Make This Thanksgiving Side Marilyn Monroe-Style With A Sourdough Twist
Marilyn Monroe may not be the first person who comes to mind when you think of a traditional 1950s housewife. Yet at the time of her marriage to Joe DiMaggio in 1954, she was eager to create a peaceful domestic life. It was around that time that she took down a recipe for Thanksgiving stuffing. However, it's no surprise that the recipe bucked convention. Rather than using stale white bread, it called for sourdough French bread soaked in water.
The recipe, which is scrawled across two sides of a sheet of memo paper from an insurance company, was discovered around 2006. It's surprisingly lengthy, fussy, and laborious, with 18 ingredients that result in around 20 cups of stuffing. A historian surmised that this unique stuffing recipe that Monroe loved was influenced by her Italian in-laws and life in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the inclusion of sourdough bread, which wasn't widely used outside the region at the time.
Most traditional Thanksgiving stuffing recipes of the time used stale or toasted white bread and called for a binder like egg or fat. Monroe's recipe, however, requires that the sourdough bread be soaked and shredded, a method that wasn't even in Monroe's own 1950s cookbooks. It's possible that sourdough was Monroe or DiMaggio's favorite bread, and that the parmesan cheese, raisins, and pine nuts in the recipe were nods to his family's Sicilian roots. Monroe also carefully wrote "no garlic" at the very top of the page, as DiMaggio famously hated the pungent ingredient.
Monroe's handwritten stuffing recipe was sold at auction twice
Marilyn Monroe loved food, drinks, and dining out, so it's easy to see why many people would want to
own her handwritten recipe as a stunning piece of history. However, the recipe, which was found among personal effects from the home of her late acting teacher Lee Strasberg, didn't originally fetch as high a price as expected. The original handwritten stuffing recipe first sold at auction by Julien's Auction House of Los Angeles in 2016 for $6,400, but was expected to garner $10,000 to $20,000.
Ten years later, the recipe and other personal effects went up for sale again in June 2026 at the auction house's special 100 Years of Marilyn event, commemorating what would have been Monroe's 100th birthday. At this second auction, the recipe sold for a jaw-dropping $16,000, far exceeding its projected sale price of just $2,000 to $3,000. The final price is a testament to the lasting fascination with Monroe, even 64 years after her tragic death.
Making Monroe's famous stuffing is a labor of love
The instructions for Marilyn Monroe's stuffing recipe are detailed, and you should be prepared to spend at least two hours chopping, dicing, boiling, and browning. Start by measuring your ingredients into prep bowls so everything is ready before you begin cooking.
You'll need sourdough French bread, as well as chicken livers, ground beef, oil, celery, onion, curly parsley, hard boiled eggs, raisins, chopped nuts, parmesan, poultry seasoning, bay leaves, salt, pepper, and dried rosemary, oregano, and thyme. Then soak the bread in water, wring it out, and shred it into bite-sized pieces.
After cooking the livers or hearts and browning the ground beef, the meat can be chopped into small pieces. You want everything in the stuffing to be roughly the same size, so aim for raisin- or nut-sized pieces. After chopping and dicing the rest of the ingredients, combine everything in the biggest bowl you have and mix in the herbs and seasonings.
The result is a hearty stuffing that is wholly unique for its slightly sweet taste, beautiful color, and fluffy texture. Like a traditional stuffing recipe, this can be refrigerated and later used to stuff your turkey, or it can be baked at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about an hour and served as a side dish at your Thanksgiving dinner. You can also adapt it to create our sourdough sausage stuffing recipe.