Stuffing may be synonymous with Thanksgiving, but there are countless variations and recipes out there, and its origins actually predate the holiday. A Roman recipe book from the first century A.D. documents that Romans combined herbs, spices, and veggies with spelt (an ancient grain) and put that inside chickens, pigs, and rabbits to create their own kind of stuffing.

Stuffing may have originated before it was written down, as the Wall Street Journal notes there’s a 3,700-year-old clay tablet from ancient Iraq that shows chicken recipes alongside flavored bread. That bread was merely a side dish, like many present-day stuffings, but the Journal hypothesizes this was the dish's oldest ancestor.