What even is stuffing? The "stuffing" that people here in the U.S. commonly have at our
November feast of Thanksgiving is a savory bread pudding. That is, a mass of wet bread.
It's weird when I think how old I was before I figured that out. Like, we had stuffing
every Thanksgiving and Christmas growing up, I loved it. Had no idea what it was. You could
have told me it's Soylent Brown, but it's bread — mostly bread, wet bread. Here's
some less easily answered questions: If this is stuffing, is this stuffing, even though
it's not in the bird or is it dressing or are they both dressing? Why do some people
say "dressing" instead of stuffing? Why am I saying stuffing and not dressing? Is all
dressing or stuffing really made of bread? And why would we have wet bread with our chicken
or Turkey in the first place?
Also, how do you make it? Come, friends. Let us seek these answers together. Putting things
inside meats is a very old practice. People generally point to this first century Roman
cookbook as the first written example — lots of stuffed meats in here, but surely this
is a practice millennia older than Rome or writing. I reckon there are two conditions
of pre-modern cooking that would have made stuffing advantageous: scarcity of ingredients
and scarcity of tools. Virtually all food is vastly more plentiful today than it has
been for most of human history, but especially so meat. If you're in a situation where you've
got way more hungry mouths than beasts to slay, you're looking for ways of stretching
your meat, making a little bit of meat feed a lot more people. Soup or stew is a great
way of stretching meat. All the animal's nutrition stays in the broth and it flavors all the
other stuff in the broth.
But if you're roasting your meat, you're sacrificing much more of its precious nutrition to the
fire. All of that melting fat and protein-rich juice is just dripping away. One way to salvage
it is to put a tray of some kind under the beast and put some absorbent food on that
tray — potatoes, in this case. But instead, put in a batter of wheat, flour, eggs, and
milk, and you'd have Yorkshire pudding in there. The drip tray with edible stuff on
it addresses our pre-modern scarcity of ingredient problem. It doesn't really address our scarcity
of tool problem, when one considers that having a flame- and water-safe tray of some kind
to put under your food is not something that humans could have taken for granted until
pretty recently, at least not most humans. And hey, why would you be roasting meat over
a fire in the first place?
Certainly one reason might've been that you didn't have a pot with which to make soup
or stew. Putting absorbent food into the meat solves all these problems. Whatever you've
got: some grains, some bread, some dried fruits, some tubers, some rice. You just jam it in
there and it absorbs a lot of the goodness that would otherwise have just been wasted
when it dripped away. And then the meat itself becomes the cooking vessel. You don't need
a pot or a tray. The meat is the pot. For that same reason, you might put nonabsorbent
things inside meat, too —like other meat, little scraps of flesh, or fat or organs that
you've got. Like, you try cooking a brain on a spit over a fire. It wouldn't work. You've
gotta stick it inside something else. And there are tons of historic recipes for meat
stuffed into other meats, but they usually have some absorbent plant material in there
as well.
And stale bread is really the perfect thing for the job. Until the 20th century, most
Americans, for example, would have eaten way more bread than anything else. And that bread
would have not contained modern dough conditioners that delay staling. It would have gone hard
and dry within a day of baking, and stuffing would have been a great way to use it. When
I make stuffing, I have to do something that my ancestors never did, which is intentionally
dry out my bread so that it can absorb the poultry juice that's coming. You could do
that by cutting or tearing up your bread, laying it out on a pan, and then just leaving
that on top of the fridge or something for a few days. But with dough conditioners, even
that might not work so great. I usually just put it in the oven at like 300 F or 150 C
for at least half an hour.
During that time, I can finely chop my onions, carrots and celery. The celery is crucial
for the classic Thanksgiving taste from my childhood. I just sharpened my knife, so it's
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Thank you, Harry's. So we've got our veggies sliced up. You gotta remember to stir up the
bread a few times while you're baking it or the stuff on the bottom will not dry out.
When it's done, you can easily grind it into even finer pieces. Remember that it's going
to rehydrate and expand in the stuffing. So you want the pieces pretty small. You don't
have to put an egg in your stuffing, but it does help bind it together.
Egg is in bread puddings of all kinds, for that very reason. I'll dump in some dried
bread, vegetables, seasonings. To me, this is the flavor of Thanksgiving: the combination
of dried sage and dried thyme, a little pinch of salt, and mix it up. And here we can see
why large birds, such as chicken and turkeys, have always been so likely to be stuffed.
