Stuffing

Stuffing, cooked inside a roasting bird or on its own in a pan, can be made with cornbread, breadcrumbs, wild rice, cereal, oysters, or sausage. There aren’t two cooks in America who make it the exact same way, but some preferences are regional: In Louisiana and east Texas and the North Country of the Great Lakes, the essential ingredient is the local crop – rice. We’ve sampled hazelnut-based stuffing in Oregon and pecan stuffing in New Mexico. To a vast majority of cooks, bread is stuffing’s foundation. Plain, ordinary white bread – as crumbs, cubes, or shreds – is part of many traditional recipes, except in the South and in seriously Yankee kitchens of the Northeast, where cornbread rules. New England cooks might use cornbread that is muffin-sweet. In Dixie, you’ll likely find cornbread stuffing flecked with cracklins (crunchy bits of deep-fried pork skin). In places with a rich Italian or Portuguese heritage, expect sausage to add super savor to the dish; likewise in the Southwest, Mexican chorizo can contribute peppery punch. Pennsylvania Dutch cooks add mashed potatoes to their bread stuffing and call it filling. It is! Do you call stuffing dressing? Up until Victorian times, everybody called it stuffing. At the turn of the last century, manners mistresses decided that the term stuffing was crude, and that polite people should demonstrate their good breeding by using the nicer-sounding term, dressing. For many people today, the difference simply is that stuffing is what you make inside the bird, while dressing is what you make in a pan.