Someone needs to make a better stuffing vs. dressing map than this one from Butterball. The problem is that they have a small sample: the fine print reads “This survey was conducted online with a random sample 1,000 men and women in 9 regions – all members of the CyberPulseTM Advisory Panel. Research was conducted in May 2007. The overall sampling error for the survey is +/-3% at the 95% level of confidence.” So the average state has a sample of 20, which would lead to a 21% or so margin of error. This error is enough that the map just looks wrong – Georgia and Mississippi call it stuffing, but Alabama and Tennessee call it dressing? The Butterball map does seem to capture the regional divide, though, where the South calls it “dressing” and the North calls it “stuffing”. We’re still fighting the linguistic Civil War in my house. Obviously this is meant to be entertainment, but get a bigger sample, will you?
It looks like Epicurious has some internal data based on search results that led to their site, but they’re not sharing.
My Google Image Search results for “stuffing vs. dressing” find a bunch of pictures of the ambiguously named bready dish, and also this map of the largest religious denomination in US counties and this article on Josh Katz’s maps of Bert Vaux’s dialect survey. “Stuffing” vs “dressing” is not one of the questions in that survey, sadly.
And yes, I know about the compromise where it’s “stuffing” when it’s cooked in the bird and “dressing” when it’s cooked separately. But in my family of origin we generally have too much to fit in the bird, so some gets cooked in the bird and some doesn’t… does that mean we have “dressing” and “stuffing” on the table at the same time?
God plays dice 