Why Do We Call the Stuff We Stuff in a Turkey Stuffing?
Not THAT kind of farce! (Credit: Comedy Central UK)
It would be hard to think of a more straightforward name for a foodstuff than “stuffing.” Though we don’t recommend actually cooking it inside your Thanksgiving turkey, that’s how it was done until fairly recently: like the padding in a couch, stuffing is stuffing because you stuff it in something.
But if that’s all there was to the story of stuffing, we wouldn’t have much an Eat Your Words column. Thankfully, our language is never that simple: stuffing began as a “farce.”
Farce is still the word for stuffing in French, and up until “stuffing” replaced it in the 16th century, that was its English name, too. (The word “forcemeat” has the same root.) And the word’s resemblance to the genre of comedy is more than just a coincidence. Both words started out as the Latin farcire, which meant (unsurprisingly) “to stuff”–the edible farce was filler for a roast, and the theatrical farce started out as improvisational padding in French religious dramas, when the actors were expected to ham it up for laughs.
So “stuffing” bopped along for a couple hundred years, until “dressing” reared its prissy head. (Sorry, Foodist!) The dressing versus stuffing debate rages to this day, but the historical record suggests that there really is no difference between the two. In the 19th century, cookbook authors started favoring “dressing,” but used the two terms interchangeably (and cooked birds with “dressing” stuffed inside). For a while, a distinction might have been made, as BA Foodist Andrew Knowlton has said, between “stuffing” being actually cooked inside a turkey and “dressing” being cooked separately, but the death blow to that distinction was likely dealt with Stove Top’s introduction of instant “stuffing” in the 1972. The instant mix, never intended to see the inside of a gobbler, took off, and “stuffing” became the catch-all word for the bready side that we know and love.