Happy Thanksgiving everybody (with a side of belated Happy Thanksgiving to the Canadians)!!

I am truly thankful for this community and all the moral and other support it provides throughout the year.

As I read through the food posts, I am struck by the terms. What is the stuffing/dressing, sauce/relish divide? It doesn't seem to be East/West.

At Chez Zmayhem I am listening to old British folk rock (surprisingly good Thanksgiving music since they don't celebrate turkey day, but it's all burnished and melancholy and hence autumnal). I just kicked JZ, Matilda and Emmett out the door to (a) get them out out of my way for a few minutes while I review recipes and (b) get a few extra items for today and (c) get the kids some fresh air before I can turn my attention to them after I get the turkey in the oven.

Found a mustard/vermouth/thyme sauce in Silver Palate I think I'll use on the brussel sprouts. Got extra dairy products to toss into the mashed potatoes to make them super rich. I'm wandering around the kitchen sniffing at the fresh sage and thyme, and a little bowl of mulling spice.

It's funny - I feel like I should be up and cooking already but since the pies are coming with EM, I don't really have to do much more than turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy and brussel sprouts. While the turkey takes time (and lots of babying the way I do it) it's still too early, and the other stuff is also premature.

So I'm just in that meditative menu planning stage, reviewing the timing of everything.

Since Emmett's got the complete Friends box set, we'll probably watch some of their Thanksgiving episodes.

I'm in central US and we always say stuffing /sauce in my family, but I remember my great-grandfather saying dressing. I wonder how it does divide. Maybe like dinner/supper?

Stuffing/dressing is basically north-south (with a good bit of the farm culture part of the midwest following the south, as tends to happen with foodways). Dinner/supper is a similar divide.

Sauce/relish, I dunno. I've always thought of it as a question of different recipes rather than different regions. Mine this year claims to be a chutney on the recipe, but I think that's just a matter of magazine publishers wanting to make it sound more exotic than cranberry sauce. As if.

Stuffing is cooked in the bird, dressing is cooked separately.

Sauce is a pretty general term, but (to me) relish means some sort of pickle is involved.

For the record, we said stuffing/sauce. That's in Northern Connecticut. I think I knew people growing up who might have said dressing.

My great-grandfather being born in 1850 or so, I have no idea what he would have said. And of course, he didn't celebrate Thanksgiving and it wouldn't have been in English so I guess that's no help anyway. And it occurs to me now that I have no idea what language he spoke.

I call cranberry sauce "sauce" but really it's a relish or a chutney, because it's not properly smooth, but lumpy.

And Happy Thanksgiving, Buffistas who are celebrating it!

Stuffing is cooked in the bird, dressing is cooked separately.

I wonder if now that most people know that it's not a good idea to actually stuff the turkey that will change? I doubt I will ever use dressing, even though it's been a side for years.

Stuffing here, all the way. Also our stuffing is only bread, butter, onions and summer savory, and nothing like sausage or oysters or nuts goes inside the bird.

I don't understand how sauce and relish can be attached to the same food.

We keep cooking the stuffing inside the bird--the unsafe part is when you leave it in the bird after you take it out of the oven. So we remove it right away, and in my mumblety years of having turkey stuffing, nobody in my family's ever gotten sick from it. And stuffing cooked in the bird is far better than stuffing cooked in a pan, because the turkey juices flavor it so wonderfully.