The United States of Thanksgiving! Where to find the best recipes from Nebraska and around the country! - Robert Hanco*ck & Co (2024)

Lucy Buffett and her famous brother, Jimmy, grew up in Mobile, Ala., where seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is a key player in the culinary canon. Mr. Buffett went on to a giant career in music. His sister Lucy opened the freewheeling LuLu’s restaurant in Gulf Shores, Ala. When they were children, oyster stuffing was always on the Thanksgiving table. And it still is. “Usually, it’s all gone by the end of the day because the kids go back for thirds and fourths, just digging directly into the pan,” she said.

Ms. Buffett likes to use cornbread with a little sugar in it, often relying on a box mix. But any cornbread recipe will do. The best bread is an inexpensive white loaf from the grocery store that will break down into a smooth texture. The oysters don’t have to be from the Gulf of Mexico, but fat Gulf oysters are best for conjuring the brackish low tides and sunsets of the Buffett family youth.KIM SEVERSON

The Russians call it kulebyaka, but in Alaska it is pirok, perok or peroche — all amendments of pirog, the more general Russian word for pie. Inside the flaky crust, wild salmon from Alaskan waters is layered with rice and cabbage, crops introduced to the 18th-century natives of Kodiak Island by fur traders from across the strait. Long after the Russians gave up the hunt for sea otter pelts and sold their claim to the territory to the United States, the frontier fish-camp dish remained a staple of the Alaskan table.

Kirsten Dixon, the chef and an owner of Winterlake Lodge, along the Iditarod Trail, and Tutka Bay Lodge, near Homer, likes to make salmon pie at Thanksgiving, when the Alaskan back country is already muffled in snow and guests arrive by ski plane, landing on a frozen lake.LIGAYA MISHAN

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Heat is an integral aspect of Arizona cooking, so it’s no surprise that local chiles of all kinds accent the flavor of Thanksgiving. Cooks use them in everything from hatch turkey rubs to chipotle mashed potatoes to jalapeño jelly.

This cranberry sauce, adapted from the Phoenix-based chef Gina Buskirk, is spiced with chiltepin chiles, small, round, fiery hot chiles that are native to Arizona and northern Mexico. Though Ms. Buskirk is known locally for her Italian Gina’s Homemade products, this year she and her husband and business partner, Chris, have put together an Arizona Thanksgiving menu for their YouTube channel. Their turkey is hand-rubbed with local hatch chiles, their bread stuffing incorporates chorizo and queso blanco, and a prickly-pear pie stands in for pumpkin.MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

Arkansas is the land of turkey and gravy. The state is one of the top turkey producers in the country, and its cooks are well versed in everything from red-eye gravy from a cast-iron pan to the chocolate gravy of the Ozarks, eaten with biscuits for breakfast.

P. Allen Smith is sort of like Martha Stewart’s Southern cousin. He has a cooking and lifestyle empire, but his true love is heritage poultry. He founded a conservancy to protect and improve the genetics of old breeds of birds, and raises several on his Moss Mountain farm near Little Rock.

Heritage birds can be tricky to roast; the flesh is firmer than a supermarket bird. He suggests a day in a brine sweetened with apple cider and then roasting the bird on a bed of rosemary. Roasted giblets and a chopped hard-boiled egg add texture and depth to his country-style gravy.

“That’s from my mother’s side of the family,” he said. “The eggs and giblets make it a little more rustic and a little more interesting. It’s the gravy that saves that dry turkey.”KIM SEVERSON

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Sit down with a California chef, and it usually takes only a minute or so before the word “produce” pops up. The state remains extravagantly proud of the bounty of its land, and all of the best West Coast cooks (both in restaurants and in homes) integrate local agricultural blessings into their handiwork.

