.

Total: 2 hr
Serves: 8
Calories: 385 per serving

Goetta

Cincinnati's pork and pinhead-oat loaf: shoulder simmered to threads, oats cooked three hours in the same broth, set overnight in a pan and fried in slices until both faces are black-brown and brittle.

Total: 4 hr 50 min, plus overnight chilling
Serves: 8
Calories: 425 per serving

Ipswich Fried Clams

Whole soft-shell clams, belly and neck together, through evaporated milk and corn flour and ninety seconds of hot fat.

Total: 50 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 665 per serving

Jucy Lucy, or Juicy Lucy

Two thin patties of plain ground chuck sealed around a folded slice of process American, griddled hard on both sides and rested until the cheese inside stops being dangerous.

Total: 45 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 870 per serving

Key Lime Pie

Condensed milk thickened by lime acid, set briefly in the oven, under a meringue made from the yolks' own whites.

Total: 4 hr 30 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 430 per serving

Lexington Pork Shoulder with Red Slaw

Shoulder alone over hickory, cooked without basting, chopped with its outside brown and served with a thin tomato-touched dip — plus the red slaw that the same dip turns pink.

Total: 9 hr 15 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 496 per serving

Maryland Steamed Blue Crabs with Old Bay

Two dozen live crabs stacked above a half inch of vinegar and water, seasoned between every layer, steamed twenty-five minutes and tipped out onto newspaper.

Total: 40 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 310 per serving

Memphis Dry-Rub Ribs

St. Louis-cut spareribs over charcoal and hickory, basted with nothing but vinegar and water, and shaken with the rub a second time as they come off the fire.

Total: 5 hr 30 min plus overnight rub
Serves: 4
Calories: 780 per serving

Midlands Pulled Pork with Yellow Mustard Sauce

A Boston butt held at 275°F until it pulls apart under a fork, dressed with the yellow mustard sauce that belongs to the middle of South Carolina and nowhere else.

Total: 8 hr 5 min
Serves: 10
Calories: 470 per serving

Mississippi Mud Pie

The baked version the state's own encyclopedia describes: butter, chocolate, sugar and eggs in a pastry shell, with a thin cracked crust over a soft chewy middle.

Total: 2 hr 45 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 653 per serving

Muffuletta

A round sesame loaf split and packed with provolone, Genoa salami, mortadella and capicola, under an olive salad that is made the day before and pressed into the bread for two hours.

Total: 26 hr 30 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 1005 per serving

Nashville Hot Chicken

Fried chicken lacquered with a paste of cayenne and the fat it just came out of, served the way north Nashville serves it: on white bread, under pickles.

Total: 1 hr plus brining
Serves: 4
Calories: 989 per serving

Pastrami on Rye

A beef navel cured a week with salt and nitrite, crusted in cracked pepper and coriander, smoked to 160°F and then steamed for hours until it gives — the last step being the one everybody leaves out.

Total: 8 days
Serves: 8
Calories: 585 per serving

Pecan Pie

A pie built on toasted halves and dark brown sugar, with cream in the custard and less syrup than the standard, baked until the centre reads 200°F and moves as one piece.

Total: 4 hr 30 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 565 per serving

Pepperoni Rolls

Soft white bread baked around sticks of cured pepperoni, so the fat renders out in the oven and soaks into the crumb instead of running off the plate.

Total: 2 hr 30 min
Serves: 12
Calories: 295 per roll

Persimmon Pudding

Pulp from the native persimmon, taken when the fruit is soft enough to look spoiled, baked flat in a pan with sugar, flour and milk until it sets dark and sinks in the middle.

Total: 1 hr 25 min, plus cooling
Serves: 12
Calories: 235 per serving

Red Beans and Rice

Kidney beans started in cold water with a ham bone and simmered until a spoonful mashes against the pot, served over rice boiled dry and separate the way the Picayune insists on.

Total: 2 hr 50 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 560 per serving

Rhode Island Clear Clam Chowder with Clam Cakes

Quahogs steamed open, their broth turned into the whole liquid of the chowder, and the same broth beaten into a batter and dropped into hot fat for the cakes.

Total: 1 hr 15 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 540 per serving

Runza

A sweet yeast dough folded around beef, cabbage and onion cooked down until dry, then baked shut so the filling steams inside its own bread.

Total: 2 hr 45 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 425 per runza

She-Crab Soup, Carrying One Teaspoon of Flour

Crab, milk, a little cream and sherry, held together by puréed rice and sieved egg yolk instead of the roux that turns this soup to paste.

Total: 50 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 385 per serving

Shrimp and Grits, the Way Charleston Printed It

Stone-ground grits cooked slowly in water and shrimp stock, with headless shrimp turned in butter for four minutes and tipped over the top, pan butter and all.

Total: 65 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 365 per serving

Slugburger

A thin ground-beef patty stretched with soy flour and mashed potato, fried crisp in deep fat and dressed with yellow mustard, dill pickle and raw onion.

Total: 1 hr 15 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 755 per serving

Smoked Chicken with Alabama White Barbecue Sauce

A split bird smoked over hickory until the skin can take a wetting, then lowered whole into cold mayonnaise, cider vinegar and cracked black pepper — the north Alabama finish, which goes on after the fire and never over it.

Total: 2 hr 40 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 702 per serving

Smoked Mullet Dip

Salt-cured mullet smoked over hickory until the fat runs, then flaked coarse into cream cheese with lemon, scallion and enough hot sauce to keep it awake.

Total: 6 hr 30 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 320 per serving

Spoonbread

White cornmeal scalded into a mush, slackened with milk and eggs and baked in a buttered dish until it rises, cracks and has to be served with a spoon because it will not hold a slice.

