Dressing or Stuffing?

It's Friday at 4 pm and not only is it starting to get dark (!) but I'm distracted by thoughts of dinner...not tonight's dinner, but the BIG one: Thanksgiving.  As I envision the yearly frantic search for recipes and dread the mad rush to the grocery store to buy french fried onions, I'm also kind of excited for this yearly ritual and how I get to be with family.  

Every year I pull out my manila folder of past Thanksgiving recipes with its worn edges and cooking stains. It's not pretty, but it safeguards my magazine-clipped recipes from the 90s, more recent recipes from Pinterest, and most importantly, my grandmother Mimi's dressing recipe, circa 1948. While she wasn't a prodigious cook, she did have a few dishes that knocked it out of the park, and dressing was one of them.

COO Tracy's Grandmother Mimi, far right

Now some of you may think I'm talking about salad dressing... but I actually mean the side dish that goes with the turkey. My friends have teased me before that they've never heard the word "dressing" to mean stuffing... But didn't we all read the Amelia Bedelia books? And laugh when she put a turkey in actual clothes after being asked to "dress the turkey?" 

Being a transplanted southerner who now lives in New York, I was starting to think that maybe my family made up the word, but as I researched it, turns out that there's a geographic distinction:  Southerners often refer to their side dish as dressing, while Northerners refer to it as stuffing.  Southern Living magazine analyzed Google searches by state, and the top states for "dressing" searches were Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia.  And what I found interesting is that Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana rarely searched for the word stuffing at all-- the word just doesn't make sense for them!

Mimi and my mom grew up in Louisiana, and I in Tennessee, so that little factoid made sense, and now I can move on to more important matters.  I go back to the recipe folder, and my shopping list that precede doing what really matters - spending time with people whom I love, just like generations have always done, to create lasting memories.

The team at Woosh Beauty wishes you all a wonderful Thanksgiving and hope that you have more time back in your life for the people and the conversations that really matter.

XO