Stuffing or Dressing? There's Only One Right Answer.
Do you know which one it is?
There have been many great debates through the ages. Does Miller Lite taste great, or is it less filling?
Did the young man jamming to his Walkman put his chocolate in the young woman’s peanut butter, or did she get peanut butter on his chocolate?
Was that dress white and gold or black and blue?
The most consequential debate of the holiday season is what to call the bread-based dish that accompanies the Thanksgiving turkey. Do you call it dressing, and if not, why are you so wrong? I know Yankees call it stuffing, but bless their hearts, they can’t help it. There are also some odd ducks in Pennsylvania who put mashed potatoes in it and call it filling, but that’s just weird and quirky. Or folksy and cute depending on how you feel about such things.
Dressing, assembled properly, is made with crumbled up day-old cornbread and biscuits, mixed with onions and spices (maybe a little celery if you roll that way), and drenched in chicken broth and melted butter. You spoon it into a Pyrex or Corningware casserole dish and cook it alongside the turkey until it is golden brown. If you are old school, you bake it in a cast iron skillet.
Stuffing, on the other hand, is that stuff Stovetop makes (make stuffing instead of potatoes) that my mom uses as a topping for her chicken casserole. I’ve heard tell of people actually putting that stuff or some other sort of bread-based concoction INSIDE the turkey chest cavity, but I’ve never actually seen it done in person.
What does history tell us about the Pilgrim’s stance on the dressing/stuffing debate? Nothing at all. Since that first Thanksgiving was all about locally sourced foodstuffs, they likely had wild rice as a carb-laden accompaniment, but it’s unknown whether that was cooked on the side or in the bird.
We do know the Romans were rather fond of stuffing stuff into roasting carcasses. They used vegetables, spices, nuts, and herbs in every sort of roast you can imagine from dormice to suckling pigs. Sometimes they stuffed carcasses with other carcasses, the precursor of the modern-day Louisiana delicacy, turducken. In more modern times, the 2010 Guinness Book of World Records declared a Bedouin wedding dish the “largest item on any menu in the world.” It’s a roasted camel stuffed with sheep, chickens, fish, and eggs. I don’t think that would fit in my oven.
Regardless of what you call it, dressing takes a decidedly regional flair depending on what part of the country you’re in and what the traditional local food scene looks like. In New England, your dressing could very well have chestnuts in it and/or oysters in areas along the coast. Dressing in the Northwest often has seafood in it as well, including clams and mussels, and San Francisco uses sourdough bread as a base for its dressing. In the South, of course, we use cornbread and biscuits for our regional variation.
A note of caution to the stuffing-curious: dressing cooked on the side is less likely to give you ptomaine poisoning* than potentially undercooked stuffing inside the turkey. Poison Control says so. No matter what you call it, it’s best to cook it on the side or make sure the bready mixture inside the turkey reaches 165 degrees.
In the interest of ensuring you all have a proper dressing recipe for Thanksgiving this year, I’ve included a family recipe from my husband’s grandmother, Maude Mason, which really is the perfect Southern Thanksgiving dressing recipe. I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to add your own flair to it, and if you want to know how to truly dress up your day-after-Thanksgiving turkey sandwich, the secret is adding a slice of dressing to your sandwich too.
The dress, by the way, was white and gold.
*Ptomaine poisoning is what the old timers called food poisoning. As in, “Make sure those canning jars seal properly so nobody dies of ptomaine poisoning when we eat those green beans.” Ptomaine is not an organism like botulinum or salmonella. I learned this today when I looked up how to spell it.
Grandmother Mason’s Cornbread Dressing
3-4 cups crumbled cornbread
3 cups dried bread crumbs, biscuits mostly
3 eggs, beaten
4 cups chicken broth
1 cup chopped celery
½ cup chopped onions
1 teaspoon poultry seasoning
1 teaspoon sage
½ teaspoon black pepper
½-1 stick butter, melted
Mix all dry ingredients together with onions and celery. Pour in broth, butter, and the three beaten eggs. Stir lightly and pour into greased pan and bake at 350 degrees for about an hour, or until set and golden brown. The consistency of the dressing before baking should be “dipping” and not “pouring.”
Notes on the recipe from Aunt Becky Page: Mother always baked her dressing in a black skillet, and it has a nice brown appearance when done. She admitted she never used a recipe, but thought this was close to how she made her dressing. One secret, she said, is to have “good” cornbread to use for your crumbs. She always greases and flours her skillet prior to placing the dressing in it for baking.
Notes on the recipe from me: My branch of the family does not like celery, so I leave it out of my version. You do you. I bake it in a 13 x 9 baking dish sprayed with Pam, so my dressing does not get the nice crust you’d get in a cast iron skillet. It’s delicious anyway. I make up two batches of Jiffy Cornbread Mix to make cornbread for the dressing and bake a tube of canned refrigerator biscuits for the other breadcrumbs.
Other Things I’ve Written Recently
Ordinary Times invited me to participate in their Best Meal Ever Week series last week. I wrote about how food makes our memories of travel and events more vivid and lasting. You can find it here.
Interesting Stuff From The Interwebs
We’ve all been there.
“The Everlasting Joy of Terrifying Children.” A look at the work of children’s horror author R.L. Stine in The Atlantic.
How are social media bubbles created? This tool shows how Twitter feeds change as you move a slider across the political spectrum. Definitely stuff to ponder here.
Don’t try this at home. Or in Yellowstone either. Man banned from Yellowstone for trying to fry chickens in hot spring.
Have a tissue handy.
As promised, I spent as much time as possible sleeping last weekend after a crazy week of election reporting, so I’m feeling much more with it this week. I’m a little in denial that Thanksgiving is only two weeks away, but it’s coming whether we’re ready or not. Next week we’ll continue the Thanksgiving food theme with a family recipe that is not only delicious, it’s award winning.
If you have subscribed to this newsletter and are not seeing it in your email inbox each week, your email system is probably filing it to your SPAM folder or in the case of Gmail to your Promotions folder. I was wondering why I wasn’t getting a copy of my own newsletter, and I found all of them in my Promotions folder along with several emails from you guys. I try to get it out to you every Thursday morning by 9:30 or 10:00, so expect it then.
Until next time,
Karla
With the exception of the amount of sage included (apparently my family REALLY likes sage), our dressing recipe is almost identical to yours. I think this explains a lot about our friendship.