We can think of no one who does a finer job of that than Suzanne Goin, a Los Angeles native who has adapted Mediterranean cuisine to the Pacific Coast at spots like Lucques, The Hungry Cat and A.O.C. Her stuffing recipe here pays tribute to the whole length of the state, with nods to the sourdough that you associate with fog-strewn San Francisco and to the almonds and dates of the Central Valley. As Ms. Goin explained in an email, “There is no egg and no real attempt to emulsify it like your mom’s stuffing — it’s loose, laid-back and doing its own thing, California-style.”JEFF GORDINIER

It’s difficult to assess exactly how much the legalization of marijuana in Colorado may have changed the Thanksgiving menu. But it has indubitably increased the snacking that goes on afterward, said Alexander Figura, the chef of Lower48 Kitchen in Denver. That post-meal, late-night snacking has taken on a different kind of intensity now that the munchies are involved. “Stoned people gravitate to more extreme flavors,” he said. “They want something very savory or very sweet, or both at the same time.”

His recipe for sticky pecan pie bites dunked into leftover turkey gravy — an after-hours snack among chefs he knows — hits those notes perfectly. The bite-size, bourbon-spiked pecan bars work on their own, too: no gravy or cannabis required. You can bake them up to 5 days in advance.MELISSA CLARK

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Turkey was served often at Winterthur, the ancestral home of the du Pont family, in Delaware. The birds were raised on the estate, in great enough numbers for the family to give them to employees at Thanksgiving and Christmas. The estate was established in 1810 by Eleuthère Irénée du Pont; the house was built in 1837 and opened to the public as a museum of American decorative arts in 1951. Many of its recipes survive, among them one for truffled turkey and stuffing, which Pauline Foster du Pont, Mr. du Pont’s daughter-in-law, included in her personal handwritten cookbook.

First, three pounds of zucchini were boiled, then peeled, mashed and seasoned with salt, pepper and butter. This was the stuffing. Then the contents of an entire can of black truffles were sliced and slipped under the turkey’s skin. To serve, the meat was carved and then put back in its skin so that the turkey appeared to be whole. In this adaptation, the bird is rubbed with truffle butter, and the zucchini (finely chopped, not mashed) is bolstered with bread crumbs and more truffle butter. But it does not suggest replicating the reassembled turkey. The du Ponts had staff for that. You will have enough to do at Thanksgiving without attempting it.FLORENCE FABRICANT

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President Obama’s first state dinner at the White House, just before Thanksgiving in November 2009, honored Manmohan Singh, then the prime minister of India, and his wife, Gursharan Kaur. The chef for the dinner was Marcus Samuelsson, who decided to incorporate some Indian touches into the menu. Both naan and cornbread were served, and the dessert for each of the 400 guests was a pear Tatin and a pumpkin pie tartlet.

“I flavored what I consider a very American pumpkin pie with a staple of Indian cuisine: garam masala,” Mr. Samuelsson wrote in his new cookbook, “Marcus Off Duty: The Recipes I Cook At Home,” where he gives the recipe, but as a large tart, not an individual tartlet. It adds a worldly touch to an American tradition, ideally suited to Washington.FLORENCE FABRICANT

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Thanksgiving dinner in Hawaii may start with pineapple-Vienna-sausage skewers and lychees stuffed with cream cheese. Later there is turkey and ham, but also Spam fried rice and Filipino lumpia, maybe poke (sashimi salad), laulau (ti-leaf-wrapped meat or fish) and a Molokai sweet potato pie topped with haupia (coconut pudding). It is the crazy-quilt, all-embracing nature of the feast that makes it local-kine — that is, island-style.

Lara Mui Cowell of Honolulu offers this recipe from her popo (maternal grandmother), Jannie Luke Thom, a second-generation Chinese-American who was born in Hawaii before it became a state. The dish is a Chinese take on Western-style sage stuffing, swapping out bread crumbs for mochi rice and adding lup cheong (Chinese sausage) and char siu (Chinese barbecue pork). But in true Hawaiian style, you may substitute Portuguese sausage — or even Spam.LIGAYA MISHAN

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There may never be a better book title than “Aristocrat in Burlap,” a dramatic biography of the Idaho potato, from the first seedlings cultivated by Presbyterian missionaries in the 1840s (with considerable help from Native Americans) to the brown-skinned Burbanks that built today’s $2.7 billion industry. The large size of Idaho potatoes — often 3 to 4 pounds each in the 19th century, nourished by volcanic soil and Snake River water — is the source of the mystique.

