A Chef Explains the Difference

Though my Great Aunt Carol passed years ago, Thanksgiving still reminds me of her. We’d get up early on those chilly late-Autumn mornings to drive from Los Banos, California, to Turlock, where she always answered the door to her big house with a kitchen towel in her hands and an apron on. Our Thanksgivings were conventionally Italian American, with deep pans of rigatoni and focaccia alongside the turkey and cranberry sauce. You couldn’t keep me away from those Italian American carbs on any of our family holidays, but at Thanksgiving I always saved room for the stuffing, too.

When I first moved to New Orleans after undergrad, I started hearing the word dressing being thrown around as the humidity finally died off, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether these South Louisianans were drowning their birds in ranch or blue cheese. 

Wrong as I (thankfully) often am, turns out we were discussing—pretty much, sort of, mostly, kind of—the same thing. But hold up: Whether we’re talking stuffing or dressing, where do these names come from? What’s the difference? And why don’t we just call them the same damn thing? Let’s talk turkey.

From England to the American South: How a Dish Took on Two Names

The practice of stuffing meats and poultry is as old as cooking itself, with records of ancient Roman and Middle Eastern civilizations filling birds with herbs, nuts and grains for added flavor and substance. The term “stuffing” was first used in English in 1538, but European cooks had been cramming meat and bread inside dead birds for decades. In England, cooks would prepare “forcemeat,” a mixture of meat, bread crumbs, herbs and spices, to stuff into poultry or game. These savory blends were intended to both flavor the meat and make use of available ingredients, particularly during the darkest and scarcest of days.

As English settlers arrived in America, they brought with them their fowl-filling traditions, which soon took on spin-offs of their own. The early American settlers used readily available ingredients such as maize, wild herbs and chestnuts to create their own versions of the dish. By the early 19th century, the term “dressing” appeared in Southern cookbooks and began to supplant “stuffing,” particularly in the American South. The shift in terminology was part of a broader trend of Victorian-era social refinement, where certain words, like “stuffing,” were deemed too rustic or crass for polite conversation. You know—that old Southern Charm.

In the South, dressing became inseparable from holiday meals, where family recipes passed down through generations began to define the dish as more than a mere side. Dressing, as it was, became a symbol of heritage. Over time, regional adaptations of stuffing and dressing emerged, with different ingredients and methods reflecting the diverse landscapes and cultural roots across the United States. Today, this historical split continues to influence how Americans refer to and prepare what is more or less the same classic Thanksgiving dish, just with innumerable variants. 

North vs. South: Cornbread or White Bread Cubes? Apples or Andouille?

At their most basic levels, stuffing and dressing are savory bread puddings. They are both a mixture of bread and other adorning ingredients cooked with flavorful liquid, like stock, until absorption.

In the States, no two Thanksgiving tables are the same, and as such, no two families’ stuffings or dressings are the same. The differences are even more dramatic between both sides of the Mason-Dixon. In the North, stuffing often reflects the breadbasket of wheat and other grains, leading to recipes based on white or sourdough bread. These bread cubes, when combined with herbs like sage, rosemary and thyme, create a fragrant and savory stuffing. The addition of ingredients like apples, cranberries, chestnuts or mushrooms is common in Northern kitchens, where these elements bring a seasonal and earthy flavor to the dish.

In the South, where corn is king, cornbread dressing reigns supreme, though it’s not exclusive. Plenty of Southern dressings use French bread or whatever else. Southern dressing is often augmented with ingredients like sausage, pecans and other regional harvests. This might look like oysters in South Carolina’s Lowcountry or andouille sausage in South Louisiana.

Despite their names, the regional differences between stuffing and dressing can’t be pinned down on the technical level. There are Southerners who stuff their turkey with cornbread dressing, and there are Northerners who bake their sourdough stuffing in a separate casserole dish.

Inside or Out: The Method Technically Makes the Difference

Stuffing or dressing, in the traditional sense, is packed into the turkey’s cavity, soaking up the bird’s juices as it roasts. Cooking stuffing this way, with special care to reach a safe internal temperature, can get you a moist, intensely flavored side dish. But because that dead center of the bird takes the longest to cook, you also risk drying out the quicker-cooking parts of your turkey, especially the breasts.

Nowadays, it’s increasingly more common for folks to bake their starchy side outside the bird, in a separate dish. It’s, of course, a more food-safe practice than cooking inside the turkey, but it also lets you get those crispy corners and edges along the sides of the baking vessel.

When to Serve Dressing vs. Stuffing for Your Holiday Table

So, which are you going to have? I guess that really depends on where you’re from and what you’re looking for exactly. If I have time to please everyone at Thanksgiving, I have to make an obligatory sourdough stuffing for my Yankee family—which I also adore, don’t get me wrong—but I’ll double up and make a cornbread dressing, too, if I can. 

I love the chewy, tart breadth of a sourdough stuffing cooked with cranberries or pomegranates and a deep, rich, thick turkey broth made from the wings and backbone after spatchcocking. You best believe I can also get down with a smoky, spicy, slightly sweet cornbread dressing with oysters and sausage. If you want to bring a nostalgia-laced tear to my Italian American eye, you can even load yours up with a bunch of fresh oregano and rosemary.

Whatever you decide to make, the first piece of advice I can give you is to make sure your bread is left out in the open air for several days to get stale. That’ll ensure that it absorbs all the moisture it needs to. But the best piece of advice I can give you is to do what my Aunt Carol did: Make your stuffing or dressing with love. You can take love, in this context, to mean “with the best ingredients you can find.” And no, that doesn’t mean the most expensive ones. Sometimes, it just means a little extra effort. But it’s effort you can taste. 

If you can bake the sourdough or cornbread, do that. If you can peel a fresh pomegranate and shuck a fresh oyster, why wouldn’t you? If you can use the trim from your turkey to make a delicious stock, don’t use store-bought, which can be saturated with sodium. The gestalt of a good savory bread pudding is the careful selection of each of its ingredients. Your tongue, your body, and your guests will all thank you.