It Can Not Be Thanksgiving Without Cornbread Dressing

Like most American families, our Thanksgiving dinners were filled with traditional dishes. Besides the turkey, we had dressing, mashed potatoes, gravy, candied yams, peas with pearly onions, and pumpkin and pecan pies for dessert. All were prepared by my mother except the pies which were brought by my grandmother, Mam-ma, and my great-aunt, Bev.

Since our family was large, my mother cooked a twenty-five pound or larger turkey, beginning the process about nine o’clock in the morning. The previous evening, she baked a batch of plain, unsweetened, cornbread in one of Nana’s large cast iron frying pans and hardboiled some eggs.

On the day of Thanksgiving, she put together the cornbread dressing by first filling a bowl with cubed bread she purchased from Kilpatrick’s bread company that came with a seasoning packet. She added chopped onions, chopped celery, chopped parsley, and chopped hardboiled eggs. She then added melted butter and chicken or turkey broth to the consistency wanted.

My mother stuffed the turkey with about two-thirds of the dressing and placed the rest in a casserole dish for the oven later. Back in the day, we never worried about stuffing the turkey. Often the stuffing was left in the bird to eat over the next few days. This was before microwave ovens, so reheating was done either in the oven or over a steam bath on the stove. My mother also had a tendency to overcook the turkey, so that ensured the dressing inside the bird was done.

Fast forward to 1988. I was near my due date with my first child on Thanksgiving that year and just could not eat a turkey dinner, at least I didn’t enjoy it. The next week, our first child was born and my mother-in-law, Thelma, came to stay with us for a week. One of the dishes I wanted to have was Thanksgiving dinner. I showed her the recipe from my mother on how to make the turkey and dressing. She had never made dressing with cornbread – hers tended to be that mushy white bread stuff. However, it was a hit with my father-in-law, who said it brought wonderful memories of dressing he had as a child. Funny how he had never said anything to her about it before. As he had grown up in southern Missouri, it was almost like being in the south. My mother was from a long line of Texans. Anyway, long story short, Thelma put cornbread in the dressing from then on.

Here is the recipe. My mother created recipe books for her children that included family favorites along with photos of us as children. It was in those magnetic albums and I have since removed the photos to protect them from harm, but wish I had scanned the pages beforehand so I could remember which photos were on which page.

#52 Ancestors: Week 49: Favorite Recipe

This is my sixth year working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow (https://www.amyjohnsoncrow.com/) at Generations Cafe. I write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or My Trails into the Past. I have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways.

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