The Hasselback potato, named for the hotel in Stockholm where the recipe was invented in the 1950s, shows off the sheer mass of the Idaho potato like nothing else. In the original, the potato is wrapped in bacon, but you can get good smoky flavor and a gorgeous ruddy color by using smoked paprika.JULIA MOSKIN

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Wild persimmons start to blush along the country roads of Indiana in late September, stealing the colors of sunset and weighing down their trees like Christmas balls. They are native to the landscape, unlike the Chinese and Japanese varieties cultivated in California and found in grocery stores. Foraging carries on through November, when the fruit claims a place at the Hoosier Thanksgiving table in the form of a dark gold pudding, distant kin to the sweet persimmon bread offered to early colonials by the Cherokee.

This recipe comes from Alverta S. Hart of Mitchell, Ind. This fall, the town hosted its annual Persimmon Festival and as always, the most suspenseful event was the persimmon pudding contest. Ms. Hart submitted her first pudding in 1962 as an 18-year-old bride, and re-entered every year for nearly four decades until she became a judge, then chairwoman of the event, winning on and off and collecting every color of ribbon along the way.LIGAYA MISHAN

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Fifty or a hundred years ago, community cookbooks were as essential to a well-stocked American kitchen as rotary egg beaters. These spiral-bound compilations created as charity fund-raisers, often using local recipes, have been largely sidelined by the flood of professional cookbooks that are published every year.

Those are not likely to include recipes for suet pudding and lye soap, like the ones in “Treasured Recipes Old and New 1975” by the Schuyler-Brown Homemakers Extension in Iowa Falls. The book includes these date and walnut Thanksgiving cookies, contributed by Wilma Miller, who credits the recipe to her great-aunt. Ms. Miller wrote that the original recipe called for two pounds of walnuts, but that she prefers it with pecans “and not that many.” That makes sense. Mixing in even a pound of nuts requires the arms of a sturdy farm wife. The recipe yields enough for an entire church supper.FLORENCE FABRICANT

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In a lot of states, people don’t just eat food on Thanksgiving; they hunt for it. Lora Smith, a writer and farmer with roots in Kentucky, sends along a recipe. handed down from her great-grandmother, for her family’s “pocket” dressing: a baked patty of dressing that slides easily into the pockets and knapsacks of rabbit and quail hunters. The Smiths also have the patties at the table, where they are passed around on a platter.

Texture is key. The outside must be browned and crisp. Inside, softness comes from cornbread and biscuits, and chewiness from foraged mushrooms. A family member (traditionally, the oldest matriarch) leaves a thumbprint indentation on each patty before baking, so that a little gravy can settle and soak in.

The hunt continued through Thanksgiving weekend. “They’d again take the leftover dressing wrapped in wax paper with them, and sometimes turkey sandwiches or turkey with fresh biscuits pulled out of the oven that morning,” Ms. Smith said. “My father always carried a small backpack where he kept extra leftovers and cold bottles of co*ke. His other job was to carry the rabbits and quail they shot in the backpack.” When the weather was especially chilly, the patties solved another problem. According to Ms. Smith, “they also served as nice hand warmers.”JEFF GORDINIER

The mirliton is a pale green squash with an end puckered up like a toothless granny. They are native to Louisiana, but if you grew up eating from certain Latin American culinary canons, you might know them as chayote.

In New Orleans, mirliton stuffed with shrimp is a dish both common and fancy. The chef David Guas, who grew up in Louisiana and now runs the Bayou Bakery in Washington, D.C., ate this version at his Granny Lilly’s holiday table in Amite, La. His recipe is a version of her original, but with a touch of heat from cayenne pepper as influenced by Justin Wilson, a relative who had a long-running cooking show on New Orleans public television that he punctuated with the tagline “I guaranteeeeee!”

Use the freshest shrimp you can find. Something from the Gulf of Mexico would lend authenticity. And be careful scooping the flesh from the mirlitons. The skin is thin and can break easily.KIM SEVERSON

Maine did not become a state until 1820, and the history of its Thanksgivings is inextricably linked with those of its former administrators in Massachusetts. A 1949 McCall’s magazine article about the Sortwell family Thanksgiving in Wiscasset highlighted the family’s 150-year history of serving New England roast turkey on “a damask-covered table heavy with the good fruits of the land.” The photograph could have been made in Boston or Marblehead.

