20 Thanksgiving Vegetable Side Dishes

The dish that decides whether a vegan Thanksgiving feels like a compromise. This one builds the mushroom sauce from twelve ounces of cremini and a proper roux rather than opening a can, blanches the beans for four minutes so they still squeak, and puts the fried onions on for the last ten minutes only. It tastes like the one you remember, and the reason is a splash of soy sauce that was in the 1955 original all along.

Watch for: The beans have to be dried after the ice bath, not just drained. A colander leaves enough water on them to turn the sauce soupy in the oven.

Stuffing baked in a dish instead of a bird, which is where the crisp edges come from. Browned mushrooms, two teaspoons of miso and six tablespoons of butter stand in for the three things the turkey drippings used to do, and two eggs set it so it slices. Sourdough rather than sandwich bread, dried out properly first, is what stops it collapsing into paste.

Watch for: Bake it covered with foil first and uncovered only at the end. Uncovered from the start, the top browns while the middle stays wet.

A mash that holds up beside its dairy cousin without anyone asking. The trick is sequence: the potatoes are mashed with a block of vegan butter alone, and only then does the warm oat milk go in, because starch that meets liquid before fat swells into paste. It goes cold and stiff faster than a dairy mash, so hold it over a pan of simmering water rather than in the serving bowl.

Watch for: Salt the cooking water like pasta water, a full tablespoon. Salt added at the end cannot reach the inside of a cooked potato, and the mash tastes flat however much you add.

Gravy is the thing a vegetarian Thanksgiving most often gets wrong, and this one does not try to imitate a roast. A pound of cremini cooked until dry and browned, a roux, good broth, soy sauce and a splash of sherry make something the color of milky coffee that tastes deeper than most turkey gravy. Fifteen grams of dried porcini turn it from good to the thing people ask about.

Watch for: If it tastes brown and heavy but somehow boring, it is missing acid. A teaspoon of sherry vinegar or lemon at the end wakes the whole pan up.

Roasted rather than boiled sweet potatoes, two eggs to set the base, and a restrained half cup of brown sugar because roasting has already done the sweetening. The marshmallows go on for the last five to eight minutes, not the whole bake. A marshmallow company invented this dish in 1917, and the recipe leans into that rather than pretending otherwise.

Watch for: Vegan marshmallows do not melt and slump the way gelatin ones do. They brown and hold their shape, which is fine, but it is not the flat toasted sheet in the photographs.

Halved sprouts roasted cut side down on a sheet that went into the 425°F oven empty, so the faces brown hard before the middles overcook, then a balsamic glaze reduced separately. The loose leaves that fall off and go dark on the pan are the best part, not a fault. The bitter sprout most people grew up hating was bred out of existence in the 1990s.

Watch for: The glaze looks thin while it is hot and sets like toffee as it cools. Stop reducing it while it still runs off a spoon.

Southern cooks bake this and never a stuffing, and the difference is what goes into the pan: a mixture wet enough to pour, which bakes into a crisp top over a soft, sage-heavy middle with dark chewy edges. Chickpea flour whisked into warm broth holds it together where eggs would have. Its roots run back through West African grain cooking, older than anything else on the table.

Watch for: The cornbread must be unsweetened. A boxed mix or a bread-basket recipe carries enough sugar to turn the whole pan toward dessert, and nothing at the seasoning stage can pull it back.

The cooked cranberry dish, and the argument for making it yourself is ten minutes and three ingredients. A quarter teaspoon of salt, which almost every version leaves out, is what keeps it tart rather than sharp and hollow, and holding back half the zest until the pan is off the heat is what keeps it tasting of orange rather than of jam. Some berries stay whole, and they are meant to.

Watch for: It is loose in the pan and sets only as it cools. Cooking it until it looks thick on the stove gives you a brick by dinner.

Thin slices of Yukon Gold in a soy milk béchamel seasoned with miso, nutritional yeast and fresh nutmeg, simmered briefly on the stove before they go into the dish. No cashews and no lemon juice, and the second omission is the point: acid keeps potato slices firm no matter how long they bake, which is why so many vegan versions come out of the oven still crunchy.

Watch for: Slice to one thickness. A 6 mm slice needs twice as long as a 3 mm one, so a mixed tray gives you mush and crunch in the same forkful.

Purple, yellow, white and orange carrots on one tray, and the color is the whole point, so the recipe is mostly about protecting it: the honey goes on in the last minutes because fructose burns at oven temperature, and a little lemon stops the sweetness reading as flat sugar. Orange carrots are the newcomer; the rainbow ones are the seventeenth-century original.

