Every region has a Thanksgiving dish that gives away where the cook grew up. In Baltimore it’s a bowl of sauerkraut next to the turkey, across much of the South it’s cornbread dressing and in Pennsylvania Dutch country it’s potato filling.
Stuffing, in one form or another, is the favorite Thanksgiving side in 42 states. What goes into the pan changes from region to region, though, and so does the lineup of bowls passed around it. For the families who grew up with those dishes, the holiday doesn’t feel finished until every one of them makes it to the table.
Stuffing, dressing or filling
Few things give away a cook’s hometown faster than the bread dish next to the turkey. Depending on where a family learned to make it, the pan holds stuffing, dressing or filling, and each name comes with its own recipe.
Campbell’s 2025 State of the Sides report surveyed 5,000 adults who celebrate Thanksgiving, 100 in each state, and stuffing or dressing ranked first almost everywhere. Mashed potatoes took the top spot in nine states, and macaroni and cheese won Florida and New York. Sweet potatoes and green bean casserole also made the national top five.
Southerners call it dressing, and theirs starts with a skillet of cornbread rather than a loaf of white bread. It bakes in its own pan instead of inside the bird and comes out golden on top and soft in the middle.
In Pennsylvania Dutch country, the same dish goes by filling. The classic version, potato filling, folds mashed potatoes and bread cubes together with celery and onion, then bakes until the top turns golden brown.
Sides that stay close to home
In Baltimore, sauerkraut sits right beside the turkey. By the late 19th century, an estimated 25% of Baltimore residents were German, and those families kept making the fermented cabbage that had been a cheap staple back home. Chef John Shields, owner of Gertrude’s Chesapeake Kitchen, told Baltimore magazine that kraut eventually “spilled over to everyone” in the city and called it “a pretty uniquely Maryland thing.” He also warned that skipping it on Thanksgiving could bring bad luck, “probably forever.”
New Mexico cooks put chile on the Thanksgiving table the same way they do the rest of the year. New Mexico Magazine’s Thanksgiving feast roundup describes a Santa Fe dinner where red chile replaces the usual pan gravy, and the writer’s own table swaps green bean casserole for calabacitas, squash cooked with green chile. Other families in the piece make tamales and posole for the holiday and finish with biscochitos, the anise cookies New Mexicans bake every holiday season.
Minnesota cooks bring wild rice hotdish, a casserole of wild rice, pork sausage, mushrooms and cream of chicken soup. In Louisiana, mirlitons, the squash also called chayote, get stuffed with shrimp and baked in their shells.
Frog eye salad, a sweet mix of tiny acini di pepe pasta, whipped topping, canned fruit and mini marshmallows, turns up in Latter-day Saints communities across Utah, Nevada and Colorado. San Francisco families make their stuffing with sourdough, a bread that dates back to the Gold Rush mining camps, and coastal cooks from New England to the South stir oysters into theirs.
Across the South, the gravy boat holds a concoction called giblet gravy. Cooks thicken the turkey’s drippings with flour, stir in the chopped giblets, then finish the pot with sliced hard-boiled eggs and a little milk or cream.
Side dish or dessert
The South grows most of the country’s sweet potatoes. North Carolina alone accounts for 58% of U.S. sweet potato acreage, and North Carolina and Mississippi together plant about 80%, according to Southern Ag Today. Sweet potatoes also ranked third in the Campbell’s survey, right behind stuffing and mashed potatoes.
Sweet potato casserole, baked with a brown sugar topping or a layer of marshmallows, keeps a familiar argument going at Southern tables: Is it a side dish or a dessert? Many Southern families settle it by serving sweet potatoes twice. The casserole is served as a side, and sweet potato pie lives on the dessert table.
The marshmallow topping started as advertising. In 1917, the Angelus Marshmallow Company printed a recipe pamphlet pairing its marshmallows with sweet potatoes, a year after a fundraising cookbook ran one of the dish’s first versions. The pamphlet likely helped turn the combination into a Thanksgiving fixture.
The pie on the sideboard
Pumpkin is still the country’s favorite Thanksgiving pie, but only by a single point. In a Hers survey of nearly 7,000 adults, 24% picked pumpkin and 23% picked apple. Sweet potato pie finished third, ahead of chocolate cream and pecan.
The state results scramble the map. Sweet potato pie came out on top in Alabama and North Carolina, and Alabama respondents ranked pumpkin dead last at 9%. Sweet potato pie also won in Hawaii, Maine, Michigan and North Dakota, far from the South. North Dakota also had the strongest showing for pecan pie, with 18% naming it their favorite.
Apple won Georgia, Texas and Louisiana, and Mississippi split almost evenly four ways, with apple at 21%, pumpkin at 20%, sweet potato at 19% and chocolate cream at 18%. Wyoming was the biggest outlier in the survey. Chocolate cream took first there, and 15% of Wyoming respondents chose key lime, more than double the 6% in Florida, where key lime is the official state pie.
A new dish becomes family tradition
These dishes often travel by marriage. A new spouse brings a family recipe to the first shared Thanksgiving, and within a few years it’s part of the regular lineup. A son-in-law from Pennsylvania might bring potato filling to a Georgia family’s table, and suddenly there are two bread dishes where there used to be one.
Over time, the newcomer’s dish stops standing out. Grandchildren grow up thinking every family puts green chile gravy on the turkey or frog eye salad on the buffet. Christmas works the same way, and nearly every family has a weird Christmas recipe nobody remembers adding.
Hosts expecting a new face this year can ask ahead what that guest’s family always served and make room for it. One extra pan won’t hurt a thing, and it may still be there 20 Thanksgivings from now.
Lucy Brewer holds a master’s in professional writing and is a fourth-generation Southern cook who founded Southern Food and Fun in 2010. She’s passionate about preserving classic Southern recipes while creating easy dishes for the modern home cook. Lucy currently lives in Augusta, Georgia.