Thursday is Thanksgiving.
At least that’s what the calendar tells me. More of this predication to being thankful later.
Right now it is all about the main dish of that yearly holiday meal and I’m not writing about turkey.
I am having a pastime about two strong women and how differently they prepared what my Yankee friends call “stuffing.” But all us Southerners know it simply as “dressing.”
Now I don’t write about food very much.
I leave that to the types like John T. Edge, Anthony Bourdain, and James Beard.
Really, the Grand Ole Opry’s Grandpa Jones on the old TV “Hee Haw Show” probably did more to elevate the lip smacking names of Southern fare with those who reside above the Mason-Dixon Line.
He was the king of Southern food, he and the Creole Justin Wilson of Louisiana way until the lovely Paula Dean did so with pats after pat of butter and a little controversy came along.
My two grandmothers were experts on dressing, but in two very separate and non-conventional ways.
Both women, oddly enough, grew up in Cleveland County, scant miles from one another but cooked, oh, so differently.
Both grandmothers cooked for entire tribes, I mean 20-30 eating at a time was the norm. And this was done several times a year, not just at Thanksgiving.
They were both the Queen of their kitchens.
Both were in charge, no matter their advancing age or number of daughters or daughters-in-laws who came along. A wide berth was given to each in their declining years so as not to invade their culinary home without (1) permission and (2) constant consultation on what was going on in every pot or pan.
Dressing in the South is made with cornbread.
Plain and simple.
No store manufactured bread or bread-like crumbs can compete. If that’s how you make or expect it to be made, scroll on down and read the In The News or Horoscope for today. You might find useful information there, perhaps for what is in that “plastic sack bread,” as one grandmother called store bought bread.
Both had a giant cast-iron skillet to bake their cornbread.
One skillet, I was told, was rescued from the ashes of a “burn-out” suffered by her mama’s family.
Another skillet was a wedding present that well outlasted their wonderful marriage.
After several skillets of cornbread – enough to feed 20-30 – a pan was needed to make this concoction of dressing.
Again, my grandmother Irma Leopard Rice has two white, enamel dishpans so large only one could fit in the modern day stove oven at a time. These were her pride and joy.
Many times a new grandbaby visiting her house got their first bath in these pans. I know, I was one and so were the herd of later generation Rice’s, Williams’, Jacks’, Sprague’s, Walls, Cameron’s and others over the years. They were deep enough for an older child to sit up and hold to the edge.
But they were the absolute pride and joy to cook dressing.
These pans had a knock or two over the years, a spot where the enamel was knocked off – that resulted in first a shiny spot where the base metal showed. Later a little rust color took over that spot, but these pans still held true to their use.
My grandmother Rice loved the spice – sage.
Entering her home, literally the wide and spacious front porch of their home on Thanksgiving or Christmas you could smell the sage prior to the front door being opened.
It was a staple in her dressing.
Not so at my grandmother Mary McClellan Brown’s home down in Bradley County just across the old Highway 15 steel bridge near the Cleveland/Bradley County line.
Only a “pinch” of sage was necessary.
The differences in the preparation of the dressings were minuscule. Both sautéed chopped and used the liver, gizzard, and other non-essential turkey trimmings or roaster chicken trimmings in any type of dressing.
A little bacon fat, some handy pork cracklings, bacon trimmings or other additives were not that unusual to be found in the dressing.
But the consistency was the kicker.
Now I know many of you are wondering about this Pastime. It is a memory that is just as fresh as when I was a small kid, troublesome teen and young adult trying to observe and not observe the moment.
I didn’t stay in the kitchen, but the sights, sounds, joy and laughter of such a gathering, along with a plethora of questions and a generation or two of aunts, cousins, sisters, nieces and others make these observations.
Grandmother Brown’s dressing was, well, “soupy.” It would move around on your plate like lava. It was thicker than gravy, but just barely. It mixed well with the dry meat.
Grandmother Rice’s dressing was, well, almost bread-like. A spoon could stand on end in it. It was not so firm as to be sliced, but I’ve had a cake of a less consistency baked by a good looking woman.
Dare one to say anything about this obvious difference? No.
It was all delicious.
And everyone was there.
Kids at one table or spared throughout the house eating on one’s lap, on a spare card table and literally on the couches arms.
Adults for the most part, sat at the main table.
Laughter and talk circulated like those hot rolls and homemade biscuits or pieces of that delicious pie once the main event was over.
There are vacant places at the table today. The years have gone by, oh so quickly for these heroes of my youth.
Now the tears are falling.
My cheeks wet with the joy that these holidays bring.
I wish each of you a Happy Thanksgiving.
And may those men and women who slave in the kitchens in Bradley County today know that someday their handiwork will be a memory to make a grown man cry tears of job.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone.