DevraDoWrite

MediaPost sends me emails with various news items relating to media and advertising. Todays notice included a story from Ad Age that read in part:

A half dozen morning TV shows in large markets, including Atlanta, Denver, and Cleveland, are selling on-air segments to advertisers at $2,500 a pop. The shows, which carry slightly different titles in each city, are slotted into Gannett-owned stations. And the sponsored segments, while briefly identified as being such, are designed to fit seamlessly into the programming. The shows’ standard hosts appear in the segments, which helps erode the line between normal programming and advertising. Most of the advertisers to date have been local–dentists, auto dealers, and home builders–but some regional and national advertisers are also beginning to take advantage of the unique opportunity at these Gannett stations. One, Honey Baked Ham, has purchased segments on morning chat shows in Atlanta and Colorado. Al Tompkins, of the Poynter Institute, a journalism-research school in St. Petersburg, Florida, says he is troubled by the Gannett initiative. “I understand they’re not calling this journalism,” he said, “but it looks and smells a lot like journalism” and therefore has the potential to trick consumers.

You can read the whole article here , registration is required, but it’s free.

Regular readers of DevraDoWrite will correctly guess that I find these developments troublesome; it is yet another slide down the slippery slope. This feels like a bit like a cross between product placement in movies and print advertorials that look like articles, read like feature stories, and have a teeny tiny “advertisement” notice in a margin — but this is more dangerous and deliberately duplicitous. Not only in that “it looks and smells a lot like journalism,” but by virtue of association with a TV host or anchor it implies an endorsement from someone viewers ‘trust’ and it all unfolds right there in your home. Call it trickery, manipulation, or effective marketing, the bottom line is…well, the bottom line. It is all about convincing people to spend their hard-earned ca$h. It’s not that I think people are stupid, but I do think that we are vulnerable. We look increasingly to those who can help to filter, decipher, and/or evaluate the avalanche of information that threatens to bury us daily, and this need makes us susceptible to influence from people perceived to be in-the-know and on our side.

So what IS the difference between stuffing and dressing? Everyone who wrote in was emphatic, but two answers are running neck in neck with no clear winner.

Half concur with this reader who wrote:

my understanding has always been that if the mixture is stuffed into a bird or meat, it’s stuffing. if it’s cooked or baked outside the “vessel” (in a pan or dish), it’s dressing!!

Note the exclamation marks.

The other half believe that the word choice is dependent on one’s geographic location within the U.S., not the location of the foodstuff vis a vis the bird.

Two people referred to an AP Wire story that said, in part:

(AP) – Is there a difference between stuffing and dressing? This recipe for a tasty sourdough, pears and sausage accompaniment bakes in a baking dish rather than being stuffed inside the Thanksgiving turkey – but what you call it depends more on where you live than how the dish is prepared.

That’s the view of the editors of Cooking Light, noted in a holiday feature in the magazine’s November issue. “Stuffing” can be stuffed into the bird or baked alongside it in a separate dish, and the same holds true for the term “dressing,” they write. “In the southern and eastern United States, people generally call it ‘dressing,’ a term that came about during the 19th century. Elsewhere, it’s referred to as ‘stuffing.”‘

One of the people who cited the AP/Cooking Light stories, a writer friend of mine in Kentucky (she’s a reporter and columnist for the Kentucky New Era), wrote:

Think of it simply this way. Stuffing goes in the bird. Dressing is cooked in a dish outside of the bird.

I know you will try to analyze this, Devra. Just remember, I was once a food editor of a small rural daily, where food is serious business. I thought I knew the answer when I read your Thanksgiving entry, but just to be careful, I “googled” the question. I found the same conclusion in an AP story and in a Cooking Light magazine article.

Another thing. Dressing is typically more popular in the South. I had cornbread dressing for my family.

She knows me well; let’s analyze. On the one hand, she concurs with the stuffing inside/dressing outside definition, and on the other she supports the Cooking Light editors who clearly say that “it depends more on where you live than how the dish is prepared.” So, here’s my conclusion: lets all just agree that location is the key, regardless as to whether you’re talking about the location in which the bread-based morsels are prepared in relationship to the bird, or the geographic location of those about to eat it.

My Kentucky reporter goes on to mention:

In Kentucky, turkey and dressing with gravy is actually served yearround at many mom-and-pop restaurants and at grocery stories that offer the classic “meat and three” lunches.