More recently, the state’s bounteous lobster harvest (some 126 million pounds in 2013, the most recent figure) has led local cooks to introduce lobster to the Thanksgiving table. The following recipe for lobster mac and cheese, a variation ona classic plain recipethat Julia Moskin published in The Times, is a rich and shockingly flavorful addition to the holiday feast, and requires only a single lobster to serve six or eight.SAM SIFTON

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In the Chesapeake, seafood often finds its way onto the Thanksgiving menu. But in Baltimore, which has a strong eastern European and German immigrant history, the holiday table demands something else. “The absence of sauerkraut when turkey is present, Thanksgiving included, is unthinkable, comparable to potatoes without gravy or crisp French fries without ketchup,” wrote John Shields, the chef and owner of Gertrude’s restaurant in Baltimore, in his cookbook “Chesapeake Bay Cooking.” (Sauerkraut is a mainstay well beyond Thanksgiving; Gertrude’s hosts an annual Krautfest in January.)

Traditionally, homemakers fermented the cabbage in earthenware crocks in their cellars, but these days the fresh stuff is available to buy. On Thanksgiving, it’s often simply served as a side, or incorporated into dishes like this, in which the sauerkraut is braised in beer with bacon and apples.JENNIFER STEINHAUER

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This grape salad, which falls into the same category of old-fashioned party dishes as molded Jell-O salad, comes from a Minnesota-born heiress, who tells me it was always part of the holiday buffet in her family. It couldn’t be simpler to prepare and has only three ingredients: grapes, sour cream and brown sugar.

Rather like a creamy fruit salad with a crisp sugar topping, it really is delicious, though the concept sounded strange to me before I first tasted it. Other versions, I hear, call for softened cream cheese and nondairy “whipped topping”; I can’t say I’ll be trying that. Some cooks caramelize the brown sugar under the broiler and some don’t, but I definitely recommend this step, which gives the dish a crème brûlée aura.DAVID TANIS

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Greens have always had a symbolic role on the Southern table. A pot of greens is the food of the fields, of grandmas and of barbecues. It’s a dish rooted in both the black South and the white South, but one that unites every Southerner in the communion of the table. At Thanksgiving, soft greens with a kiss of pork are a natural part of the lineup.

Hayden and Erica Hall are Mississippi natives who left Clarksdale, the birthplace of the blues, for bigger cities. He worked for chefs like Wolfgang Puck. She worked on Capitol Hill. Together, the couple returned home in 2010 to open Oxbow Restaurant. They offer this recipe, in which collard greens are braised in amber ale. (They like Yalobusha Copperhead from Water Valley, Miss.) The ale is essential, as is a ham hock. Red pepper flakes and apple cider vinegar give the greens a sharp edge, a welcome respite on a bland plate of turkey and potatoes.KIM SEVERSON

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“Thanksgiving here is about hunting rather than football,” said Errol Rice of the Montana Stockgrowers Association. The season for hunting big game comes to a close in the last, best place on the Thanksgiving weekend, and those who have not yet bagged a buck are known, said Dennis Konopatzke, the proprietor of Great Northern Brewing Company in Whitefish, to rush their holiday dinners in order to get out to the woods to hunt.

You’ll find huckleberries on Thanksgiving tables in Montana, Mr. Konopatzke added, or the Norwegian cured fish known as lutefisk, or pork pies and stuffed pasties, all nods to the state’s diverse history of settlers from afar. But game is the game. What follows is a recipe honed over the years by the members of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation for a marinade that works on wild venison perfectly and most other proteins as well. Broil some steaks and pair the result with traditional Thanksgiving side dishes.SAM SIFTON

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Like many restaurant workers toiling in Las Vegas, Eric Klein, the executive chef at Spago, spends Thanksgiving Day on the line, dishing out turkey and trimmings to vacationing high rollers. Time with family and friends comes after the holiday. While the rest of the city combs shopping arcades for Black Friday deals, he’s making magic with the leftovers.

