Cornbread Dressing

It’s the season to share family recipes, and I hope you know how big of a deal it is that I’m sharing this one. My Southern Cornbread Dressing recipe is the only one you’ll need on your Thanksgiving table spread. It used to be a secret family recipe, but I just couldn’t keep it from you!

In my family, this southern cornbread dressing is the most coveted side dish. As long as this is on the table, people will show up hungry. I think it’s the texture and sweetness of the cornbread coupled with a generous amount poultry seasoning that makes it so good. It’s firm but not soggy, contains the perfect balance of vegetables, and is easy to make ahead of time.

Like all good things, this recipe is first my Mom’s. She says she clipped it from a Southern Living magazine decades ago, and quite frankly, it’s the only type of dressing or stuffing I’ve ever tasted in my life. I don’t need to try any other dressings; this is as good as it gets.

What is cornbread dressing?

Cornbread dressing is the same thing as regular ‘stuffing,’ but made with cornbread and white bread. Typically ‘stuffing’ is just made with white bread. And technically, it’s called ‘stuffing’ if it’s inside the turkey, and it’s called ‘dressing’ if it’s baked separately on the side. My version consists of stale cornbread crumbles and stale bread cubes tossed with your favorite Thanksgiving spices (sage, parsley, thyme, marjoram, and rosemary), and then baked in a custard of milk and eggs studded with chopped onions and celery. It’s like a savory bread pudding, in the best way possible.

Ingredients

For the cornbread:

• Cornmeal. We’re making a batch of cornbread that we will then crumble and use for the cornbread dressing, and it starts with 2 cups of cornmeal.
• Flour. A small amount of flour cut into the cornmeal makes the cornbread fluffy. Measure out 1 1/3 cups of all-purpose flour.
• Sugar. My cornbread recipe has a very small amount of granulated sugar in it, 1/4 cup total.
• Baking Powder. Three teaspoons of baking powder, for rising.
• Baking Soda. A very small amount (1/2 teaspoon) of baking soda for rising.
• Salt. We need 1 teaspoon of fine sea salt.
• Eggs. Four large eggs, at room temperature.
• Buttermilk. Two cups of buttermilk because it makes the best cornbread. You can substitute the same amount of milk that you can have added one teaspoon of vinegar or lemon juice to, if you don’t have buttermilk.
• Butter. Melted butter is the key for the best cornbread; we need 6 tablespoons of it!

For the cornbread dressing:

• Sliced White Bread. The other bulk of our cornbread dressing is sliced white bread. Cube 8 slices of regular plain white bread, and let it go stale on the counter for 12-24 hours.
• Salt. Three, yes, three teaspoons of salt. Trust me on this–we’re adding a lot of unseasoned ingredients here. If this feels like too much salt, check the back of the store-bought boxed dressing brand, and come back to me when you’re ready.
• Rubbed Sage. Three teaspoons of rubbed sage. This is whole dry sage leaves that have been crushed/ crumbled. If you want to use fresh sage, finely minced the leaves until you have 2 tablespoons.
• Poultry Seasoning. This is the main flavoring component, so I think it’s important to buy a nice one that smells delicious to you. I like when you can see the individual herb flecks instead of a powdery version. Poultry seasoning contains sage, thyme, marjoram, and rosemary. We need 4 teaspoons of this.
• Celery. Celery is the quintessential Thanksgiving vegetable, and this dressing requires 1 1/3 cups of finely chopped celery. This is weird, but my Master’s Degree is in celery production, and farmers in California and Arizona rush to get their celery crop in the ground at the end of summer so that they are guaranteed their ‘Thanksgiving harvest.’ Also, absolutely nothing smells better than driving by a field of celery being cut for harvest.
• Onion. An equal amount of chopped onion to celery: 1 1/3 cups.
• Butter. Twelve tablespoons of melted butter for the custard-like base here.
• Chicken Stock. You can use 3 cups of store-bought chicken stock, or you can use leftover turkey stock.
• Eggs. Four large eggs, beaten before being added to the bowl.
• Milk. I prefer whole milk for baking, and this recipe requires 1 cup of it.

How to make Cornbread Dressing

Scrape it all into a 9×13-inch baking dish. Don’t flatten it out–the craggy top develops a great crust.

Make Ahead and Storage:

We have experimented with this heavily in my family, because we all agree that, in almost all cases, ‘leftover Thanksgiving food’ is better than (or just-as-good-as Thanksgiving food. We have found that cornbread dressing tastes best re-heated the next day, so technically, you can make this dish one day early, refrigerate it and then re-heat over very low heat before serving. In our family, I make it the morning of Thanksgiving and let it rest before re-warming and serving. Fresh out of the oven, it is slightly crumbly and hard to serve.

Recipe Tips

• If you are looking to avoid all the pitfalls of other dressing recipes, this recipe is for you.  First of all, the crumbled cornbread and bread cubes are left out overnight to dry, so the dressing is never too wet. There’s milk, eggs, and chicken broth to make sure it’s never too dry. While other dressings might bake up flat and dense, this one has eggs for lift and fluff. Any potential set-backs to enjoy this carb-loaded, best-part-of-Thanksgiving, I-might-skip-the-turkey-for-this-recipe has all been precariously planned for and diverted.
• The spices are doubled and tripled what they used to be in the original Southern Living recipe, and still, I manage to amp them up every time I make the recipe. It just keeps getting better. If you come to my house in 10 years, I’ll be adding an entire cup of sage.
• If you make this, you can address all fan mail to my Mom. I understand that no other dressing recipe will ever grace your table after you taste this one, so if you want to start a social media revolution and send me snaps, Instagrams, and tweets of you burning the recipe card with your previous stuffing recipe, we can totally do that. You can find me anywhere on social media with the name ‘dessert for two.’ I’ll be waiting for you; that’s how good this Southern cornbread dressing recipe is!