Stuffing inspires a lot of arguments every Thanksgiving. First off, is it stuffing or dressing? Do you put oysters in it? Gizzards? Sausage? Do you use wild rice or is that an abomination? Do you cook it in the bird, or does that just dry out your already dry turkey, Uncle Gary? As with all things Thanksgiving-related, the dish simply offers us another reason to quibble.
However, we seem to be avoiding the most important question of all: Why the f*ck don’t we eat stuffing year round?
I’ve more recently become aware of our severe oversight in not allowing ourselves to dine on herbaceous wheat slurry every single day, as for the past two Thanksgivings, I’ve missed out on stuffing. One year, the family member who was in charge of making it burned it, and for some reason everyone shrugged and moved on as if this wasn’t the greatest tragedy to befall us since that one time a cousin showed up with blueberry bagels to Yom Kippur break-fast. The next year, I was in Spain, which is certainly not a problem except that Andalusians don’t do Thanksgiving, and certainly don’t do stale bread covered in garlic powder and stuffed into a bird’s asshole.
Those experiences only illuminated a craving I realized was there all along. You can get a turkey sandwich any time of year, or mac and cheese, or mashed potatoes—and you can throw that yam-and-marshmallow thing into the ocean. But stuffing has remained quarantined in "Thanksgiving-only" territory, and for absolutely no reason.
There is nothing particularly special about stuffing. According to The Wall Street Journal, possibly the oldest version of stuffing was found on a 3,700-year-old clay tablet in Iraq, which contained a recipe “for a roasted bird accompanied by a side dish of specially flavored soft bread.” The Romans were also very into stuffing their birds. But according to culinary historian Sarah Lohman, stuffing has always been less of a recipe dish and more of a dish meant to use up leftover bread, vegetables, and whatever else you have. “It's weird that we've turned it into this dish where you go out and buy things for it, and make it a particular way,” she said. “I mean, we literally go buy stale bread and make stuffing. That makes no sense.”
The stuffing that most of us associate with Thanksgiving, with sage and onions and celery, comes from New England, where Thanksgiving was celebrated long before it became a national holiday, and where those flavors were in season in November. In fact, in American Cookery, America’s oldest cookbook, written by Amelia Simmons in 1796, the recipes for a Thanksgiving table are nearly identical to what we still make today. To stuff a turkey, Simmons says, “grate a wheat loaf, one quarter of a pound butter, one quarter of a pound salt pork, finely chopped, 2 eggs, a little sweet marjoram, summer savory, parsley and sage, pepper and salt (if the pork be not sufficient,) fill the bird and sew up.”