One of his favorites is this play on a French dip sandwich. Shredded turkey stands in for the usual beef, while gravy, thinned out to make it brothlike, replaces the jus for dipping. To this he adds the requisite leftover stuffing, and he folds the cranberry sauce into a fragrant and creamy aioli. He likes to crumble mild blue cheese over the top of his sandwich for extra pizazz, but feel free to leave it out if you’re feeling more traditional.MELISSA CLARK

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For many Italian-American families, in New Jersey and elsewhere, the Thanksgiving smorgasbord doesn’t feel quite right without a little touch of red sauce. So you say: “Manicotti? That doesn’t really go with turkey and stuffing and cranberries.” What, you want to argue about it? Besides, Thanksgiving also represents an American expression of abbondanza, the Italian concept of too-muchness that makes a meal feel epic.

Here, courtesy of Reservoir Tavern, which has been serving customers in the Boonton area since 1936, comes a recipe for baked manicotti that uses crepes in place of pasta. Nicola Bevacqua, a member of the family that owns the place, said that his own family digs into this melted-cheese masterwork each holiday, as do the New Jersey locals who drop by to pick it up. The crepes, he assured us, “are light and airy and will leave you plenty of room for the turkey.”JEFF GORDINIER

Anyone who has spent time in New Mexico knows that fiery red chile sauce, made with local dried chiles, finds its way into most meals there, enhancing plates of huevos rancheros or enchiladas. But just as often, it is the base for a meat stew, usually beef, pork or lamb. The dish is known as carne adovada, and it is insanely good.

Yes, there probably is a roasted turkey in most homes for Thanksgiving, and maybe a steaming pot of tamales. But the thought occurred to me that turkey thighs (the tastiest part of the bird) simmered in red chile would be a welcome substitute. It turns out I was right. Slowly braised for 2 hours, this spicy turkey is succulent and tender.DAVID TANIS

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Although a golden-domed apple pie may be an iconic Thanksgiving dessert across the country, it is particularly apropos to New York. There is the Big Apple itself — a nickname for the city that’s said to have its origins in horse-racing slang, not the orchards throughout the state, though they make New York the second-largest apple producer in the country. The state also happens to be home to the very first apple nursery in the country (1730).

No matter where you bake it, this particular apple pie recipe is a keeper. Gently spiced with cinnamon, tinged with brown sugar and loaded with apple butter, it’s as deeply flavored as an apple pie can be, all covered with a buttery wide-lattice top crust. Although it’s at its most ethereal when baked on the same day you serve it, it’s still wonderful made a day ahead.MELISSA CLARK

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North Carolina and sweet potatoes go way back. The relationship, according to the food writer Sheri Castle, hinges on a history of abundance. “Sweet potatoes were plentiful, even among the poorest folks of any ethnicity,” she said. “Enslaved Africans used sweet potatoes in place of yams and other West African root vegetables.” To this day, the state is a national leader in growing the crop.

Stephanie L. Tyson, the chef who oversees the kitchen at a Winston-Salem spot called (appropriately) Sweet Potatoes, likes to blend one Southern staple into another. The result is a cornbread laced with a holiday-friendly undercurrent of cinnamon and nutmeg. Ms.Tyson has said that the cornbread just clicks with a side of greens, but we have a feeling it will play well with cranberries and gravy, too.JEFF GORDINIER

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Lefse, thin potato-dough flatbreads like Scandinavian tortillas, or Oslo injera, can be found on holiday tables throughout the upper Midwest, wherever Norwegian families settled to farm. The recipe is adapted from Ethel Ramstad, 90, who learned it from one Ollie Amundson in North Dakota decades ago. We picked it up when she was teaching it to Molly Yeh, 25, a Chicago-raised food blogger marrying Ms. Ramstad’s great-nephew, on a farm in the Red River Valley, right before Thanksgiving.

