The recipe is from one of those ancient wire-bound cookbooks in my mom’s collection that is covered in splatters of sauce from holidays past. This stuff has reached legendary status in my mind as part of my mom’s culinary repertoire, the one thing I can never get enough of, and the one thing I will fight for at the dinner table once the cheese grits are eaten and gone. Now that I reflect on it, this is probably the most passive-aggressive of holiday dishes, in that if you resent your family you can just feed them cornbread stuffing until their arteries harden.
I made it this year since Mom was down and out after knee surgery and my sister was kid-wrangling most of the morning, and frankly, because I wanted to claim ownership of the dish this year. It was the one piece of Lauren’s Thanksgiving Bake-Off that was successful this week, wherein FOR WHATEVER REASON I peeled pearl onions instead of buying them canned*, crafted a batch of yeast rolls that cooked up hard and tasteless**, cooked up some cheese grits that while pretty didn’t manage to set***, and forgot all about green food on the Thanksgiving table. But the stuffing: it was good.
First you bake off a large slab of unsweetened cornbread, think a 9×12 dish. Melt ONE STICK OF BUTTER in a Dutch oven. Fry up about one half pound of sausage and one pound of ground beef in the butter. Dump in a chopped onion, several cloves of chopped garlic, and a couple sticks of chopped celery, and cook them with the meat and butter mixture until they’re tender. Then add ANOTHER STICK OF BUTTER, 12-ish ounces of chicken broth, and a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, and let this simmer for a little under two hours. Crumble up the cornbread into this mixture gradually while stirring, and season with salt, black pepper, red pepper, chili powder and paprika to taste. If it looks a little dry add more chicken broth to moisten the mixture. SERVE.
So basically, make a meat and butter soup and add cornbread. It’s ridiculous. And delicious.
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* I’m going to do this more often since I love onions so much. Buy a little bag of fresh pearl onions and boil them in water for about 3-5 minutes. Strain them and wait until they’re cool, then you can cut off the root end and squeeze the edibles out the bottom. So good sauteed.
** I don’t know what I did wrong, especially since the dough itself was perfect.
*** Two eggs, not one. Next time remember to bring the recipe.
You did own it this year. It was yours and it was outstanding. I think I am going to see if there is more in the back of the frig now and I will heat it….