The 'Most Important' Recipes of the Last Century

Slate has put together a list of what it considers the 25 most important recipes of the past century—the ones that "changed it all in American cooking." The honorees were chosen by a slew of chefs, recipe writers, historians, and "food luminaries," write Dan Kois and J. Bryan Lowder. A sampling:

• Caesar salad by Caesar Cardini, 1924: Legend has it Cardini put the salad together using the "dregs" of an almost-empty icebox: some lettuce, a lemon, an egg, and Worcestershire sauce, and though that's hotly debated, Julia Child ultimately adapted the recipe in what is likely the closest we'll ever get to the original. "The nation's craftiness, defiance, ingenuity, performance, thrift, all mixed up in a huge bowl, combining to make the perfect salad," Kois and Lowder write.

• Toll House chocolate crunch cookies by Ruth Wakefield, 1938: It may shock you to hear that the original recipe for a "Toll House" cookie, created by Wakefield to be eaten alongside ice cream at her Toll House Inn, actually resulted in a tiny, very crispy cookie. As one culinary historian explains, no one before her had mixed a butter cookie with a chocolate cookie, though both types existed separately.
• Green bean bake by Dorcas Reilly, 1955: The dish was created by a supervisor in the research and development department at the Campbell Soup Company, which wanted a quick and easy recipe using its Cream of Mushroom soup. The resulting casserole became a holiday staple a few years later when Campbell's began printing the recipe on soup cans.
• Waffles and fried chicken by Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, 1970: The actor, radio personality, anthropologist, griot, and food writer "offered a simple recipe for waffles, assumed the reader already knew where to get fried chicken, and embedded the food itself deep within a meaningful and vibrant cultural milieu—and her own idiosyncratic personal history," write the authors.
• Good old-fashioned pancakes by "Dakota Kelly," 2001: Generations ago, the recipe for pancakes may have been written on a recipe card or just known by the people who made them over and over. Not so anymore: "Much of the information that used to persist as folk wisdom, or was written in books, now is stored, cloudlike, on the internet and is thus beholden to the same vagaries of algorithmic discovery that increasingly rule our lives," the authors write. This particular pancake recipe is the most popular recipe of all time on Allrecipes, and the author says she transcribed it from her grandma's recipe book.

See the full list at Slate. (More recipes stories.)