Mama's Southern-Style Cornbread Dressing

The Taste of Deep-South Tradition in Every Bite

When Mother died
I thought: now I'll have a death poem.
That was unforgivable.

Yet I've since forgiven myself
as sons are able to do
who've been loved by their mothers.

I stared into the coffin
knowing how long she'd live,
how many lifetimes there are

in the sweet revisions of memory.
It's hard to know exactly
how we ease ourselves back from sadness,

but I remembered when I was twelve,
1951, before the world
unbuttoned its blouse.

I had asked my mother (I was trembling)
If I could see her breasts
and she took me into her room

without embarrassment or coyness
and I stared at them,
afraid to ask for more.

Now, years later, someone tells me
Cancers who've never had mother love
are doomed and I, a Cancer

feel blessed again. What luck
to have had a mother
who showed me her breasts

when girls my age were developing
their separate countries,
what luck

she didn't doom me
with too much or too little.
Had I asked to touch,

Perhaps to suck them,
What would she have done?
Mother, dead woman

Who I think permits me
to love women easily
this poem

is dedicated to where
we stopped, to the incompleteness
that was sufficient

and to how you buttoned up,
began doing the routine things
around the house.

Stephen Dunn, The Routine Things Around the House

Have you ever heard of or wanted to try real Southern Style cornbread dressing?

Have you ever spent a holiday in the Deep South?

If you have, you probably know about the tradition of cornbread dressing. In our family, this recipe wasn’t just a side dish—it was the star of the show. It was my mother’s magnum opus, her great work.

I remember the holidays when I was a young boy growing up in the piney woods of northwest Louisiana. My mother would start preparing for Thanksgiving and Christmas days in advance, crafting her famous cornbread dressing.

We don’t call it stuffing like you hear in other parts of the country; down here we call it “dressing”. For months, she’d gather the best ingredients, all in preparation to make three huge containers filled to the brim with her carefully crafted masterpiece.

It was a tradition for my mother to make the dressing a couple of months in advance and then store it in large Tupperware containers. It would then go into the deep freeze. I learned later on that freezing it and storing it away ages the dressing much like whiskey is aged in wooden casks. The aging adds a depth of flavor that cannot be obtained any other way.

Shortly before her death, I spent a memorable weekend by her side, watching and learning as she poured herself into this recipe, ensuring every detail was perfect. I joined in with her and helped put all her secrets into the recipe that weekend.

Step by step we put it all together so I could see every last detail and commit them all to memory.

Perched from the pedestal of my present age those days and those times now appear pristine as if they have long washed in a current of beauty and grace. I remember her both as a portrait of strength and kindness and a testament of hope's enduring light

In a tribute to her, I’ve kept those memories alive by putting together a simplified version of her cornbread dressing recipe just for you. It’s a tribute to her but scaled down, simplified, and designed so that anyone can make it easily in about an hour.

So, let’s get right to the recipe.