Stuffing

Stuffing, also called filling or dressing, is an edible mixture, often built on herbs and a starch such as bread, used to fill a cavity inside another food, most commonly poultry, seafood or vegetables such as tomatoes, peppers and zucchini after their seeds or flesh have been removed. As a technique it helps the surrounding food retain moisture during cooking while the stuffing itself absorbs and adds flavor, with poultry stuffing commonly built from breadcrumbs, onion, celery, sage and other herbs together with giblets, and regional versions adding dried fruit, nuts, chestnuts or sausage meat. The earliest documented recipes appear in the Roman cookbook Apicius' De Re Coquinaria, which included stuffed chicken, hare and pig, and the English terminology moved from farce around 1390 to stuffing by 1538 and to dressing, an American usage, by 1850.