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Since this week is Blogsgiving Dinner, I’m sharing this recipe for slow cooker sage cornbread dressing that comes from my Great Grandma! It’s been adapted for the slow cooker to save precious oven space on Thanksgiving day.

This week is Blogsgiving Dinner around the web and I’m so excited to join in! Like Thanksgiving, the food blogging community is all about family, friends and delicious food. I’m joining with Blogsgiving Dinner hosts Meghan from Cake ‘n Knife and Susannah from Feast + West along with more than 60 other blogs to share recipes this week!

The idea is based on an old-fashioned potluck dinner party. Each blogger is bringing one or more dishes to the party, so be sure to stop by each one and get some ideas for your own Thanksgiving meal. We’ll be posting to social media with the hashtag #blogsgivingdinner, but you can see all the whole menu in Part 1 and Part 2 of the recipe round-up. My potluck dish is this Slow Cooker Sage Cornbread Dressing!

If I could have only one item at my Thanksgiving it would be this dressing. It’s that amazing, and that important to our Thanksgiving traditions. The women in my family have been known as great cooks for several generations now (maybe always? I don’t have records.), and this recipe actually comes from my great, great grandmother. It’s one that has been passed down in our family from grandma to granddaughter and mother to daughter for almost 100 years now. (That means it’s really awesome!) I actually have a photocopy of a letter my grandma Dine wrote to my great grandma asking her for this recipe because she volunteered to make the dressing for a huge church group holiday get together at the last minute and didn’t know the recipe. (I am so like my grandma!) Great grandma flipped that letter over as soon as she got it (likely in the post office), jotted down the recipe on the back and mailed just in time for my grandma to make it for the event. I’ll have to see if I can scan it to share here because it’s such a family treasure. I never met my great grandma, but I lived with my grandma for a time and heard so many wonderful stories. I love that I get to see and taste a piece of family history when I eat this.

My great grandma used to make this for company dinners, grandma would make it for her bridge club get-togethers and our Thanksgivings when I was younger. When grandma wasn’t around for Thanksgiving, my mom usually made it once a year on Thanksgiving with me as a helper. Now that I am a “grown up,” I usually make it for Thanksgiving with my mom if I’m there in Austin, and for a “Friendsgiving” or two here in Denver each year.

I can still remember my grandma first teaching me how to brown onions for this recipe. “Low and slow” she’d always say. I’d get impatient while tending them and try to turn up the heat. Sometimes we’d get distracted by another Thanksgiving dish cooking in tandem and the onions would burn. If you don’t want a slightly burned taste in your dressing, you pretty much have to toss out all the burned onions and start over, but back in the “old days” groceries were closed on Thanksgiving and you inevitably would have only purchased as many onions as you needed. We’d pick out the charred onions and add the rest to the dressing with Grandma Dine deciding it would add “character” to the flavor. The darker your onions and toast, the darker the dressing will be.

Bread has changed a lot since great grandma’s time (she probably baked her own bread), so to keep it “authentic” I usually choose a thick Texas Toast slice of bread. Colorado groceries don’t often seem to stock Texas Toast (argh!) so I sometimes substitute using a bit extra of regular sliced bread or buying a couple bags of unseasoned stuffing mix that the groceries stock this time of year. I also sometimes get ~~lazy~~ efficient and buy pre-boiled and peeled eggs at Costco. Some for this recipe, the rest for a batch of my Tapenade Egg Salad. One other (big) thing has changed since my great grandma’s time (and all previous years actually) – I’ve adapted this dressing recipe to cook in my slow cooker using the tips at the bottom of this post from Serious Eats. It’s so convenient to have this going on the counter instead of fighting over oven space, and it turns out so moist and perfect! I don’t think I’ll go back to my oven with this recipe again. It’s basically a savory bread pudding, and slow cookers do those amazingly well. I hope you enjoy this taste of my family history!

What’s the one Thanksgiving food your family has to have on the table?

Slow Cooker Sage Cornbread Dressing

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Author: Stephanie Powers
Prep Time: 30
Cook Time: 240
Total Time: 270

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Ingredients

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16 slices of “Texas Toast” thick sliced white bread, toasted medium brown (Can sub 25 slices regular sliced white bread, toasted or about 12 cups unseasoned bagged stuffing mix)
1 9×9 pan cornbread (Use a savory cornbread mix like Marie Calendars, not a sweet one like Jiffy)
4 cups chicken broth or stock
6 hard boiled eggs, peeled and diced
2 medium onions, diced
4 tablespoons of butter
2 large eggs (raw)
1 teaspoon rubbed sage
salt and pepper to taste
1 jar diced pimentos (optional for garnish)

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Instructions

Melt butter in a large pan over medium low heat and add diced onions.
Brown onions slowly until they begin to caramelize. Do not allow them to burn.
Line a 6 qt oval slow cooker with a slow cooker liner.
Tear toasted bread into small pieces into the bottom of the slow cooker. (It will look almost full with the bread pieces.)
Heat chicken stock in a large saucepan until it begins to boil.
Pour slowly over the bread chunks in the slow cooker.
Crumble the cornbread into large chunks into the slow cooker.
Add diced hardboiled eggs, browned onions, salt, pepper, and rubbed sage and stir to combine.
Scramble the two raw eggs in a bowl and pour over the top of the dressing and stir gently to combine.
Cover and cook on low for about 4 hours, or until edges begin to brown and dressing has set.
Turn off slow cooker to prevent over-cooking, fluff dressing with a fork (if you want a fluffier appearance), add pimentos as garnish and serve warm straight out of the slow cooker or from a pretty casserole dish.

Notes

Onions can be caramelized and refrigerated, eggs boiled and diced and refrigerated, and bread toasted and torn the night before to help prep go faster on Thanksgiving morning.
Cut this recipe in half for a smaller round 4qt slow cooker.
Oven version: Bake covered in the oven at ~350 for about 1.5 hours or until broth has mostly cooked off.
Gluten-free: This recipe is not gluten-free, however, I did make a gluten-free version one year using gf bread and gf cornbread. It was a crazy amount of work as I scratch-baked all the gf bread. It turned out pretty delicious, but a box of gf dressing mix from Trader Joe’s might be a cheaper alternative. 😉
Vegetarian: This will turn out just fine with vegetable stock!
Vegan: This won’t really set in the slow cooker without the eggs, so I probably wouldn’t adapt this for vegan diets.