Total: 55 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 244 per serving

Springfield Horseshoe Sandwich

Two slabs of thick toast, a horseshoe of carved ham laid over them, a pile of hot fries banked around the plate, and a beer-and-cheese rarebit sauce poured over the whole platter.

Total: 1 hr
Serves: 4
Calories: 1240 per serving

Stacked Red Chile Enchiladas with a Fried Egg

Whole dried red chile pods soaked, blended and strained into a sauce, then corn tortillas passed through hot fat and laid flat on the plate with cheese and raw onion between the layers.

Total: 1 hr 15 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 880 per serving

Sugar Cream Pie

Cream, sugar and a spoonful of flour stirred together, poured into a baked shell, dusted with nutmeg and baked until it barely holds — a pie made entirely of things that keep on a shelf in February.

Total: 1 hr 10 min, plus blind-baking and 4 hours cooling
Serves: 8
Calories: 470 per serving

Sweet Potato Pie

Baked sweet potato warmed and mashed with butter, pressed through a sieve, and bound with eggs, sugar and nutmeg — the 1907 Raleigh method, with the sugar brought down to something a modern mouth can stand.

Total: 4 hr 15 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 352 per serving

Tampa Cuban Sandwich

Mojo-marinated roast pork, sweet ham, Genoa salami, Swiss and pickle on Cuban bread, pressed flat in a dry pan until the crust shatters.

Total: 4 hr 40 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 985 per serving

The Louisville Hot Brown

Roast turkey on hard-toasted bread under a Mornay sauce, run under the broiler until the top blisters, finished with bacon and a roasted tomato half.

Total: 40 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 862 per serving

Traverse City Cherry Pie

Sour Montmorency cherries, frozen rather than fresh, set with cornstarch under a lattice — a pie built from the one fruit too sour to eat and too fragile to ship.

Total: 3 hr 45 min, plus 4 hours cooling
Serves: 8
Calories: 560 per serving

Upper Peninsula Pasty

Diced beef, potato, rutabaga and onion sealed raw in a lard crust and baked slowly, so the filling cooks in its own steam inside the pastry that carried it down the shaft.

Total: 1 hr 45 min, plus 1 hour resting the pastry
Serves: 6
Calories: 970 per serving

Verenike with Ham Gravy

Dry-curd cheese dumplings boiled and then browned in butter, under a cream gravy built on ham fat — the Low German Mennonite Sunday dish of Harvey, Marion and McPherson counties.

Total: 1 hr 15 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 610 per serving

Virginia Oyster Stew

Oysters cooked in their own liquor only until the edges ruffle, dropped into milk warmed with country ham and onion, and salted at the very end so they stay tender.

Total: 35 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 482 per serving

Virginia Peanut Soup

Onion and celery softened in butter, thickened with flour, loosened with chicken stock and ground roasted peanuts, then pushed through a sieve until it pours like cream.

Total: 55 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 388 per serving

West Indies Salad

Mobile's cold crab salad, which is four things and one rule: a pound of lump blue crab and a sliced onion layered in a bowl, doused with oil, cider vinegar and ice water, and then left alone in the refrigerator overnight without being stirred.

Total: 4 hr 20 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 302 per serving

West Virginia Slaw Dog

A steamed bun, mustard, a fine-ground beef sauce simmered soft rather than browned, raw onion and a cold sweet slaw laid over the top of all of it.

Total: 1 hr 15 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 590 per dog

Wild Rice Soup

Hand-harvested lake rice cooked apart in its own water, then finished in a mushroom and turkey broth with a little cream stirred in off the heat.

Total: 1 hr 15 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 430 per serving

Zwieback

A rich little roll with a second ball of dough thumbed into its back, from the Mennonite settlements of central Kansas that brought hard winter wheat with them.

Total: 2 hr 30 min
Serves: 16
Calories: 175 per roll

Stuffies, Rhode Island Stuffed Quahogs

Chowder-size quahogs steamed open, chopped, bound with their own liquor and stale bread, and baked back in the half shells with linguiça.

Total: 1 hr 5 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 350 per serving

Buffalo Wings

Wings fried naked, no batter anywhere, then tossed in an emulsion of cold butter and cayenne pepper sauce that hangs on the skin instead of running off it.

Total: 50 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 845 per serving

Texas Chili con Carne, No Beans

Beef chuck cut into cubes by hand and simmered in a sauce squeezed out of whole dried chiles, built from the recipe the army printed in 1896: no beans, no tomato, no powder.

Total: 3 hr
Serves: 6
Calories: 585 per serving

New Mexico Green Chile Stew

Pork shoulder simmered with two cups of roasted, peeled New Mexico green chile and potatoes, thin enough to eat with a spoon and never thickened with flour.

Total: 2 hr 30 min
Serves: 6
Calories: 465 per serving

Maryland Crab Cakes, Jumbo Lump and Almost No Filler

A pound of jumbo lump crab held together with half a cup of cracker crumbs and one egg, shaped by hand and run under the broiler so nothing ever has to be flipped.

Total: 55 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 280 per serving

Chicken and Andouille Gumbo

A dark-roux gumbo of chicken on the bone and smoked sausage, built in the order the Picayune gumbo chapter lays down, with the filé stirred into the bowl and never into the pot.

Total: 2 hr 45 min
Serves: 8
Calories: 670 per serving

Braised White Beans with Kale and Lemon

Canned cannellini beans braised in garlic, rosemary and their own broth until creamy, with kale stirred through and a lot of lemon at the end.

Total: 35 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 418 per serving

Crispy-Skin Salmon with Charred Broccolini

Salmon started skin-down in a cold pan so the skin renders crisp, with broccolini charred in the fat it leaves behind.

Total: 25 min
Serves: 4
Calories: 486 per serving