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CRANBERRY SAUCE (One quart of cranberries two)
One quart of cranberries, two cups of sugar and one cup of water. Place all in the kettle of the fireless cooker, put over the fire and boil slowly for ten minutes. Pack in the fireless cooker and leave for two hours.
A straightforward cranberry sauce written for an insulated retained-heat cooker, which means the ten minutes on the stove is only the first half of the cooking. Without that box, the whole thing is done in about fifteen minutes on the burner.
- A quart of cranberriesFresh cranberries measure about 4 cups to the quart, or roughly 1 pound. A standard bag is 12 ounces, so a pound is one bag plus about a third of another; or simply use a full 12-ounce bag and drop the sugar to a scant 1 1/2 cups.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated wooden or metal chest, often holding a heated soapstone or metal disc and packed with felt, hay or asbestos; food was brought to a boil on the range, then sealed in to finish on its own stored heat. It saved fuel and let a cook leave the kitchen.
- Without the cookerBring the berries, sugar and water to a boil in a heavy saucepan and cook 10 to 15 minutes, until the skins have all popped and the syrup sheets off a spoon. There is nothing the two-hour rest accomplishes that a few more minutes of simmering will not.
- If you want to imitate the methodBoil the ten minutes in a heavy lidded pot, then wrap the whole pot in several thick towels inside a closed cooler. Expect it to be soft and jam-like rather than whole-berry, since the long hold breaks the fruit down completely.
- The setCranberries are high in natural pectin and acid, so the sauce thickens as it cools, not in the pot. Judge it cold; it will look alarmingly loose while hot.
- Skim, and watch the boilCranberries throw a persistent pink foam. Skim it or stir it back in, but keep the heat moderate — a hard boil scorches the sugar against the pan bottom quickly once the liquid reduces.
- YieldAbout 3 1/2 to 4 cups, enough for eight to ten servings alongside roast poultry. It keeps a week or more covered in the refrigerator.
The Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911, at the height of American enthusiasm for the fireless or retained-heat cooker — a fashion driven partly by domestic-science reformers who prized fuel economy and partly by the practical difficulty of holding a coal range at a low, even heat. Cranberry sauce was an obvious candidate for the box: brief boiling, then a long unattended hold, with none of the risk of a scorched pan. The berry itself is usually named as one of a short list of fruits native to North America and commercially cultivated here — alongside the blueberry and the Concord grape — and by the 1910s Cape Cod and New Jersey bogs were shipping enough of it that the pairing of sweetened cranberry sauce with roast turkey is often said to have been well established, though how fixed or how national the habit had become by then is hard to document.