My Thanksgiving Cornbread-Biscuit Dressing Is Not Stuffing
The Southern-style Thanksgiving dressing that I grew up eating is not like the stuffing my Midwestern and Northeastern coworkers grew up eating. In fact, despite having been told that the two holiday staples are synonymous, I'm not sure that's true at all. Stuffing, which is just savory bread pudding (or worse, a bunch of seasoned bread baked inside a bird), is laden with crusty cubes, nuts, dried fruit, and—so strangely—sausage. Sometimes even oysters. It's literally so weird. It's not a side dish—add a green salad and it's a complete meal.
Buttery layers mean nothing to me.
My family's dressing, on the other hand, is a spongy mix of crumbled cornbread and day-old biscuits, hit hard with dried sage, sautéed celery and onions, and stock. It is, in essence, spoonbread: soft and herby and begging for gravy. With a little cranberry sauce spooned over, it's the perfect side dish for turkey. It is, frankly, my only Thanksgiving essential.
The one problem with dressing is that it isn't particularly pretty. It is a flat plain of sage-speckled, greenish-beige food. It tastes delicious, but it's not quite ready for Instagram. And since everyone needs to feel pretty sometimes, I decided to give the classic version a little update. But first I had to figure out exactly how to make the original. You see, even though I've made it, alongside my mother, for years, it wasn't as easy as fishing out a withered recipe card passed through the generations to figure out how to adjust the ratios. When my family makes dressing on Thanksgiving, we do it in a way that my mother calls "by-gosh-by-golly" cooking—meaning that we just toss the appropriate ingredients together until it "looks right." So I replicated that process, adding each ingredient until it looked and tasted right, jotting down measurements along the way. After that, I was ready to make some tweaks.
To give the dish more visual appeal, I tore the bread and biscuits into larger pieces, instead of crumbling them completely. I added a bit less stock so the dressing would sit more upright in the pan. I baked the mix in a cast-iron skillet, even if the original casserole dish is more practical (easier to store in case you want to make it ahead).
What turned out was a craggly-topped mash-up. It was moist, tender, and spoonbread-y on the bottom, but the stalagmites of biscuit and cornbread that jutted out of the top had become toasted and crisp like a more traditional "stuffing." My colleague Anna smartly suggested adding a dash of vinegar to the liquid ingredients—you can hardly taste it, but it brightens the whole thing up. She also suggested adding a few additional herbs, but those I kept tried and true: dried sage only (and if you come to my house, I'll double up on it).
What I like best about this dressing—no matter how you choose to put it together—is that it comes with a built-in Thanksgiving Day breakfast. Since the recipe only uses half a batch of cathead biscuits, the other half is free for nibbling while you get the cooking started. Or, you could use biscuits and cornbread that you've made several days ahead. And if you want to call it stuffing—well, you do you. Just, please don't put it in the bird.
Skillet Dressing with Cornbread and Biscuits
