Slate – “When we initially reached out to scores of chefs, recipe writers, historians, and food luminaries for nominations for their most important American recipes of the past 100 years—Which written recipes were the most influential, pivotal, or transformative for American home cooking between 1924 and 2024?—we expected strong opinions, but we didn’t anticipate the philosophical quandaries that adjudicating and assembling them would bring up. After all, what or who confers “importance”? Our experts do, for one thing. But we also determined it had to do with reach and scale, with the sense that a recipe represented a clear shift in some aspect of home cooking for some significant number of Americans. “American cooking”? Rightly and necessarily a sprawling thing made by immigrants, shaped by the push and pull of assimilation, separatism, and syncretism, utterly dependent on the open migration of flavors and ideas. Last, what even is a “recipe”? There are many excellent dishes from the past century that, upon examination, are innovations rather than discrete entities recorded for replication in the kitchen. Roasted Brussels sprouts, fajitas, chili crisp, and Spam musubi were all nominated and ultimately dismissed for this reason. Recipes carry not only ingredients and instructions (sometimes) but also family stories, regional lore, cultural values, evolutions in technology and free time, and, of course, taste. They track the movement of diverse peoples across borders and nutrition fads through bodies. They are both tool and knowledge, artless instruction manual and literary form. They help us celebrate, mourn, or simply get supper on the table. One of our richest inheritances, recipes are time capsules of the past and present that happen to contain something you can safely chew. This is what informed our list, full of little-known history and tips we will now swear by in the kitchen (and some better left in the past). Are the 25 recipes we’ve gathered here really the most important from a century of American braising, baking, and imbibing? Possibly! At the very least, we’re sure they’ve profoundly and deliciously changed what Americans eat. So tie your apron, preheat your oven to 350 degrees, and stand facing the stove—it’s time to get cooking.”