#JIFFY CORNBREAD DRESSING WORTH GIZZARDS HOW TO#
Mary Alice and “Little Mary Alice” read Little Women together, laughed at The Golden Girls and Designing Women together, and cooked together, her teaching me how to make tea cakes and mashed potatoes and eventually, her dressing, the dish that more than any other we revered as a totem on the table each November. Over the years, she took me, her oldest grandchild, the one with her same blue eyes, wry humor, and righteous temper, under her wing in the kitchen and just about everywhere else. Before she retired, she would take the whole week off from her secretarial job at the brick company and spent days making lists and schedules so everything-the turkey, the dressing, the giblet and boiled egg gravy, the creamed corn, the mac and cheese casserole, the real cranberry sauce, the canned cranberry sauce, the dinner rolls-was perfectly timed. But she treated Thanksgiving like a sacrament. Grandma lived to host the Brown family-birthday dinners, Christmas brunch, the New Year’s good-luck meal, hog jowl and all. Adding the Pepperidge Farm felt mostly natural if a little mysterious, like when the cows in the pasture just beyond her kitchen window all stood facing the same direction. Who would admit to stacking their cornbread dressing with store-bought? But Grandma got married in 1948 and had her two boys in the fifties, the postwar Jell-O mold years when saving a little sanity with a shortcut became a matter of course-a status symbol, even. She never actually called it her secret ingredient, but I have to imagine it was. We slipped in the sautéed onion and her secret ingredient-half a bag of Pepperidge Farm dried stuffing.
The corn oil she had coated the pans with days earlier turned her hands to onion skin as we worked, the blues and pinks of her veins shining. Grandma Mary Alice and I crumbled the stale cornbread into her dented stockpot, our fingers eroding the chunks into fine silt.
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