Cranberry Sauce
INGREDIENTS. -1 pint of cranberries, 1/4 pint of water, white sugar to taste.
Wash and pick over the berries, and put them in a lined saucepan with just sufficient water to cover them. Let them stew slowly, stirring often till they are reduced to a pulp.
Take them from the fire, sweeten them, and SEASONABLE all the year; but not so good turn into a deep dish or mould to cool. This in May, June and July.
Crab Sauce (for Fish; equal to
The text has come through the scanner with a line of the "seasonable" note dropped into the middle of the method; read it as "sweeten them, and turn into a deep dish or mould to cool." Otherwise the procedure is intact and still sound.
- QuantitiesA pint of cranberries is a volume measure of whole fruit; an imperial pint of loose berries weighs roughly 8-9 oz (230-260 g), rather less than a standard 12 oz supermarket bag. A quarter of an imperial pint is 5 fl oz, roughly 2/3 cup; the instruction to add "just sufficient water to cover" overrides it, and less water gives a thicker sauce.
- A lined saucepanThis means a copper pan lined with tin. The point is that cranberries are acidic enough to react with bare copper or cast iron, so use stainless steel or enamel and not an unlined aluminium pan.
- How much sugar"White sugar to taste" works out at somewhere around 3/4 cup (150 g) per pint of berries, a proportion in the same range as modern recipes. Sweeten only after the fruit has burst and come off the heat, as the original directs - sugar added early slows the skins from breaking down.
- Timing"Stew slowly" will take roughly 10 to 15 minutes at a bare simmer, though the recipe asks only that the berries be reduced to a pulp. The berries pop audibly; once the popping stops and the mass looks uniform, it is done.
- Why it mouldsCranberries are extremely high in pectin, so a sauce poured into a wetted mould or deep dish sets firm enough to turn out and slice when cold. That is the whole reason for the last sentence, and it is also why jellied cranberry sauce later became the canned standard.
- Yield and keepingAbout 1 1/2 cups, enough for six to eight servings alongside turkey or game. It keeps a week covered in the refrigerator and freezes well.
- The seasonable noteThe garbled aside means cranberries are available all year but are poorest in May, June and July — before the autumn harvest reached the shops. Frozen cranberries work identically here and need no thawing.
The large cranberry of commerce, Vaccinium macrocarpon, is a North American bog plant; Britain's native Vaccinium oxycoccos is a much smaller berry, and the tart red sauce that Mrs Beeton's readers knew was made largely from imported fruit. Because cranberries keep for months submerged in water, they travelled well in barrels across the Atlantic, and by the middle of the nineteenth century they were a familiar winter grocery in British towns — which is why the entry can claim the fruit is "seasonable all the year" while admitting to a lean spell in early summer. The pairing with turkey and game is often said to have been established on both sides of the Atlantic well before this book, though how far it had taken hold in British practice is uncertain; the sharp fruit served the same purpose as apple sauce with pork or redcurrant jelly with mutton. The direction to set the sauce in a mould reflects a Victorian taste for shaped, sliceable accompaniments on the sideboard, a habit the canned cylinder of jellied cranberry later inherited.