THINGS TO DO
By Deborah Allard Dion
Stuffing might just be the stuff that elevates Thanksgiving dinner to holiday status.
W
ithout stuffing, all we’ve really got is turkey and mashed potatoes with a few sad peas or green beans – a meal hardly worth celebrating. It’s the dressing on the plate that’s more than merely a “fixin’” and certainly the glue (though hopefully not gluey; we’ll leave you to tackle that title when you make your gravy) that binds the meal into a feast. Be it a stuffing passed down through the generations or taken from the pages of a glossy magazine, it’s a side dish to be savored and shared. A few friends, through the beauty of social media, were inclined to give up their stuffing recipes in plenty of time for you
20
to let them shine on your own holiday table. Mary Delaney Murphy shared her grandmother’s Irish stuffing, which she described as “very simple and tasty.” Based on mashed potatoes, with flavorings, onions, and celery, it is baked inside the turkey where it can pick up the juices. It was served up with lots of her “Grammy’s gravy,” too, made with “giblets from inside the turkey.” Louise Menard shared her grandmother’s recipe for French stuffing. She happily got her hands on it from her cousin, who collected family recipes into a booklet and gifted them to relatives for the next generation of cooks. “The book has recipes from both sides of my cousin’s family,” Menard said.
November 2020 | The South Coast Insider
“This is a special recipe from my grandmother straight from Canada.” Her mémère Diana Bouchard brought her recipes with her from French Canada and luckily shared them with her family before she passed away in 2003. “She lived until the ripe old age of 95,” Menard said. And, it wouldn’t the South Coast without a couple of recipes for Portuguese stuffing. Patti Linhares shared her mom’s recipe for Portuguese stuffing, one of the many dishes Linhares remembers her late mom Mary Correira preparing in the family kitchen. Correira lived to be 92 years old and worked as a bookkeeper until not long before her passing in 2018.