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Cranberry Sauce
Wash and pick one quart of cranberries and put them in a saucepan with water to cover, let them stew slowly, stirring often till they are reduced to a pulp; then sweeten to taste and turn in a deep dish or mould. They may be strained and cleared as jelly is prepared.
A bare-bones nineteenth-century sauce with two variables left to the cook: how much water and how much sugar. Both matter, and the water is the one most people get wrong.
- Use less water than "to cover"Cranberries are mostly water and will release plenty of their own. Covering a quart of berries gives a loose, soupy sauce that needs long reduction; about 1/2 to 3/4 cup of liquid for the whole batch is enough to keep them from scorching before they begin to burst.
- A quart of cranberriesMeasured whole, a quart is roughly a pound, or a 12-ounce bag plus about another cup. Modern bags are sold by weight, not volume.
- "Sweeten to taste"The working range is 1 to 1 1/2 cups sugar per pound of berries. Add it after the fruit has broken down, as the recipe says — sugar added early firms the skins and slows the collapse into pulp.
- TimingWhole berries burst in 8 to 12 minutes over medium heat and are pulpy within 15. "Stew slowly" until reduced does not mean an hour; long cooking dulls the flavour and drives off the fresh acidity that makes the sauce worth eating.
- It sets on its ownCranberries are high in natural pectin, which is why the recipe can talk about turning the sauce into a mould with no gelatin. Strain out the skins and seeds while hot if you want the clear jelly version, then chill in the mould until firm.
- "Wash and pick"Sorting matters more with cranberries than most fruit — discard any that are soft, wrinkled or pale white in the centre, since spoiled berries can carry an off flavour through the pan.
- YieldAbout 2 to 2 1/2 cups of sauce, enough for eight to ten servings alongside roast poultry.
Cranberry sauce is one of the oldest genuinely North American preserves, the wild fruit having been eaten by Native peoples of the northeast long before colonial cooks adopted it; commercial cultivation on Cape Cod bogs began in the early nineteenth century and by the later nineteenth century barrelled cranberries were a common winter grocery item in the eastern states. It was used not as a jam but as the sharp accompaniment to roast turkey, goose and venison, where the fruit's acid did the work a squeeze of lemon or a spoon of vinegar might do elsewhere. The instruction to mould it and the note that it may be "strained and cleared as jelly is prepared" point toward the sliceable, glossy cylinder that canned versions would later make familiar.