Southern Cornbread Dressing

In my family, if we’re serving turkey for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, we’ve gotta have cornbread dressing!

What’s the difference between stuffing and dressing? Um. Where you put it. If you stuff it inside of the turkey, then you have stuffing. If you cook it in a separate pan like we do in my family, it’s called dressing.

And who the heck is Boofie? She was my grandmother, Ruth. When I was a toddler, I’d listen to my Papa call my grandmother Ruth, and in toddler-speak, I said Boof. Boof morphed into “Boofie” when I really  wanted something.

So — here is my grandmother’s cornbread dressing recipe via my Mom. The thing is that when my grandmother passed away in 1979, her cornbread dressing recipe was a somewhat sketchy thing on a recipe card — and it really is my Mom, Betsy, who got it nailed down to a set of measurable ingredients. There is no sage in this dressing. Never was — and it came from the black cooks at the Cavitt home, which dates from the 1840’s. If you like sage in your dressing, you can certainly add it when you sauté the vegetables.

Additional note: This is a cornbread dressing without egg in it. Honestly, until I was looking at other dressing recipes online, I’d never heard of putting egg into a cornbread dressing — but it’s obviously a thing for some folks — and supposed to bind the cornbread together better. We’ve never cooked it that way in my family, and I’ve always found the chicken broth holds the cornbread together just fine.

Boofie’s Cornbread Dressing

Ingredients

• 2 cups celery, finely chopped
• 1 1/2 cups green onion, finely chopped (takes about 1 1/2 bunches of onions)
• 1/2 cup yellow onion, finely chopped
• 1/2 cup parsley finely chopped
• 1/4 cup butter (1 stick), cut into pats
• 2 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. celery seed
• 1 tsp. celery salt
• 1/2 tsp. black pepper
• 10 cups of cornbread, cut into 1 inch cubes
• 6 slices of french bread, Cut into 1 inch cubes and completely dried out
• 10 – 12 ounces chicken broth

(Makes a rectangular dish of dressing. How many does this serve? 6 to 8 servings . . . it all depends on how heavily your Thanksgiving table is groaning from the weight of other side dishes 🙂 ).

Bake cornbread ahead (recipe below). Cube French bread and dry/toast in a 300 oven for 30 minutes. These things can be done a day ahead.

Chop all the veggies. I use a Cuisinart food processor to make this step a lot speedier.

Measure out seasonings into a ramekin or little bowl.

Preheat oven to 350°.

Put cornbread and french bread together in a large mixing bowl and set aside. Measure out chicken broth. Important: you may not need all of the broth, and you may need a little more. See notes below.

Melt butter in large skillet over medium high heat. Saute celery, all onion, parsley, salt, pepper, celery seed, and celery salt for 5 minutes.

Take the skillet off of the stove, set to the side, and allow mixture to cool to room temperature. Once cooled, spoon over cornbread and French bread cubes. Mix well — I do this by hand. Then pour about half of the chicken broth over mixture — combine thoroughly.

Here is where you make this to your taste — you may want ALL of the chicken broth, to make the dressing more moist. You may want less broth. A lot of it depends on how dry your cornbread and French bread are. SO — use a light hand pouring the broth in. You can always add more . . . but you can’t take it out! And — if you live in a super-dry climate, you may need a little extra broth. I used a little under 12 ounces. You might go 2 ounces under or 2 ounces over, depending on your preference.

Spoon the dressing into a pyrex baking dish. DON’T pack it down.

Bake in a 350° degree oven for 45 minutes to an hour. The more broth you add, the longer it will take the dressing to cook. I cooked my for about 50 minutes.

Making your cornbread

Cornbread in the South is not sweet. You can use either white or yellow cornmeal, but never sugar — and certainly not for cornbread going into dressing. When I was growing up, we always used Ballard cornbread mix, which was made with white cornmeal, but like many products, Ballard is a thing of the past.

Here is my mother’s cornbread recipe, which makes 1 cast iron skillet (or one 9 x 9 pan of cornbread. The dressing recipe above requires TWO PANS of CORNBREAD.

Proper Southern Cornbread

Recipe for 1 pan of Cornbread (make 2 of these for the dressing recipe above !!)

• 3 Tbsp. Butter (or bacon grease)
• 2 cups white cornmeal
• 3 Tbsp. flour (all-purpose)
• 1 Tbsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 3/4 cup milk
• 1 egg, beaten

Preheat oven to 425°.

In a mixing bowl, combine cornmeal, flour, baking powder, milk, and egg.

Place empty skillet (or baking pan in the oven for a couple of minutes to warm sufficiently to melt butter (or bacon grease). Put the butter (or grease) into pan and swirl around to coat thoroughly. Pour any extra butter (or grease) into the mixing bowl.

Mix contents of bowl thoroughly. Pour into greased cast iron skillet (or baking pan).

Bake at 425° for 25 – 30 minutes, or until golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the cornbread comes out clean.

Happy holidays!

    — Ann