Choices abound when determining traditions for Thanksgiving meal

If you are a traditionalist, James Beard says, “roast your turkey with the stuffing inside.” But, he argues: “After many years, it is my considered opinion that stuffing tastes much better when cooked in a baking dish than inside the bird – it gets nice and crispy, not soggy, and is altogether much more satisfactory and easier to serve.”

Thus, the debate continues about whether to stuff the Thanksgiving bird or serve a dressing on the side.

To complicate matters further, it depends on what kind of traditionalist you are. Does your tradition dictate sweet potatoes or white, giblet gravy or brown, jellied cranberries or whole, pumpkin pie or mince, cornbread or bread crumbs, sausage or oyster stuffing? Smoked turkey or roasted goose?

Ironically, on this truest of traditional American holidays, there’s no single traditional meal.

Cookbook author Beard prefers two stuffings in his turkey: a bread stuffing for the body cavity and another for the neck cavity combining sausage meat and ground veal.

There’s a Pennsylvania Dutch recipe that calls for a package of commercial stuffing mix added to mashed potatoes, onions and fried sausage, then cooling before stuffing the turkey.

From “Maine’s Jubilee Cookbook,” we find “Grandmother’s Sage Stuffing,” which isn’t a stuffing at all but rather a dressing. Made with biscuit, bread crumbs or crackers, the mixture includes sage, onion, eggs and milk. For cooking, it can be steamed for 3 hours in a tightly covered, greased container as one would steam brown bread.

Then, we discover a dressing that becomes a stuffing from a Metairie, La., recipe called “Oyster Dressing for Turkey.” This mixture combines toasted white bread with scalded oysters and saut?ed ground beef, plus plenty of spices, before stuffing it inside the turkey.

The editors of “Southern Sideboards” cookbook solved the stuffing-dressing debate by doing both. Their cornbread dressing can be used to stuff the turkey or can be baked in a greased casserole. In addition, they use both crumbled corn bread and toasted bread pieces as the base before adding chicken stock and even some chopped turkey giblets.

On Thanksgiving Day, it doesn’t matter – semantically – whether we dress the turkey with stuffing or stuff the turkey with dressing. Whether we serve green beans or peas, butternut or acorn squash, dinner rolls or biscuits.

What matters is the family tradition that brings generations together around a table encircled with love.

“Bless the hands of those who prepared for us this food and make us thankful for these and all blessings.” Amen.