Dressings and Stuffings

Important as it is to America’s festive culinary traditions, “dressing” is a term that wants some pinning down. Above all, whether it is interchangeable with “stuffing” is a matter of continual debate. On the one hand, insofar as “dressing” came into use in the nineteenth century as a prim euphemism for the latter term, we can assume it is equivalent. On the other hand, the verbs “to dress” and “to stuff” have historically connoted distinct culinary procedures—the one having to do with the cleaning and preparing of the carcasses of fish or fowl and the other with the making of fillings of all sorts. In this light, dressing might be viewed as a subtype in the more general category of stuffing, namely, one related directly to meat cookery—whereby filling the animal cavity with various ingredients would simply constitute a later step in the dressing process. This verb-based distinction accords to some extent with the popular notion that, technically, stuffing is the mixture actually inserted into the animal to be consumed, while dressing is the same mixture cooked separately, “on the outside.” At any rate, “stuffing” is the dominant term, while “dressing” inheres in regional vocabularies, particularly in the South and Southeast.