If you’ve sung “The Thanksgiving Hymn” (aka “We Gather Together”), you may recognize my title. The actual line, of course, is “The wicked oppressing, pray cease from distressing”, but when I was a kid, I heard it the other way. I really liked dressing, you see, and keeping the wicked away from it struck me as a fitting punishment.

So this is a post about dressing. Not stuffing, mind you. Other people might stuff their turkeys, but we of the Weathers clan had only dressing baked separately in a glass casserole dish. That was one of the guiding dressing principles, but not the only one. Here then are The Dressing Rules as passed down from my forefathers, or more likely foremothers. I don’t necessarily obey them all, but I have to admit I’m still aware of them.

Proper dressing is austere, even minimalist. No eggs, no sausage, certainly nothing like chestnuts or oysters. I suspect this was partly due to the fact that we lived in Wichita, Kansas, where additions like chestnuts and oysters were not particularly easy to come by. Anyway, dressing as I know it includes only celery and onions along with the bread. As I recall, my mom would toss that chopped up onion and celery into the dressing raw to cook in the oven along with the turkey. I break with tradition and sauté the veggies in butter. Lots of it.

About the bread. True dressing is made with stale bread you’ve been saving for that purpose. Thus it includes lots of heels and little thin pieces that nobody wants for a sandwich. This in turn means that there are some fairly recalcitrant pieces of bread in the dressing that never really soften up. This is another rule I disobey. Stale bread tastes like, well, stale bread. I make a couple of pans of cornbread using a mix (yeah, usually Jiffy) and let it sit out overnight to get a bit more substantial than it is straight out of the oven. If I’m feeling particularly fancy, I may buy a baguette, cut it into pieces, and let it sit out too. Needless to say, the Wichita of my youth had no baguettes available.

When you put everything together (i.e., bread, onions, and celery), you soften the mixture with liquid, and here again I have major differences with The Dressing Rules. My mom, for reasons that escape me, dunked the bread in ice water and then rung it dry, creating a damp but crummy mixture. I use warm stock, usually vegetable stock since our Thanksgiving guests include vegetarians. I also don’t wring it out since a wet mixture seems to puff up better than a dry one.

On seasonings, I’m a purist. Salt, pepper, and powdered sage. I may occasionally throw in a little thyme if it’s available. But since I’m usually cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen, I stay with the big three.

And then you bake it. Oven temperature doesn’t matter much—anywhere from 325 to 375 seems to work. Length of baking time depends on how hot the oven is. Just follow the old recipe guideline “’Til it be enough.”

And it will be good. Very good. Good enough that you will definitely want to keep the wicked as far away from it as possible.

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all!