Home › The Principles of Cookery › Cranberry Sauce
Cranberry Sauce
Pick over and wash one quart of cranberries, put them in an enamelled saucepan with half a pint of water, and boil for half an hour, or until the cranberries are perfectly soft, add half a pint of sifted sugar, and serve cold, with roast turkey or duck. Probable cost, 1s.
A plain boiled cranberry sauce of the older English type, sweetened at the end rather than the beginning. Two things need attention: the quantity implied by "one quart" and the half-hour boil.
- A quart of cranberriesMeasured as whole berries by volume, this is roughly 1 lb (about 450 g). If you are working from a British imperial quart (40 fl oz) the weight is nearer 1 1/4 lb, so scale the sugar to match.
- Half a pint of waterAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz (about 285 ml); a US half-pint is 8 fl oz (about 240 ml). Either works; less liquid gives a thicker sauce.
- Sifted sugarThis means ordinary white sugar passed through a sieve to break lumps — caster or granulated sugar today. A US half-pint by volume is about 1 cup, or 200 g; an imperial half-pint nearer 250 g. Either makes a moderately tart sauce by modern standards.
- The half-hour boilFar longer than needed. Cranberries burst within 8 to 12 minutes of a simmer and are fully soft by then; beyond that the sauce darkens, loses its fresh acidity and can catch on the pan. Cook until the popping stops.
- Sugar last, and for a reasonSugar firms cranberry skins, so adding it before the berries have collapsed leaves them tough. The instruction to add it after softening is correct and worth following even in modern recipes.
- An enamelled saucepanNot a period nicety. Cranberries are acidic enough to react with bare cast iron or unlined copper and aluminium, picking up a metallic taste and grey cast. Enamel, stainless steel or glass all serve.
- SettingCranberries are high in natural pectin, so the sauce thickens considerably as it cools and will look thin while hot. Make it several hours ahead, or the day before.
- YieldNearer 3 cups (about 700 ml), enough for eight to ten servings alongside roast turkey or duck. It keeps a week or more covered in the refrigerator.
The cranberry of this recipe is the large American species Vaccinium macrocarpon, not the small native British cranberry V. oxycoccos that grows sparsely on northern bogs. By the time Cassell's dictionary appeared in the later nineteenth century, American cranberries were reaching British grocers in quantity — they travel exceptionally well, and are often said to have been shipped and stored in barrels of water, which is why a Victorian cookery book can treat them as an ordinary autumn commodity with a stated price of a shilling. The pairing with roast turkey is traditionally supposed to have come over with the fruit, and the technique here is simply the standard method for any high-pectin sour berry: soften in water, sweeten, let it set as it cools. Note that this is a sauce rather than a jelly or a "cranberry jam", reflecting a period when sweet-sour fruit accompaniments to roast meat and game were a much larger family of preparations than they are now.