Always amusing when someone tells me they don’t like Sothern cornbread stuffing because they’re the same ones who can’t leave mine alone. Now in my defense, it’s probably not “true” Southern CBS, but it’s a recipe taught to me by my Ma, and she’s a pureblood Daughter of the Confederacy from the suburbs of Wheatley, Arkansas (pop 355) who learned to shoot squirrels from horseback with a .22 rifle when she was 7 years old. She learnt it from her mamma who never really learned to cook anything else (apart from squirrel) with any great amount of success. I reckon it’s Southern enough, and to the extent it includes things not normally found in Southern CBS, I submit this is because other recipes are inferior due to lack of heart and heritage accompanying the ingredient list. Well, that. And the fact that any good traditional recipe defies transcription as the product is tasted and tweaked in production to account for variances in flavors peculiar to real ingredients. You can’t get there unless you’ve been there. That said:
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[li]Make a 8x8 inch cornbread. Turn it into crumbs in whatever way seems best to you.[/li]
[li]Toast about 6 slices of bread. Turn it into crumbs. You can use a food processor if you like dust, or you can just tear it up until you get tired of doing it. Smaller is better, but I don’t use the food processor because dust mush.[/li]
[li]Dice up a yellow onion[/li]
[li]Hack up 6-10 celery stalks celery as thin as you can (no more than 1/8 inch) include the leaves[/li]
[li]Sautee allla dat in 1 stick of butter until the celery starts getting soft[/li]
[li]Mix that all up[/li]
[li]Season it to taste with[/li][/ul]
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[li]o Black pepper (like, ¼ teaspoon)[/li][li]o Celery salt (like, ¼ teaspoon)[/li][li]o Rubbed sage (start with a tablespoon, be careful with it.[/li][li]o Salt about 1 teaspoon, or until it wakes up.[/li][/ul]
In general I start with that and then tweak it with the celery salt and the sage. When it almost tastes like what you want…hit it with turkey juice or, as a last resort, chicken stock. Maybe ½ to 1 cup of the stuff but NONE if you’re gonna stuff it in a bird.
Cover it with foil and bake it for maybe 30-45 minutes, or eat it raw I don’t care…
Your recipe’s an awful lot like my mother’s. (And your cornbread isn’t sweet … RIGHT?) She always added a can of mushrooms and a couple eggs, too, for body.
I add sage sausage to mine and diced up roasted chestnuts, along with the usual celery and onion, moistened with turkey stock. I usually add some poultry seasoning along with the salt and pepper. I just use local bread without any cornbread, although I have no objection to it. For dressing cooked in the oven, I peel the skin off of a few turkey thighs to lay across the top. This gives some fat flavor to the dressing that you usually only get if it’s inside the bird.
cornbread of course (no flour in my recipe, no sugar either);
regular commercial wheat bread
eggs
onions
broth from last year’s turkey
butter
Version Two (wild rice stuffing)
2-1-1 proportional mixture of cooked wild rice, brown rice, white rice, cooked in giblet broth + additional turkey broth (this year it will get GOOSE broth due to last year’s goose)
water chestnuts
bean sprouts
sage
Sliced mushrooms, onion and celery in roughly equal proportions, sauteed in butter. Add a bag or two of plain bread cubes, a couple eggs, sage, poultry seasoning, freshly ground black pepper and enough stock to moisten. Put in a baking dish, casserole or roasting pan and cover with foil. Bake at whatever the oven’s set to for the main dish for as long as it takes to get hot in the middle. Take the foil off and give it another 10-15 minutes to brown the top.
I’ve never understood the addition of eggs to stuffing. It certainly doesn’t need additional binder to all that bread and liquid, and can’t add much in the way of flavor.
My mother made an Italian stuffing (we called it “filling” for all of my childhood)…bread crumbs, eggs, garlic (powder or otherwise), copious amounts of romano and parmesan cheese. My husband makes something like it, which he gets pretty close to.
Corn Bread Stuffing with Green Chile. Doesn’t have to be Hatch Chiles, but I use 'em if I got 'em. Celery, onions, BACON. Always some chopped fresh Rosemary from the garden. Not exactly rocket science. Heavily adjustable. Just don’t put in too much stock. It’s not meant to be a mean, nasty paste of disgusting bread vomit. That’s what we get at the in-laws.
I only use cornbread in my dressing, while a lot of Southerners also mix in some biscuits or other bread. I also use eggs, chicken broth, butter, black pepper and plenty of sage. The one thing that I use that is pretty unique- Yellow Squash!
I grew up in North Georgia and my grandparents always had a garden every summer. They also grew some yellow squash and my grandmother discovered that I loved it more than anything else when I was just a toddler. She eventually adapted her dressing recipe to incorporate squash and it turned out to be delicious!
So, in addition to the basics I mentioned above, I boil about two cups of yellow squash (sliced or cubed) and one large onion (sliced) with salt, black pepper and butter until fully cooked. Then I drain it and use a potato masher to turn it into mush and add it to the dressing batter. It adds a great nutty squash flavor and makes the dressing very moist (which I can’t say for a lot of the dressing I’ve had).
It’s the one thing that I’m always asked to bring to any potluck or holiday dinner!
Whatever y’all were imagining for liquids-to-solids ratio, mentally increase the liquids (mostly broth) substantially. My cornbread dressing isn’t at all dry; it’s not like that pepperidge farm stuff that looks like croutons. Before you put it in to bake, it’s practically soup.
It’s to give it a silky mouthfeel without being soggy. It does add a subtle flavor, but you’re right, it’s not much, especially after the gravy is on the stuffing. We did, back in the cholesterolphobia of the 1980s, try it without eggs, and it suffered.
Our stuffing (dressing, really) is a substantial dish, but it’s actually less dense with the eggs. Think of what eggs do in a souffle. They give lift.