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Cranberry Sauce
Pick over and wash three cups cranberries. Put in a stewpan, add one and one-fourth cups sugar and one cup boiling water, and boil ten minutes. Care must be taken that they do not boil over. Skim and cool.
A whole-berry sauce that works exactly as written; the only things worth knowing are the modern equivalents and the point at which to stop cooking.
- Quantities in modern termsThree cups of cranberries is a scant 12 oz, so a standard 12-oz bag is close enough. That gives roughly 2 cups of finished sauce, enough for eight to ten servings alongside a roast.
- SugarOne and one-fourth cups is about 250 g, a fairly assertive ratio that suits sour fruit and keeps the sauce glossy. Cutting it to a cup gives a sharper sauce that sets slightly softer; with much less sugar than that the set tends to be looser, since sugar helps the fruit's pectin gel.
- A stewpanAny heavy saucepan of at least 2-quart capacity. Volume matters more than material here, because the boil climbs.
- Why it boils overCranberry skins split as they cook and the sauce foams up quickly once it reaches a rolling boil. Use a pan far larger than the volume suggests, keep the heat at a steady rather than furious boil, and stay with it.
- Ten minutes is the outside limitThe berries burst within three or four minutes and the pectin sets once cooled. Past ten minutes the fruit disintegrates and prolonged boiling dulls the colour from bright red toward brown.
- SkimmingThe pale foam is trapped air, not scum, and skimming it is purely cosmetic. It can also be stirred back in with no harm.
- Cooling and settingThe sauce looks thin and loose in the pan and firms considerably as it chills. Judge the set at refrigerator temperature, not off the stove, and expect it to keep a week or more covered in the refrigerator.
Cranberries were one of the few native North American fruits to hold a permanent place in nineteenth-century American cookery, largely because they keep. Sound berries sit in a cool cellar for weeks without processing, which made them a reliable late-autumn and winter fruit long before refrigeration, and their natural acidity and high pectin content mean sauce sets with nothing but sugar and water. Commercial cultivation in the bogs of Cape Cod and southeastern Massachusetts was well established by the end of the century.