Moni

Call it dressing if you'd prefer.

dcarch

You can call it dressing or stuffing but it's still that mixture of bread herbs and vegetables that was meant to stuff the bird.
Back in the "olden days" when you "dressed a bird" you removed the feet and feathers, gutted it stuffed it and tied the legs and wings and essential got it ready for the oven.
They say that southerners use the term dressing more often and those in the north say stuffing....even when it's cooked in a pan not the bird.

for the likes of me, I could not come up with the term dressing. Sometimes, my second language, English just doesn't come up with the correct term.

Moni

Call it what you will, its all good!

Maybe we use the terms filling and stuffing because we feel filled and stuffed when we eat it. I think my son could skip the entire rest of the meal and just eat filling and gravy.

We make some in a pan and some inside the bird, then mix them together. I like when I get one of those crunchy bits from the stuffing baked outside the bird.

When I was a kid it was always put into the bird as stuffing and then some extra was made in a separate dish because there's never enough. Then around the late 1970s or 1980s people started to worry about completely cooking it - apparently for a few hundred years it never occurred to anyone that the stuffing might be dangerous but that's when they started taking all the slides and teeter totters out of parks and playgrounds and the gestalt of the period was to panic about possibilities.

I've never known anyone to get sick from undercooked stuffing and as far as I'm concerned, it's a theoretical issue rather than a real issue, but I may be entirely wrong and I'm willing to be corrected if anyone knows of instances first hand and not thru reports. In Britain and Europe they've been stuffing meats for centuries and maybe people were dying off - who would know?

Anyhow, I don't put it in the bird because it takes longer to cook the thing that way. However, I've stuffed pork roasts and lamb roasts and beef roasts and fish.

(on what tv show did I hear that? Hm. It showed someone with a spoon putting in/taking out stuffing from the bird--LF and I just roared with laughter!)

I don't dislike dressing/stuffing that is cooked in turkey, but it isn't my favourite. Just personal preference.

I was watching Michael Symon on the Chew today, preparing his Thanksgiving Turkey. His advice was to never stuff the turkey because the stuffing draws moisture out of the turkey making for a dry bird.

~Ann

So although I don't know if his theory is accurate, that bread pulls the moisture out of the bird into the stuffing, it does make me wonder if that is why some have a problem cooking the perfect turkey.

The only thing that is important is to not over cook the darn thing, or heaven forbid undertook it! Buy a good thermometer and use it!

But there was no stuffing/dressing. My daughter and her husband don't care for it.

We had a really nice dinner, and the kiddos were delighted with the amount of side dishes. It was the first TG they will remember I think.

Allison is 3 now, or as she says, 3 1/2, and Nathan is two.

Moni

I am so old that I remember when there
was no such thing as the term 'dressing',
it was ALWAYS called stuffing.

I'm still alive, so, go figure.