The riced potato mixture that forms the basis of the dough should be very, very cold when it is rolled out, to prevent stickiness. And although you do not need a lefse griddle to make great lefse, a lefse stick — essentially a long, thin, wooden spatula — is an admirable investment in success.SAM SIFTON

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Jonathon Sawyer is no snob. Although he runs the kitchens in a slew of acclaimed restaurants in the Cleveland area, including The Greenhouse Tavern, the chef decided to honor Thanksgiving and his home state, Ohio, by sending along a personal recipe that calls to mind the processed-food delights that, for decades, characterized the cooking of the Midwest. “Think of this salad as a little slice of nostalgia from the canned-and-frozen households of the mid-20th century,” he wrote in an email.

Mr. Sawyer recommends frozen peas (“I think frozen peas are magical,” he said) and organic eggs, but over the years he has seen the dish made with Miracle Whip, cubes of cheese from the deli, powdered Ranch dressing, French’s fried onions. “The real goal of having a salad like this on the holiday table is it’s a tart, sweet and delicious break from the overindulgence of roasted birds, velvety gravy and buttery potatoes,” he said. And hey, that break from the overindulgence happens to have bacon in it.JEFF GORDINIER

Green bean casserole is unheard-of on Thanksgiving tables in New England, said Clifford A. Wright, author of the casserole cookbook “Bake Until Bubbly.” But as you move through the Midwest and down into Oklahoma, where the casserole is king, it is a cornerstone of the holiday meal. When this reporter asked some Oklahomans about their Thanksgiving staples, the now-traditional green bean casserole — which originated in 1955 in the Campbell Soup Company test kitchen and came to include frozen or canned green beans, canned cream of mushroom soup, Durkee French Fried Onions and a Ritz cracker or cornflake topping — turned up in every response.

This version pays tribute to the classic but upgrades its components. The cream of mushroom soup is replaced with crème fraîche and sautéed mushrooms; bacon and Gruyère are added to the mix; fresh green beans stand in for frozen (though you could use frozen in a pinch); and bread crumbs swap in for the Ritz crackers — though Mr. Wright said the Ritz topping is surprisingly good.MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

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What does mofongo mean to Puerto Rico? Well, what do biscuits mean to the South, or green chiles to the people of New Mexico? Mofongo, which in its most traditional form is a fried-and-mashed fusion of plantains, pork rinds, garlic and peppers, symbolizes the island’s soul food. It is beloved, even if sometimes misunderstood; it can be vexingly heavy, but when it’s executed properly there’s a righteous balance of crispness and fluff.

For this recipe we went to Jose Enrique, the Puerto Rican chef who’s gaining attention for giving Caribbean cuisine an extra layer of refinement. We asked him for a mofongo for the Thanksgiving table, standing at the ready to soak up gravy and meet your turkey on the tip of a fork.JEFF GORDINIER

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Indian pudding was a compromise. A mass of cornmeal, milk and molasses, baked for hours, it was born of the Puritans’ nostalgia for British hasty pudding and their adaptation to the ground-corn porridges of their Native American neighbors. Originally served as a first course, it grew sweeter (but not too sweet; Puritanism runs deep) and migrated to the end of supper.

For a proper historical re-enactment of the dish, you need meal stone-ground from Rhode Island whitecap flint corn, a hard, tough-to-crack corn, less sweet but more buttery than hybrid strains. One of the oldest incarnations of the plant, it was cultivated by the local Narragansett and saved from extinction by a few equally flinty Rhode Island farmers. This recipe comes from George Crowther, owner and chef of the Yankee diner Commons Lunch, which has stood on the town square of Little Compton, R.I., since 1966.LIGAYA MISHAN

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Community-supported agriculture takes many forms these days: You can subscribe to a weekly delivery of produce from a farm, a monthly cooler from a seafood supplier or a biannual supply of country ham. But only in Charleston, S.C., will you find a C.S.A. for pie. Amy Robinette, who grew up in Spartanburg, S.C., is committed to adapting Southern desserts, which have often come to rely on supersweet and artificial ingredients, back to real food.

