Whether you call it filling, dressing, or stuffing (and whether you know that, to some, there is a distinction between each); whether you make it from sourdough, cornbread, or white bread (or spelt if you're sensitive to wheat or are Ancient Roman); whether you embellish it with chestnuts, oysters, cranberries or chorizo; no Thanksgiving table is complete without stuffing.
It plumps up in the roasting turkey's cavity and then cozies up to the finished product on your plate -- and both benefit, as your taste buds do (though your waistline doesn't), from a generous dousing of gravy. Like meatloaf, there are as many recipes for it as there are cooks to prepare it, and, also like meatloaf, nearly every cook thinks theirs is definitive. To its fans, the reason we call it stuffing is not the technical definition -- a working understanding of which could be "any food that fills, at least theoretically, a cavity in another food" -- but the obvious fact that you "stuff" it into "your face."
10 More Dirty Restaurant Tricks
5 Things You Didn't Know About Turducken
10 Catchiest Food Jingles We Love to Hate
