Home › Catsups and Sauces › Cranberry Sauce
Cranberry Sauce
After removing all soft berries, wash thoroughly, place for about two minutes in scalding water, remove, and to every pound fruit add three-quarters of a pound granulated sugar and a half pint water; stew together over a moderate but steady fire. Be careful to cover and not to stir the fruit, but occasionally shake the vessel, or apply a gentler heat if in danger of sticking or burning. If attention to these particulars be given, the berries will retain their shape to a considerable extent, which adds greatly to their appearance on the table. Boil from five to seven minutes, remove from fire, turn into a deep dish, and set aside to cool. If to be kept, they can be put up at once in air-tight jars. Or, for strained sauce, one and a half pounds of fruit should be stewed in one pint of water for ten or twelve minutes, or until quite soft, then strained through a colander or fine wire sieve, and three-quarters of a pound of sugar thoroughly stirred into the pulp thus obtained; after cooling it is ready for use. Serve with roast turkey or game. When to be kept for a long time without sealing, more sugar may be added, but its too free use impairs the peculiar cranberry flavor. For dinner-sauce half a pound is more economical, and really preferable to three-quarters, as given above. It is better, though not necessary, to use a porcelain kettle. Some prefer not to add the sugar till the fruit is almost done, thinking this plan makes it more tender, and preserves the color better.-C. G. & E. W. Crane, Caldwell, N. J.
A ratio recipe rather than a measured one, and it works cleanly once the weights are converted. The whole point of the method is restraint: covered pan, no spoon, gentle heat, so the berries stay whole.
- The weights in cupsA pound of cranberries is about 4 cups, so a standard 12-oz bag is three-quarters of the recipe. Three-quarters of a pound of granulated sugar is about 1 3/4 cups; half a pint of water is 1 cup.
- Do not stirThis is the instruction that decides how the dish looks. Stirring breaks the skins and you get pulp; shaking the covered pan moves the fruit without shearing it. Keep the lid on so the berries steam as much as they boil.
- Moderate but steady fireOn a modern burner that is medium-low, just enough to keep a lazy boil under the lid. Cranberries are naturally high in pectin and the syrup thickens fast, which is exactly when scorching starts.
- Five to seven minutes is correctLonger cooking is a common modern error. The berries pop within a couple of minutes and the sauce sets as it cools, so pull it while the syrup still looks thin.
- Porcelain kettleMeaning enamelled cast iron or enamel-lined steel. Any nonreactive pan does; bare cast iron or unlined copper will dull the color and pick up a metallic edge from the acid.
- The strained version1 1/2 lb fruit to 1 pint (2 cups) water, ten to twelve minutes, then pushed through a sieve and sweetened off the heat with 3/4 lb sugar.
- Less sugar is a real optionThe note about half a pound instead of three-quarters is sound advice, not thrift alone. At roughly 1 cup sugar to a pound of berries the fruit tastes sharper and more like itself.
- Ignore the storage lineLadling hot sauce into jars and letting the lids seal themselves is open-kettle canning, which current guidance does not accept for any product. Refrigerate the sauce for a week or two, freeze it, or follow a modern tested boiling-water process.
- YieldA pound of berries makes roughly a pint and a half of whole-berry sauce, enough for eight to ten servings alongside a roast.
Cranberries were one of the few native North American fruits that entered nineteenth-century American cooking almost unchanged, largely because they keep for months in a cool cellar without processing and because their acidity and pectin make them almost impossible to ruin. It belongs with the condiments kept on hand to cut rich roast meat, and the closing direction to serve it with turkey or game reflects a pairing already well established by the 1870s. The recipe carries a contributor's name, C. G. and E. W. Crane of Caldwell, New Jersey, which is characteristic of the book's method of gathering tested household recipes from correspondents across several states. The final sentence, offering the alternative of sugaring the fruit only when nearly cooked, is a small piece of genuine kitchen argument preserved intact rather than resolved by the editors.