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Cranberry Sauce
Pick over and wash a quart of cranberries, adding one and one-half cups cold water and stewing slowly about an hour. The tenderness and colour of the skins will indicate when they are done. Remove from the stove before adding sugar generously.
A whole-berry sauce with unusually little water and no sugar until the end. Two things need adjusting: the cooking time and the vague direction to sweeten "generously."
- An hour is far too longAn hour is far longer than needed -- Cranberries burst and soften in 8 to 12 minutes of gentle simmering. An hour in only a cup and a half of water risks catching on the pan and leaves a flat, broken-down mush. Cook until most of the skins have popped and the fruit slumps, then stop.
- A quart of cranberriesDry measure: roughly 4 cups, or about 1 lb, about a third more than one standard 12-oz bag. If using a single bag, cut the water to about 1 cup.
- "Sugar generously"For 1 lb of berries, 1 to 1 1/4 cups granulated sugar gives the familiar sweet-tart balance; 3/4 cup leaves it distinctly sharp. Add it warm and stir until fully dissolved.
- Why sugar goes in lastSugar added at the start firms the skins and slows their breakdown, so the berries stay tough. Cooking them in plain water first, then sweetening off the heat, is the reason this method works and is still good practice.
- Watch for boil-overCranberries foam as they burst. Use a pan with more headroom than the volume suggests and keep the heat low; a bare simmer is enough.
- SettingThe sauce looks thin while hot and thickens as it cools, since cranberries are high in natural pectin. Judge consistency at room temperature, not in the pan.
- Yield and keepingAbout 3 to 4 cups, enough for 8 to 10 at table. Refrigerated in a covered jar it keeps a week or more.
Cranberries were one of the few native North American fruits to enter the standard household repertoire more or less unchanged, and by the period of this book the berry's place beside roast turkey and game was long settled. Cranberries were sometimes nicknamed "bounceberries," after the sorting trick of dropping berries down a stepped board and keeping only those that bounced, a sign of a firm, unspoiled fruit; the direction to "pick over" the quart is the domestic version of the same job. Recipes of this period generally divide into strained jelly and whole-berry sauce, and the instruction here to judge doneness by "the tenderness and colour of the skins" belongs to a cookbook culture that assumed the cook would watch the pan rather than a clock -- which is just as well, since the hour given is a good deal longer than the fruit needs.