10 Favorite New England Recipes from the Yankee Archives

If you look at food beyond what’s on your plate, it can be a window through which you learn about history, art, culture, economics, family, and geography. Consider our Yankee recipe archives: Each dish represents a moment in time and offers a glimpse of daily life as it was shaped by forces large and small. In the postwar 1940s, for instance, our editors praised the “wayside inns” serving classic New England fare like chicken potpie. Convenience foods came to the fore in the 1950s, with Ritz crackers being used as the topping for an iconic baked scallops dish. In the 1980s, Yankee’s recipes became markedly more global, and we see Portuguese dishes like kale and chouriço soup woven into the fabric of regional cooking.

In celebration of the magazine’s 90th anniversary, I’ve compiled a list of favorite recipes from our archives. So join me in a little time travel through the decades, and get cooking! (In the interest of reliability, some recipes did need to be adjusted to appeal to modern tastes, but all remain true to the spirit of the original dish.)

1930s: Maine Potato Doughnuts with Cranberry Glaze

Potatoes are still the primary crop in northern Maine, and in the 1930s, the state was producing about 15 percent of the country’s spuds. Mainers incorporated potatoes into everything, and in the May 1937 issue alone, Yankee featured 100 potato recipes (albeit written in short paragraph form). If you’ve never tried mashed potatoes in doughnuts before, you’ll find that they create a wonderful texture: lighter and more tender.

1940s: New England Skillet Chicken Pie

In Yankee’s February 1948 issue, longtime “Food and Household” columnist Nancy Dixon wrote, “You’ll surely want to make plans to visit the delightful White Turkey Inn at Danbury, Connecticut. This typically New England inn caters to the discriminating tastes of New Englanders with true Yankee food!” The original recipe lists “pie pastry” as one of the ingredients—back then, Dixon could assume everyone knew how to make a crust. Worry not, modern reader: I’ll explain how.

1950s: Baked Scallops with Ritz Cracker Topping

Ritz crackers were introduced in 1934, and by the 1950s they had become so popular that they even made their way into a culinary curiosity called “Mock Apple Pie” (the “apples” being crackers). Here’s a much better idea: The crackers make a perfect and classic topping for all kinds of seafood, including this popular baked scallops dish.

1960s: Molasses-Raisin Bars

In the ’60s, Yankee ran a column of reader-submitted recipes called “My Favorite Recipe.” Mrs. Louis W. Jackman of Bethel, Connecticut, earned a spot in the January 1969 issue with a spiced molasses bar recipe that’s more cakelike than barlike, to my contemporary sensibility. I adjusted the ratios to get a gooier texture, but the cozy warmth of this recipe is just the same.

1970s: Anadama Bread

In the 1970s, home bread baking fit neatly into the “natural” food movement of the time, but Anadama bread goes back much further. It evolved out of the first bread baked by the English colonists, called “Thirded Bread,” which combined cornmeal, rye flour, and hard-to-grow wheat flour. Over time, molasses and milk were added and wheat flour became the dominant grain.

1980s: Portuguese Kale and Chouriço Soup

In the 1980s, Yankee ran a series of culinary profiles called “Great New England Cooks.” This opened our food coverage up to a wider range of cuisines: Lebanese, Greek, Hungarian, Chinese, Portuguese. For the latter, we featured Puddie Gilmette’s recipe for classic caldo verde.

1990s: Louisa May Alcott’s Fruit Slump

Inspired by Alcott’s signature apple slump, a recipe she loved so much that she supposedly named her house after it, this easy dish from Yankee’s August 1991 issue yields a cozy cobbler-style dessert that makes excellent use of end-of-summer nectarines and raspberries.

2000s: Pumpkin Chiffon Pie

I first made this pie when food writer Jane Walsh submitted it as part of a Thanksgiving recipe story in 2003, and I’ve made it at the holidays ever since. It has all the flavor of regular pumpkin pie, but with the loveliest cloudlike filling and an earthy walnut-enriched graham cracker crust.

2010s: Stovetop Clambake

During the height of the chef-as-celebrity decade that was the 2010s, I met the talented Matt Tropeano, then executive chef at Pain D’Avignon in Hyannis (and now Chatham and Osterville). His take on the classic clambake, cooked with much less fuss on the stovetop, is the perfect summer feast for those of us without access to a private beach. Adding white wine and aromatics (leeks, celery, etc.) to the cooking liquid replaces the smoky flavor of a traditional clambake with something equally delicious.

BONUS RECIPE: Classic Durgin-Park Baked Beans

Nary a decade has gone by that Yankee failed to publish a recipe for baked beans. This recipe is inspired by the beans served at the late, lamented Boston restaurant Durgin-Park. We merely added a small onion and some vinegar to deepen the flavor.

This feature was originally published as “Birthday Plates” in the September/October 2025 issue of Yankee.

Amy Traverso

Amy Traverso is the senior food editor at Yankee and cohost of the public television series Weekends with Yankee, a coproduction with GBH. Previously, she was food editor at Boston magazine and an associate food editor at Sunset magazine. Her work has also been published in The Boston Globe, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure, and she has appeared on Hallmark Home & Family, The Martha Stewart Show, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Amy is the author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, which was a finalist for the Julia Child Award for best first-time author and won an IACP Cookbook Award in the “American” category.

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