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CRANBERRY SAUCE (Wash one quart of cranberries)
Wash one quart of cranberries in cold water, put them into a porcelain or agate kettle, add one pint of cold water, cover and bring to a boil, keeping berries closely covered until they are broken to pieces. Rub through a colander, add two cups of granulated sugar, stir over the fire just a moment until sugar is thoroughly melted, then turn out to cool.
VELOUTÉ SAUCE-Cook together in a saucepan two tablespoons butter and two tablespoons of flour. Pour on gradually one cup of heated white stock. Season with salt, pepper and cayenne.
Two separate sauces printed as one entry: a strained cranberry sauce and a small-batch velouté. Both work as written; the notes below are mostly about vessels, quantities and the modern habits that differ.
- A quart of cranberriesMeasured by volume, a quart of whole berries is roughly a pound — about a 12-ounce bag plus a generous handful. One bag will do if you scale the water and sugar down by a quarter.
- Porcelain or agate kettleAgate ware is speckled enamelled steel. The point is a non-reactive surface: cranberries are acidic enough to pick up a metallic taste from bare aluminium or unseasoned cast iron. Enamel, stainless or a well-glazed pan all qualify.
- Keep it coveredThis is the instruction that matters. Cranberries pop hard as they heat, and the lid both contains the spatter and traps steam so the skins break down evenly. Ten to twelve minutes at a low boil is usually enough.
- Rubbing through a colanderRubbed through, the sauce comes out smooth, largely seedless and skinless — quite different from the whole-berry style most people expect now. Skip this step if you want the rougher, unstrained sauce; note that by this point the berries have already been cooked to pieces.
- Sugar at the end, off the heat almost immediatelyTwo cups is a lot of sugar to a pound of fruit, and the recipe is right to add it after the berries have broken down: cooked in from the start, it slows the skins from softening. Stir only until dissolved. Prolonged boiling after sugar goes in pushes the sauce toward jelly.
- SettingCranberries are high in pectin, so the sauce will thicken considerably as it cools. Judge the consistency cold, not hot. It keeps a week or more refrigerated.
- White stock for the veloutéThat means an unbrowned veal or chicken stock. Any light chicken stock works; avoid dark or heavily reduced commercial broths, which defeat the pale colour the sauce is named for.
- Cook the roux blond, then cook the sauceTwo or three minutes for the butter and flour — enough to lose the raw-flour smell, not enough to colour. After the stock goes in, let it simmer gently ten to fifteen minutes and skim; the book's silence on this is the main omission. Two tablespoons of each to one cup of stock gives a thick coating sauce, so thin with more stock if you want it pourable.
Cranberry sauce reached print in American cookbooks well before this one, and by the 1890s it was, by most accounts, well established as the accompaniment to roast turkey and game. The Butterick book's version is the genteel form of it: pressed through a colander into a smooth purée rather than left as a rough compote, and it sits in the sauces chapter next to a velouté rather than among the preserves. Velouté itself is one of the French mother sauces codified in the nineteenth century — the name simply means "velvety" — and its appearance here, boiled down to four lines and a cup of stock, suggests how thoroughly classical French method had been absorbed into the American middle-class kitchen by around the turn of the century. A pattern company publishing a cookbook is itself a sign of the moment: Butterick sold dress patterns, and the cook book was part of a broader business in instructing the aspiring housekeeper.