Stuffing Versus Dressing

   

  "Doing a little research, I found “Dressing” or “Stuffing” edges out the baked potato as the most beloved American side dish. I suspect that has something to do with an association with treasured family memories…Grandma’s milk gravy, Aunt B’s pumpkin pie and Mom’s green bean casserole. make better memory mates then a grilled rib-eye. Maybe it’s tryptophan induced brain-washing.  

     Wikipedia unpretentiously describes stuffing as… “often a starch, used to fill a cavity in another food item.”  Hmmm…Factual I guess…but hardly the appealing up-on-a-pedestal prose this prized staple of precious holiday meal memories deserves.

       

     The dressing vs. stuffing debate seems to depend on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line your dining room table is on. In Maryland, I once asked a dinner mate to pass the stuffing and she quickly let me know that, “Southerner’s call it dressing…stuffing is just too rude of a word for the dinner table.” She was very sweet about her correction, but prefaced it with a “bless your heart”…and we all know that is southern slang for “you idiot.” I have also heard that stuffing is what you cook “stuffed” inside the turkey…dressing is cooked in a pan on the side. At our house there was always way more prepared than would fit inside the bird so we ended up with both -in the bird and in the pan…two names for the same dish seems a bit unwieldy and makes asking someone to pass a second helping a bit tricky.

      

     Dressing/stuffing is one of those historic handed-down-for-centuries-family-specific kinds of dishes. I have tried many times to experiment with new styles or recipe, adopting the regional traditions of wherever I was living, cornbread or oysters in Maryland…chorizo in Arizona… only to be met with a painful, slow to come exasperated sigh…“Fine… as long as we make Mom’s too.”

      

     The most memorable thing I remember about my Mother’s dressing is that she always mixed it right in the kitchen sink, so the first person up on Thanksgiving morning got stuck scrubbing and scouring. This was followed by endless chopping of celery and onions.  Maybe it just seemed endless because we kept taking breaks to stop and go watch the Macy’s parade. Actually, the real dressing ritual began on Monday or Tuesday when we would tear up loaves of bread and scatter it on cookie sheets to hang out in the oven and get stale for Thursday.  This was the only time cheap white bread appeared in our house."

From "Warm Hearth: Comforting Love-filled Recipes for Family, Friends and Cozy Fireplace Afternoons" by Mango Dragonfly

www.Mangodragonfly.com