Weekly Dish

Dressing (not stuffing) is a staple at my family’s holiday events. My grandmother makes it every year, and every year, the aunts sit around and talk about how somebody needs to learn how to make it like she does (much like all of the other family recipes, there are no official written instructions).

So last Christmas, my sister and I followed Grandmother around the kitchen, snapping photos and scribbling down notes about what she was doing. This year, David’s brother and his wife are sharing Thanksgiving dinner with us, so Hannah and I are attempting to replicate the famous dressing.

I should say a word about southern cornbread dressing: it is not very similar to stuffings of other kinds. It’s more kin to a savory bread pudding, moistened by eggs and stock until it can be pressed into a dish, baked, and cut into squares. The oven browns the top into a lovely crunch, which gives way to a soft cloud of egg-enriched cornbread, flecked with celery, onion, and scallions.

I’m recording Grandmother’s instructions here, as Elizabeth and I observed, but after Hannah and I have attempted to follow them, I promise to update with more specifics. Grandmother’s been doing this so long, she can almost move around the kitchen combining ingredients blindfolded, so quantifying what she was doing was quite a challenge.

Grandmother’s Cornbread Dressing

1 batch cornbread (she makes it with buttermilk, but I don’t have the exact recipe. I’ll post the one Hannah and I use later, but Grandmother says the Jiffy mix works in a pinch)
Half of a bunch of celery
2 yellow onions
Olive oil and butter
Half a bunch of scallions or green onions
6 eggs
1 bag Pepperidge Farm stuffing
A handful of Saltine crackers, crackers
2 1/2 - 3 cups chicken or turkey stock (we roasted a chicken earlier in the week, so we would have homemade)
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Heat the oil and butter (enough to properly sweat the vegetables) in a skillet. Dice the celery and yellow onion, and slice the green onion, white and green parts. Saute the celery and onion in the oil and butter over medium-high heat until translucent. Add the green onions and cook for another minute or two.

In a large bowl, crumble up the cornbread. Beat the eggs and mix them in. Dump in the soft veggies, the stuffing mix, and the crushed crackers. Stir with a long-handled wooden spoon until well-combined.

Here comes the tricky part. You have to pour in the stock until the dressing reaches the “right” consistency. This is what it should look like (only half that quantity):

You can pour more stock on top of the dressing as it cooks if it looks like it’s getting to be too dry, but you want to be able to easily mold the mixture into a casserole dish. It should stick together without a problem, but you don’t want it to be soupy.

Press into a casserole, and bake for 45 minutes, or until it browns around the edges.

Recipe courtesy of the cutest, sweetest Grandmother I know (and my cute, sweet sister, Elizabeth, who helped record it):

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Posted: Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006 at 9:25 am Filed under: On the Side, Basic Recipes, Family, Holidays, Bread. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.