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Cranberry Sauce
1 pint cranberries Sugar 1¼ cups water Put the cranberries on with the water and cook until soft; strain through a cloth; weigh and add three fourths of a pound of sugar to every pint of juice. Cook ten minutes; pour into molds and set aside to cool. Serve with poultry, game or mutton.
This is cranberry jelly rather than the whole-berry sauce most people mean today: the fruit is strained out and only the sweetened juice is set. It works because cranberries are unusually high in both pectin and acid, so no commercial pectin is needed.
- A pint of cranberriesBerries were sold and measured by dry volume; a dry pint is roughly 12 oz, or about 3 cups of whole fresh cranberries. A standard 12-oz supermarket bag is the same thing.
- Sugar by weightThree-quarters of a pound of sugar per pint of juice is about 1 3/4 cups sugar to 2 cups juice. Weighing is more reliable here, since the yield of juice varies with how ripe the fruit is and how hard you press it.
- How much juice to expectThe recipe does not say; a pint of berries with 1 1/4 cups water should give somewhere in the region of 1 1/2 to 2 cups of juice, and the sugar dissolved into it adds appreciably to the finished volume.
- Straining is the hingeLet the juice drip through the cloth without squeezing or pressing the pulp. Forcing it through pushes fine solids into the liquid and the jelly sets cloudy instead of clear.
- The ten-minute boilTen minutes of hard boiling after the sugar goes in is about right for cranberry pectin to set, but check rather than trust the clock: a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer should wrinkle when nudged. Overcooking gives a stiff, slightly caramelised jelly.
- MoldsRinse the mold in cold water and leave it wet before pouring, which lets the set jelly slip out. A small loaf pan or straight-sided cup works if you want the sliceable cylinder familiar from tinned jelly.
- StorageThis is not a canned preserve. Cool it, cover it, and keep it refrigerated — it holds a couple of weeks.
- Serving with muttonThe pairing with mutton and game reflects an era when tart fruit jellies were routinely served against rich or strongly flavoured meat. It suits lamb and duck as well as turkey.
Cranberries are one of the few fruits native to North America to become a fixed part of its cooking, and by the time books like this were compiled they were a commercial crop, cultivated in the sandy bogs of Massachusetts, New Jersey and Wisconsin and shipped by rail through the autumn and winter. The molded, strained jelly here belongs to a period when clarity and a firm turn-out from a mold were marks of careful cookery, and when tart jellies of currant, quince or cranberry were the standard accompaniment to roast meats. The recipe serves it with poultry, game or mutton, a pairing that reads oddly now but followed the older European habit of setting a sharp fruit preserve against rich or strongly flavoured meat. Canned cranberry jelly came later to displace the home-molded version, which is why the shape survives in supermarkets long after the technique left most kitchens.