They already have a hole in them — the cavity where the bird's organs used to be, and could
be again, if you chop up your giblets and put them into your stuffing. You can also
put in some sausage — a lot of people do that. Some people put in oysters — oysters
are often paired with breadcrumbs because they put out so much liquid that needs to
be absorbed. The problem, of course, with stuffing the cavity of the bird is that the
cavity formerly housed the digestive system, which is the source of all of that pathogenic
bacteria w e got to worry about with poultry.
And the cavity is center-mass on this thing, which means the stuffing deep in there is
going to be the last place the heat reaches. As you can see, my stuffing has not yet reached
a safe temperature while my white meat is more than done. This is why the United States
department of agriculture among other authorities recommends against actually stuffing the bird.
You can instead do what I do every Thanksgiving and melt a huge quantity of butter in a pan.
Then I'll cook my chopped onion, carrots and celery until they're most-of-the-way soft,
stirring constantly. Dump in the dry bread, thyme and sage, big pinch of salt. Crack in
a couple of eggs for binding, and then enough cartoned chicken broth to moisten it a bit.
The wetter, you like your stuffing, the more broth you should stir in. This is going to
be on the wet side. It should be more crumbly if you like it dry. Throw it in the oven,
uncovered if you want that crispy brown top, which I absolutely do. And 30 to 45 minutes
later, it's done.
I prefer this method because it's safer, and because it can make way more stuffing this
way, also with more browned surface area. But a lot of people would argue that is not
stuffing, because we did not actually stuff it into the bird. It should actually be called
dressing. Stuffing is made in the bird, dressing is made outside the bird. But I think a lot
of the informed people who would say that are speaking prescriptively rather than descriptively,
which is fine. They're saying this is a semantic distinction that we should use so that we
can more clearly communicate what exactly we're cooking and eating. But if you want
to address this topic descriptively, it's a lot more complicated, because if you look
at historic recipes from the 19th and early 20th centuries, dressing and stuffing are
used interchangeably. They're still used interchangeably. They're both used to describe foods cooked
within the bird or without the bird. What we can say for certain is there's a regional
distinction here in the U.S. Here's people searching Google for Thanksgiving stuffing
versus Thanksgiving dressing.
The American Southeast is dialectically very distinct from the rest of the country. And
down here, most people say dressing. I say stuffing, because I'm originally from up here
in Pennsylvania. There is a commonly held belief that the reason they favored the term
dressing down here in the South is because dressing is less profane than stuffing. The
South historically is more socially conservative than the North, and the term stuffing conjures
positively scandalous images of an object penetrating a body between its legs. Heaven
forbid. That's a fun story, but for what it's worth, I can find no scholarly or primary
source to back it up. Lots of articles on the internet attribute this to an article
on the History Channel website, that itself cites no primary sources. I would like for
that story to be true, but I have no idea if it actually is true. What I do know is
that the term dressing more broadly refers to all of the actions necessary to prepare
an animal for consumption.
It's a very old term, used in that sense. It's still used by hunters to describe gutting
the animals, skinning it, plucking it. It's a pretty natural leap to refer to all of the
stuff that you put on the animal to prepare it as a noun — a substance called dressing
that results from the act of dressing. Maybe they say dressing in the South because the
South is historically a lot more rural, and therefore terms used by hunters and such were
more likely to be retained in the general dialect. Just an informed guess on my part.
And here's another informed guess: If we look on Google Ngrams, we can see that the term
"turkey stuffing" rapidly overtakes "turkey dressing" in popularity right around 1970.
What happened around then? Well, a woman named Ruth Siems invented Stove Top Stuffing, the
first mass-market stuffing in a box.
She was a northerner, so naturally she called it stuffing. Though, ironically, the virtue
of her invention is that it allowed stuffing to be prepared entirely outside the bird,
entirely in the pan, on the stove top. And therefore many people would say it's dressing
and not stuffing, but it's Stove Top Stuffing. That's the brand name. I'm using the Pepperidge
Farm imitator by the way, because that's what I grew up eating. It's still my favorite stuffing.
Sorry, not sorry. Again, this is just a guess on my part, but it does seem to me that the
national marketing campaign for that insanely popular product could have pushed the whole
language, in this country at least, toward using stuffing instead of dressing. Whatever
you call it, happy Thanksgiving, and go get that wet bread.
Feed me, Seymour.