In her kitchen, the chocolate chess pie her grandmother always made for Thanksgiving — filled with white sugar, evaporated milk, and cocoa powder — has been adapted to local honey, fresh cream, dark cocoa powder and sea salt from the nearby Bull’s Bay Saltworks. Called salty pluff mud pie, it is her most popular creation. “Pluff” mud is the sticky, sulfurous sediment that lines the bottom of the South Carolina tidal marshes; some say it is the true source of Lowcountry flavor. “I thought it was an awful smell at first,” said Ms. Robinette, who moved to Charleston to attend culinary school and never left. “But now, when I smell pluff mud, I know I’m home.”JULIA MOSKIN

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Karen Van Guilder Little grew up in Knoxville, where Thanksgiving always included old-school American brussels sprouts, boiled into submission and doused in butter. “I was the only one who ate them,” she said, “but I was always the weird kid who would eat anything.”

Fast forward to last December, when Ms. Little and her husband, Andrew Little, a chef, opened Josephine in Nashville. Not many states with fewer than seven million people have three major food cities, but Memphis, Nashville and Knoxville are all burgeoning restaurant destinations. And every new place, it seems, has to have killer brussels sprouts. At the Catbird Seat in Nashville, they are dressed with sorghum and ham. At Hog and Hominy in Memphis, they’re slicked with tomato and bacon jams and shocked with mint.

“I knew I couldn’t do bacon, because everybody else had that covered,” Mr. Little said. “I started playing around with peanut butter — it’s rich and salty like bacon — and it just clicked.” The sprouts are never allowed to come off the menu, and grace the Van Guilder/Little Thanksgiving table every year.JULIA MOSKIN

Tamales are a holiday staple for Mexican-American families from the Rio Grande Valley up to North Texas, and not just at Christmas. “We have a big market for Thanksgiving tamales,” said Cyndi Hall of Tamale Place of Texas, in Leander, near Austin.

Although Ms. Hall said she’s seen more families buy tamales than ever before, many still keep the tradition of coming together to make them. You can cook up a turkey breast or extra legs for tamales to have with the Thanksgiving meal, or make the tamales with leftover turkey for the long weekend.

They aren’t difficult, but they do take time, so the more hands you have for your assembly line, the quicker it goes. Corn husks and masa mix for tamales can be found in markets that sell Mexican ingredients; make sure you get the masa for tamales (Maseca is the most widely available brand), not the finer, drier tortilla masa harina.MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

Briar Handly left Vermont for the Rocky Mountains as soon as he finished high school. “I didn’t have much of a plan beyond skiing,” Mr. Handly said. But jobs cooking burgers in turn-and-burn dives led to high-end ski resorts, and then culinary school. Now he’s among a few chefs who are cracking the code of how to make Utah restaurants individual, seasonal and profitable. (Working against 100-mile-an-hour wind gusts and the state’s labyrinthine liquor laws isn’t easy.)

Handle, which opened in Park City in September, is his first restaurant as chef and owner, but he knows the local palate backwards and forwards. “Pudding always sells,” he said. Pudding, like Jell-O (Utah’s official state snack) is a staple at Mormon gatherings, where sugar is a favorite indulgence. (Alcohol, caffeine and nicotine are forbidden by the church.) His sneaky and delicious twist on butterscotch pudding has a breath of whiskey from the High West Distillery across the street; you may leave it out. The Chex streusel brings back every Thanksgiving Day, as he snacked endlessly on bowls of Chex Mix while watching football.JULIA MOSKIN

Early American colonists may not have eaten Cheddar at the first Thanksgiving, but they certainly began to make it in the traditional English manner soon thereafter. At some point the colonies were actually exporting domestic cheese to the mother country, where it was known as Yankee Cheddar.

To some, Cheddar is synonymous with Vermont, even if it is produced in several other states, too. For most, mashed potatoes are an absolute essential for a proper Thanksgiving table. Combining them seems natural, whether customary or not. Using two-year-old aged Vermont Cheddar, which is deeply flavored but not too sharp, gives these creamy mashed potatoes a subtle Cheddar presence, neither overwhelmingly cheesy nor gooey.DAVID TANIS

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As a child of Virginia, Edna Lewis — the African-American chef and cookbook author credited with preserving countless recipes from the old South — was ambivalent about a lot of Thanksgiving standbys that belonged, in her view, to Yankee territory: cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, even turkey.

