15 Best Thanksgiving Stuffing Recipes from Classic to Creative

What do you call it, stuffing or dressing? Maybe what we call it doesn’t matter, so long as it tastes good. These Thanksgiving stuffing recipes can help us put together a perfect meal. We can even decide if we want it to be classic, creative, stuffing, or dressing all on our own.

These are the best Thanksgiving stuffing recipes you can make for your Thanksgiving dinner crowd to enjoy. It really isn’t a secret; stuffing and dressing are the same thing. However, the history goes much further back than the first Thanksgiving meal.

In fact, stuffing meats was a Roman trend, with the earliest recorded recipe for it coming from a First Century AD cookbook. They would stuff everything: chicken, rabbits, and pigs.

They would stuff their meats with a combination of spelt, a more common wheat back then, along with veggies and herbs. They would cook these things inside the meat, hence the term “stuffing.”

Yadda yadda yadda, immigration to the Americas, yadda yadda yadda, stuffing wasn’t at the first Thanksgiving, yadda, yadda, yadda, wait, the first Thanksgiving didn’t have stuffing?

Well, we don’t have copies of the laminated menus that the pilgrims didn’t make. Therefore, we don’t know whether stuffing was served, but we do know that stuffing at Thanksgiving didn’t become popular until the 1800s, when stuffed turkeys were on menus across the colonies.

Now, we serve stuffing every Thanksgiving; EVERY Thanksgiving. Why not play with it a bit and try something new? Of course, you should practice the best Thanksgiving stuffing recipes before the big game. However, that is a tasty homework assignment we all can get behind.

Difference Between Stuffing and Dressing

There is an important reason we had to go into the history of stuffing a bit to better understand the difference between stuffing and dressing. We could just get straight to it and say, “This classic, traditional stuffing recipe is all you need.”

Where’s the fun in that? The difference is all in how it’s made. Stuffing dates back to the Romans, when we still used “A.D.” in years. They may not have been making this skillet sausage stuffing recipe back then, but the method was different, too.

We know that the Romans loved to stuff meats with bread, veggies, and herbs. When was the last time you served yourself some stuffing straight from inside the turkey? The answer is more than likely never.

That’s why some people call it dressing: they didn’t make their cranberry apple stuffing recipe inside the turkey; they cooked it separately.

Southern Dressing for Thanksgiving

The best Thanksgiving stuffing recipes are not from any specific region. However, it is more common to encounter dressing rather than stuffing in the South. The South adopted the term from Victorian England, which considered the word “stuffing” crude and impolite.

You can make a butternut squash and wild mushroom stuffing, but call it dressing if you think it’s too crude. However, the South likes to replace the bread with something a little more buttery, cornbread!

The classic cornbread stuffing recipe is definitely worth trying. We can even use different Thanksgiving dressing recipes that feature cornbread, like this unique take on cornbread dressing.

Grandma would be proud to know you kept the tradition alive by calling it dressing and using cornbread to make it, especially when you use this Southern-style cornbread dressing recipe.

Traditional Stuffing Recipes

Yes, there is a traditional stuffing recipe, though these days it is more common to find it in a box. There’s nothing wrong with using boxed stuffing on Thanksgiving. After all, we are cooking a lot, cheating here or there is not a big deal.

However, we could find ways to dress up boxed stuffing. The idea of tradition is what we make it. We now know that they probably didn’t serve stuffing at the first Thanksgiving. Why would we want to emulate that meal anyway?

Instead, we can go for something different, screw tradition. Let’s make an oyster sausage stuffing recipe or a hybrid of two Thanksgiving classics. That’s right, we can stuff another recipe inside the stuffing recipe to make green bean casserole stuffing!

After all, what is stuffing/dressing if not a casserole? Put a pin in that one for later. For now, let’s really shock the family with a ham and gruyere stuffing recipe no one was expecting.

Best Thanksgiving Stuffing Recipes from Classic to Creative

The beauty of stuffing is that it is a casserole, plain and simple. This means we can get as creative as we want with it. The staples include bread of any kind, veggies of any kind, and herbs of any kind. Want to add sausage?

Make a delicious fennel sausage and apple stuffing recipe. Hosting a vegetarian at your party? Ditch the meat and the broths and make a completely vegetarian loaded stuffing recipe.

Stuffing, dressing, casserole, it’s all the same stuff; we just want to be sure it tastes good. A sure-fire way to increase the flavor and enjoyment is to add bacon, like in this Thanksgiving bacon stuffing recipe.

You can even take any of these recipes and turn them into a weird craze that hit the interwebs a couple of years ago, stuffing balls. Cranberry turkey stuffing balls have a place at a Thanksgiving table, too.

Ultimately, we all just want to share a nice meal with people we care about. You can call it stuffing, you can call it dressing, and you can even skip inviting that one uncle and just have a good time. Happy Thanksgiving!

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