In particular, notice Hannah Glasse’s recipe, “To dress a turkey of fowl to perfection.” It calls for making a forcemeat of pounded veal, suet, bread, mushrooms, morels, truffles, and herbs, binding it with eggs, and then (this seems implied, but not stated) stuffing and baking the deboned turkey with this forcemeat.

The recipe does not use the term “stuffing” or “stuff.” It does use the term “force-meat..” And it specifically uses it in the context of “dressing” the turkey.

Mrs. Glasse’s 1784 cookbook had a tremendous influence on Southern cooks. It’s possible to attribute the term “dressing” in Southern cooking directly to her, I think–if you accept that “dressing” a turkey is a logical linguistic step from “to dress” a turkey.

I also think it’s entirely possible that Mrs. Glasse’s recipe for dressing a turkey is reflecting a usage that was common in some sectors of English cookery and culture at the time, and which was adopted by Virginians, whose culture became the template for Southern culture in general.

My thoughts, for what it’s worth. I’m Southern, by the way, and have always called the accompaniment to the turkey the “dressing,” whether it was baked in the turkey itself or as a separate dish. My mother also used to tell me that turkey was far less common when she was growing up, as a holiday dish. What was common was chicken parboiled in highly flavored broth, then baked in a pan of dressing to which the chicken pieces were added.

Otherwise, I loved the references to measures of the size of a “hen’s egg” or “walnut.” Very interesting reading, Tom.

Thanks for the response! You’ve spotted the key weakness in my research: it was not often that someone called something “stuffing” unless it was getting stuffed in a cavity (although, again, it was not often that dressing or stuffing was cooked outside a cavity, period).

I did omit from my post a few pieces of evidence that are relevant to the point because I thought they were a little tenuous. First, there was actually another reference to something as “stuffing” that was fried and served on the side of the bird, 20 years before Hearn. It is found in JM Sanderson’s The Complete Cook (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1864.):

This stuffing may be used for a turkey, with an equal quantity of sausage meat parboiled; rub them well together, and keep out half a pound, to which add an egg to make up into balls and fry, and lay round the dish as a garnish.

But your objection that Hearn doesn’t refer to these fried balls as “stuffing” applies here as well.

More interesting is Rufus Estes’s Good Things to Eat (Chicago: Rufus Estes, 1911). He gives a recipe entitled “Stuffing for Fowls”:

Trim off the crusts from two pounds of bread, put the crumbs into a basin of cold water, soak it for five minutes then turn it onto a sieve and drain well, pressing out the water with a plate. When nearly dry cut the bread into small squares and season it well with powdered sage, salt and pepper. Warm one breakfast cupful of butter, beat in an egg and three teacupfuls of warm water and pour it over the bread, stirring it lightly, but not mashing it. Allow it to soak for ten minutes and the stuffing will then be ready to serve. (42)

The “stuffing” will “be ready to serve”! But it hasn’t been stuffed in anything, except maybe into a bowl. You might respond that this is a stuffing recipe and “to serve” is shorthand that assumes the stuffing will be put inside the fowl before it is actually served. But, in the very next recipe —”Stuffing for Goose”— Estes concludes in a different way:

Roast fifty chestnuts, using care not to let them burn, remove the inner and outer peels and chop them fine. Chop the goose’s liver, put it in a saucepan with one-half tablespoonful of chopped parsley, shallots, chives, and a little garlic and about two ounces of butter, fry them for a few minutes, then put in the chopped chestnuts with one pound of sausage meat, and fry the whole for fifteen minutes longer. The stuffing is then ready for use.

“For use”! For use in stuffing a goose presumably, and not ready to serve. This is not an isolated case in Estes, either; in the long list of stuffing recipes he offers, some are for “use” and some “ready to serve”.

Am I reading too much into these two words in Estes? I thought so when I wrote the post, which is why I left it out. On further reflection, though, it seems more significant. Then again, this is just one book among many. But if Estes thought stuffing could be cooked absent of any fowl, he would certainly be in line with the suits at Kraft and many cooks today — including your SE colleague Erin Zimmer, apparently. I will continue to maintain that people should call their broth and fat-soaked seasoned bread cubes —regardless of where they were cooked— whatever they want.

I may be wrong, but I believe that stuffing is a subclass of dressing. IE, “dressing” doesn’t become “stuffing” until it is actually stuffed into something. So if you use the word dressing, you’d never be wrong, but to call something that hasn’t been stuffed into anything “stuffing,” is inaccurate, whether Stove Top or or Lafcadio Hearn states it.

If you look back over your supporting documentation, you’ll find that only in one case it is called “stuffing” when it is not actually stuffed into something (La Cuisine Creole), and even in that source, the terminology is a little ambiguous, since the first recipe claims to be a “stuffing for turkey,” indicating that it can, and should be used to fill the cavity in the turkey (despite the alternate he presents of frying it separately), and that the second recipe is titled, “nice forcemeat, for stuffings, etc,” indicating that the recipe is a recipe for forcemeat that could possibly be used as a stuffing, but not that the recipe itself is called a “stuffing.”

Even in Miss Beecher’s recipe, the dressing is a dressing until it gets stuffed into something, at which point she refers to it as “stuffing.”

So, to summarize:

I was wrong in SeriousEats to claim that dressings are always a baked bread casserole, since a stuffing is clearly a type of dressing, to call something that has not been stuffed into something else a “stuffing” is incorrect.

Best,
Kenji Lopez-Alt