“But Lewis can’t imagine Thanksgiving without corn pudding,” Molly O’Neill wrote here in The Times in 1992. Plenty of Virginians would agree with her. For them, as for Miss Lewis, this buttery, fluffy dish serves as not only a seasonal bridge — a farewell to summer, with winter chill waiting in the wings — but also as a sweetly welcome blurring of the lines between a side dish and a dessert.

In her essential book “The Taste of Country Cooking,” Miss Lewis, as she was called, wrote that her mother always paired corn pudding with a “casserole made from fresh-dug sweet potatoes.” That strikes us as a partnership worth encouraging.JEFF GORDINIER

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The State of Washington, culinarily speaking, is apples, cherries, wheat. It is wild salmon, crabs, oysters and mussels. And it is mushrooms, a plethora of them. Western Washington’s coastal rainy climate means there are evergreen forests and woodlands galore, which is a boon for avid mycologists, foragers and hunter-gatherers. But the cultivation of mushrooms, especially shiitakes, is a thriving business throughout the state, too, and these can be found simply by going to the grocery store.

Many restaurants there use a pan-Asian palette of ingredients, influenced in part by the Asian-American communities that make up a significant part of the state’s population. Though it may not immediately conjure images of Thanksgiving, this woodsy-looking dish pays tribute to those flavors, and the spirit of cultural mashups on the holiday table: gorgeous glazed shiitakes and tender green bok choi sparked with ginger, sesame and hot pepper.DAVID TANIS

What makes Thanksgiving in Washington?Join the conversation.

When it comes to pawpaw, accept no substitutes. Trust us; we tried. We went to a bunch of experts — scholars who specialize in fruit, plus chefs and cookbook authors who know all about the proud culinary history of Appalachia — and we asked them, “If a home cook doesn’t happen to have any pawpaw, what combination of other fruits and vegetables might work well as a replacement?” We picked up passing nods to sweet potatoes, bananas, papayas, avocados, really ripe mangoes. But in the end everyone came back with variations on “Forget it, there’s nothing like a pawpaw.”

The weird, goopy-textured, tropical-ish fruit whose name sounds like a punch line on “Hee Haw” can be found scattered all over the country, but recipes (for cakes, pies, puddings) abound largely in West Virginia and nearby states like Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana. If you happen to secure some pawpaw, best to get out of its way, as is the case with this pudding. Pawpaw is a holiday guest who responds well to minimal interference.JEFF GORDINIER

What makes Thanksgiving in West Virginia?Join the conversation.

In Wisconsin, wild rice is truly wild, not cultivated as in other states, the tassels rising and swaying over rivers, lakes and floodplains come late August and September. Called manoomin by the local Chippewa, it is a protected crop that can be harvested only by state residents holding a valid license. And only by hand, as the Chippewa have always done, using wooden flails gently (the grains should fall from the stalk without great effort) from canoes propelled by paddles or push poles.

Shellie Holmes of Rhinelander, Wis., who shares her recipe here, likes to cook wild rice just until it pops open. This is a break with her family’s tradition, which favored a chewier texture and did not allow popping.

“Do not mix with other rice,” she urged, lest you lose the flavor of the wild.LIGAYA MISHAN

Matt Mead, the governor of Wyoming, recalls being taken out by his grandfather on the family ranch to shoot his first duck for Thanksgiving at age 9, when he was so small that his grandfather had to brace him from behind to help absorb the kick from the shotgun.

Game is found on many Thanksgiving tables in the state, but other traditions predate the hunt. The trinity of corn, beans and squash was central to the agriculture of the Plains Indians in what would later become Wyoming, and some cooks honor that history each Thanksgiving with a dish called Three Sisters stew. The writer Pamela Sinclair’s version is a highlight of her 2008 cookbook, “A Taste of Wyoming: Favorite Recipes From the Cowboy State.” The stew works nicely as a rich side dish for turkey, and can easily be adapted to vegetarian tastes by omitting the pork and adding a pound of cubed butternut squash instead.SAM SIFTON

What makes Thanksgiving in Wyoming?Join the conversation.