Watch for: Keep the purple carrots apart from the pale ones until they are on the tray. Their color runs in any wet bowl and turns the white and yellow ones pink.

Spoonbread's Midwestern cousin, creamy in the middle and just set at the edges, and the kind of dish that gets requested again at Christmas. The usual shortcut fails a vegetarian on a single hidden ingredient, so this version starts from flour, cornmeal, sugar and leavening you already own, with the two cans of corn and the sour cream going in exactly as they always did.

Watch for: Let the melted butter cool for five minutes before it meets the eggs. Straight off the heat it scrambles them on contact and leaves threads through the batter.

On Southern tables macaroni and cheese is a side, and at a vegetarian Thanksgiving it earns the slot twice over. The sauce comes out of a blender rather than a saucepan, and a spoonful of white miso and a little Dijon are what stop it tasting nutty and bland. It comes out beige, because that is the honest color of what goes into it, and the orange in most photographs is something else entirely.

Watch for: The sauce will seize into a paste the moment it hits hot drained pasta. That is normal; the reserved pasta water is what loosens it, a splash at a time.

The same roasted sweet potato base as the marshmallow version, for the half of the table that thinks marshmallows belong in a bag. A buttery pecan streusel goes on instead, made with softened rather than melted butter so it bakes into clusters. Roasted potatoes are sweeter than boiled, so this often ends up sweeter than the marshmallow dish people were avoiding.

Watch for: Squeeze a handful of the streusel before it goes on. If it falls apart as sand, the butter was too cold to rub in and it will slide off the finished casserole.

Creamed corn thickened the way it was before the can existed: with the milk scraped from the cobs, a little oat milk and one tablespoon of cornstarch as insurance. The can in every American pantry contains no cream either. If it is November and fresh corn is gone, frozen corn on the cob is the better fallback and the recipe says how to handle it.

Watch for: Cornstarch does not set until the pan reaches a real simmer. Held at a bare steam it stays thin for as long as you stand there.

The Velveeta dish rebuilt from the sauce up. The broccoli goes into a hot oven before it goes anywhere near the dish, because a raw floret is nine tenths water and every drop ends up under the casserole, and every shred of vegan cheese is melted into the béchamel rather than scattered on top, which is why it does not turn to rubber. A layer of crushed crackers finishes it the Southern way.

Watch for: Take the pan off the heat before the vegan cheese shreds go in. Over direct heat they turn grainy and split rather than melting.

A whole head steamed until the stems give, dried off, and processed with sliced garlic cooked gently in butter and a block of cream cheese. It is a 250-year-old French purée that lost its potato, not a diet substitute, and it goes under gravy as well as any mash. Twenty-five minutes from whole head to bowl.

Watch for: Dry the cauliflower before it goes in the processor. Steam leaves water in every crevice of the curd, and it comes out as soup.

The raw one: a bag of cranberries and a whole orange, skin and all, ground in the food processor with sugar and left in the fridge for four hours to become sauce. It is bright, sharp, faintly bitter from the peel, and it tastes nothing like the cooked sauce further up the list, which is the reason to serve both. It gets better on the second day.

Watch for: Grind the orange first, on its own, and add the cranberries after. Everything in at once gives a purple slush while the machine is still working on the peel.

Shredded cabbage and carrot in a tangy plant-based dressing, crunchy and cold against a plate of casseroles and mash. A rich Thanksgiving plate needs something with acid and snap to cut it, and a bowl of this does more for a Thanksgiving plate than most people expect. Made the day before, it takes no oven and no attention.

Watch for: Salt the shredded cabbage and let it drain for half an hour before dressing it, then squeeze it. Undrained cabbage leaks water into the dressing and the bowl is soup by the time it reaches the table.

Crisp romaine, croutons and a cashew dressing with the salt and sharpness of the original and none of the anchovy. The green thing on a table that otherwise has very little green, and the twenty minutes it takes can be found while the casseroles are in the oven. Dress it at the table, not before.

Watch for: Make the dressing and the croutons ahead, but keep the lettuce dry and undressed until the last minute. Dressed romaine wilts within twenty minutes and the croutons go soft.

Cherry tomatoes, cucumber, peppers and red onion in a sharp dressing, left to sit until the onion has softened and the vegetables have given up a little juice into it. It is the sharpest dish on the table and the easiest, and the flavor improves in the fridge, which makes it the obvious dish to hand to whoever asked what they could bring.

Watch for: Cut the onion thinner than seems right and give the bowl at least 45 minutes before serving. Thick raw onion never softens in the marinade and shouts over everything else on the plate.