Meat and three? I assumed that the three might represent stuffing, a vegetable dish, and one extra, maybe cranberry sauce or a biscuit. Wrong! These people eat three vegetable side dishes! According to my Kentucky reporter, stuffing is considered part of the meat serving (along with the gravy), and oftentimes the meat serving contains more stuffing than meat. With that, you choose three vegetables. Sounds good to me, but I can’t eat another bite — I’m stuffed.

What do a handful of writers discuss over the Cranberry Curry Dip while waiting for turkey dinner with their spouses and assorted family members? The BIG question: do you call it stuffing or dressing? And what’s the difference between the two, anyway? The youngest member of the group, age eleven, may be a budding wordsmith as she informed us that one of the words was likely a retronym for the other — though she did not know which came first. She did, however, provide us with an example of a word that became a retronym as its meaning evolved: watch –> pocket watch –> wrist watch. We were duly impressed, but no closer to an answer. One friend opined that the word choice might have changed in the Victorian era, the image of stuffing being too base, too vulgar, and dressing sounding more proper, more circumspect. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, however, seems to refute that premise as it suggests that dressing was used earlier than stuffing, if only by a few decades:

dressing “(A) sauce or other mixture added to food, esp. a salad; a seasoning; stuffing. E16.”

stuffing “A savoury or sweet mixture used to stuff poultry, rolled meat, vegetables, etc., esp. prior to cooking. M16.”

I perused a few other references — including Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary and the Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus — and quickly realized that I’d best stick to the nouns, for digression into verbs would bring us into the realm of fecundation and fertilization (“the act of making fertile by application of fertilizer or manure”), donning attire, and applying bandages.

Within culinary boundaries, the Visual Thesaurus defined stuffing as “a mixture of seasoned ingredients used to stuff meats and vegetables,” under which fall types including farce and forcemeat, the latter defined as “a mixture of ground raw chicken and mushrooms with pistacheos and truffles and onions and parseley and lots butter and bound with eggs.” Oxford defines forcemeat a bit more generically: “A mixture of finely chopped meat or vegetables etc., seasoned and spiced, and chiefly used for stuffing or garnish.”

Of course the best part of noodling around in reference books is the serendipitous discovery of related entries you had not thought about. In this case, Oxford served up two of interest, one a word I had never heard, and the other interesting in its meaning. The first is salpicon:

/”salpIkQn/ n.E18. [Fr. f. Sp., f. salpicar sprinkle (with salt).] Cookery. A stuffing for veal, beef, or mutton, also used as a garnish.

The other is pudding, certainly a familiar word, but the substance that comes to my mind is sweet and either butterscotch or chocolate. Here are portions of the Oxford entry (I’m skipping over the coarse slang and colloquial meanings):

/”pUdI/ n. Also (colloq. & dial.) pudden /”pUd()n/.ME. [(O)Fr. boudin black pudding f. Proto-Gallo-Romance f. L botellus pudding, sausage, small intestine: see BOWEL. Cf. BOUDIN.]
I 1 The stomach or intestine of a pig, sheep, etc., stuffed with minced meat, suet, oatmeal, seasoning, etc., and boiled. Now chiefly Sc. & dial. or w. specifying wd. ME.
> black pudding, white pudding, etc.
b A stuffing mixture of similar ingredients, roasted within the body of an animal. L16–L18.
2 In pl. The bowels, the entrails, the guts. Now chiefly Sc. & dial. LME.
…
II 7 A cooked dish consisting of various sweet or savoury ingredients, esp. as enclosed within a flour-based crust or mixed with flour, eggs, etc., and boiled or steamed; a baked batter mixture. Now also, the sweet course of a meal. M16.
> bread pudding, Christmas pudding, milk pudding, roly-poly pudding, steak and kidney pudding, Yorkshire pudding etc.

Lots of interesting info, but still no answer to the pressing question: stuffing or dressing? I looked in Roget’s Superthesaurus, which says little about stuffing (“fill, wadding, padding, innards”) and nothing about dressing, forcemeat, salpicon, or pudding. I even looked in The New York Public Library Desk Reference, to no avail, although I did learn from that tome that “a jiffy is an actual unit of time. It is 1/100 of a second.” And all this time I thought jiffy was cornbread mix.

If you know the answer, please email me. Inquiring minds want to know.