Southern Cornbread Dressing Recipe (2024)

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Our BEST Southern Cornbread Dressing Recipe

Southern Cornbread Dressing, the quintessential holiday side dish!

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I’m a GRITS (Girl Raised In The South.) And because I grew up in Tennessee, every single family Thanksgiving dinner includes Southern Cornbread Dressing.

I never actually loved my mom’s cornbread, but I really loved her cornbread dressing. She started with homemade cornbread then added stale bread cubes, and sometimes leftover biscuits too. Nothing went to waste! It’s a basic but delicious dressing recipe with plenty of onion, celery, eggs, chicken broth, sage and thyme.

Overview: Ingredients for Cornbread Dressing

If making your own homemade buttermilk cornbread you’ll need:

all-purpose flour
cornmeal
granulated sugar
baking powder
salt
buttermilk
mayonnaise
vegetable oil
egg

For the cornbread dressing:

1 recipe of cornbread either homemade or store-bought
hearty white bread cut into cubes
unsalted butter
sweet onions chopped
celery ribs
dried sage or poultry seasoning
dried thyme leaves
low-sodium chicken broth – homemade or store-bought
eggs
salt and pepper
parsley leaves for garnish (optional)

What makes this a Southern Cornbread Dressing recipe?

Much like Irish Soda Bread is regularly on the table of Irish families, cornbreadhas always been a fixture on southern dinner tables. So it’s only natural that cornbread would be part of the Thanksgiving feast. They used what they had on hand, so cornbread was the foundation of southern dressing and stuffing recipes.

There are many variations for cornbread recipes across the United States. Some like it sweet with sugar or honey, and many use buttermilk instead of plain milk.

Sometimes a little mayonnaise is added in place of oil to the batter like in our Skillet Buttermilk Cornbread recipe. Mayo may not be a typical add-in at your house, but don’t knock it until you’ve tried it!

For this dressing recipe, I recommend using a less-sweet cake of cornbread as the base. It just won’t taste right if overly sweet.

Overview: How to make Southern style Cornbread Dressing

First, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Melt the butter in a skillet to sauté the onion and celery.

Next, crumble up an entire cake of prepared cornbread in a large bowl. Add the buttered sautéed vegetables. You can also add stale bread cubes, if you have any on hand.

Cornbread dressing does not require adding other kinds of bread, so no worries. However, if you’re skipping the small pieces of white bread you’ll need to double the cornbread as listed in the recipe.

Finally, add good chicken stock or broth to the cornbread mixture along with a few eggs to bind it all together.

Lightly season with sage and thyme and scoop into a casserole dish or cast iron skillet. Bake the pan of dressing for 45 minutes or until cooked through. Baking times may vary depending on the type of baking dishes used.

What’s the difference between Southern Cornbread Dressing and Cornbread Stuffing?

It’s all about the bird! If the recipe is made in a casserole dish, it’s dressing. If it’s stuffed inside the bird, it’s called stuffing. The terms are pretty much interchangeable in the South.

My mom often stuffed some inside the bird, and had extra dressing to bake in a pan, separately. We like to make enough Southern Cornbread Dressing so that we have leftovers to eat with our turkey sandwiches. Is there anything better?

Can you make the cornbread dressing ahead and freeze it?

Yes you can! If you’re planning to freeze your cornbread dressing casserole, there are options.

Bake just the cornbread ahead and freeze it until needed. You’re one step closer to delicious cornbread dressing.
You can also make the entire casserole ahead of time, bake it for about 30 minutes, cool completely, cover and freeze. Thaw the casserole overnight in the refrigerator and bring to room temperature before baking.
More often than not I end up making the entire casserole the day before Thanksgiving and refrigerate it, unbaked, until needed. Such an easy way to enjoy a delicious tradition!

What kind of extras can you throw into your cornbread dressing recipe?

For years I tried changing things up by adding things like cooked sausage, dried cranberries or pecans to my cornbread dressing. Personally, I love the little bits of pork breakfast sausage, or the tart little bites of cranberry. One of my favorites was the addition of pecans. Nuts are great in everything.

However my crazy family apparently doesn’t like change. They prefer the plain old Southern Cornbread Dressing recipe they grew up on, or so they’ve said many, many times.

Simple, unadorned basic Southern Cornbread Dressing is all I make now. My kids have even complained when I leave cornbread cubes on top of the casserole as I’ve done here. Most cornbread dressing casseroles have the cornbread crumbled into very tiny pieces, with no cubes remaining.

I like the cubes for visual appeal myself, so they can just get over it. Haha. The top is a little crispy but the middle of the casserole is soft just like we love.

Food memories are the best 🙂

Even now when I smell this Southern Cornbread Dressing baking in the oven, it takes me back home. I can see the Macy’s Day Parade on the television, with my mom in the kitchen wearing her apron. She would run from the oven to the stove, and back to the sink with tremendous grace and agility.

We always helped, of course, but mostly with the cleanup. She was a force of nature in the kitchen and could bring a massive meal together with amazing finesse. I sure do miss my folks this time of year!

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