What in God’s name has happened to stuffing as a cultural institution? It used to be that stuffing was a delicious, moist, bread crumby thing eaten alongside turkey at Thanksgiving and Christmas, but it’s evolved into an AMBOMINATION!
When did people decide that it was ok to throw everything but the kitchen sink into stuffing? The celery movement was bad enough - big, thick, stringy chunks of the vile stuff began appearing in stuffing over the past few years - disgusting and infuriating. Soon, marshmallows, fruit, nuts, meat, and so on have begun to appear.
But yesterday was the last straw - Thanksgiving at my in-laws’.
I don’t even know where to begin with the stuffing - it was based around the traditional breadcrumb setup, but then included (canned) crab meat, those candy pieces that go in fruitcake, whole slimy mushrooms, big pieces of hard carrot, and whole cashews. I’m not even joking. It tasted like crabby robitussin sweetened with sweet-n-low.
When I first read the title of the thread, I thought you had omitted a word that “revolting” and “stuffing” was describing.
My five-year-old daughter asked me what stuffing was yesterday. I started explaining that it looks gross, sounds gross (wet bread? barf!), but tastes pretty good. Turns out she was asking me what the stuffing in her teddy bear was made out of.
The stuffing that you had? Ye Gods. That wasn’t stuffing, that was Satan’s toe jam.
You married into the wrong family? Because frankly I think the stuff you described says more about the cooks in the family than about stuffing as an institution.
Man, that does sound revolting. However, some of those “ingredients” are somewhat close to certain things that can be added to stuffing and it’s still good, IMO:
Crabmeat? Maybe they were thinking of making double-duty stuffing: Thursday for the turkey; Saturday for the stuffed shrimp.
Candy fruitcake pieces: some stuffing recipes do include raisins. Maybe they were out of raisins and thought fruitcake candy was close enough?
Mushrooms: should have been sliced and sauteed. Sounds like they used whole canned mushrooms.
Carrot: no idea.
Cashews: well they probably thought, “Oh the recipe says 'chestnuts.” Hmm, we don’t have any but we do have cashews from that time last year when we had that Chinese Food Festival. Chestnuts, cashew nuts, they’re all nuts, right? Yeah, let’s just use the cashews!"
If they actually just thought all those things would taste good together, well then god save you all.
Cashew nuts in an otherwise-plain stuffing work very well indeed. The OP’s description suggests the ‘more must be better’ solution, which is rarely right.
My husband and I were talking yesterday about last year’s Stuffing Fiasco, in which his cousin made some type of curried stuffing, and then proceeded to bake the everloving crap out of it until it was nothing more than curry-flavored wood chips.
I loved having Thanksgiving at our house this year.
My stuffing includes green apple, walnuts, celery, mushrooms, plus the usual crumbs and spices. Everyone loved it. Clearly you can include lots of stuff and still have it taste good. I think it’s all about the cook, not necessarily the ingredients (though the candied fruit bits sound nasty as hell, I have to agree with you there).
A relative, I think my aunt, makes a stuffing with sausage and I think chestnuts, and it’s incredibly good. Anything else is just “wet bread” to me now.
Celery? Nuts? ‘Bad enough’? ‘Past few years’? Celery has always been in our stuffing; and I was born in The Space Age, to tell you how old I am! Nuts were also common in some people’s stuffing when I was a kid, and I’ve noticed it’s very common in the past couple of decades.
And my mom used to put oysters in the stuffing! ick
Ha! My aunt makes this pineapple stuffing that only she and my uncle eat. One year she was working at a cafeteria and saw the workers there using oven bags. My aunt, being something of a ditz, thought they were using saran wrap and put the stuffing in the oven covered with plastic wrap. Which, of course, melted all over the stuffing.
Which she still ate-she just cut around the melted plastic. :smack:
My dad made up a test batch of stuffing (in a cast-iron skillet) the night before Thanksgiving. It included chorizo.
He asked me to test it. Trying to politely explain that stuffing is supposed to taste like the dish we all grew up with, I tapped into cricket slang and said that it “just isn’t stuffing.”
“No,” he agreed. “I haven’t made the bird yet. It’s dressing.”
He put the vile stuff in the turkeythe next day. Mom made Stove Top.
I use my Oklahoma grandmother’s cornbread stuffing recipe. It’s at least 50 years old, probably older, and it starts off with onions and celery sauteed in butter. In order to make it right you have to bake the cornbread from scratch the night before.
But, yes, I agree most additions to stuffing are disgusting.
Call me crazy, but I actually like Stove Top or Butterball box mix. Maybe it’s just my father’s recipe that I don’t like, but I definitely prefer the box stuff to home-made.
I will tart up my StoveTop mix with celery, onions and herbs. Works great, every time. You do have to saute the veggies, though. Perhaps the OP encountered raw celery or something…
MIL made two stuffings this year- one savory and one sweet. I think the bread used was ciabatta for the savory and cornbread for the sweet. The savory one was mostly normal but had ham in it- okay but I would have preferred sausage. The sweet one had tart cherries and some other stuff in it, and she baked it in muffin tins. I didn’t try it.
Hm, there’s always been minced celery in my mother’s turkey stuffing, and I’m 40. And Canadian, so our Thanksgiving was last month.
Celery, onions, sage… they all meld well together. I use “poultry seasoning” for my dressing, and I believe the seasoning is mostly sage.
I’m not a sweet-savoury mix kinda gal, so I wouldn’t try raisins or apples in my stuffing.
We love stuffing, and I always have to make some Stove Top just so there’s plenty to go around! (But the stuff that comes out of the bird is the best…)
Now I am really looking forward to my Christmas turkey…