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Cranberry Sauce
Wash well two breakfast cupfuls of cranberries and place them in a saucepan with one-half pint of cold water; sprinkle over the top one teacupful of moistened sugar, cover the pan and cook for half an hour; then mash the berries with a spoon, remove the pan from the fire, and stir up well; it will then be ready for use.
A plain stovetop cranberry sauce whose only real problem is the half-hour cooking time. The measurements are period cup names rather than standard measures.
- Breakfast cup and teacupA breakfast cup is roughly 8-10 fl oz, so two of them is somewhere between 2 and 2 1/2 cups of berries. A teacup is smaller, around 6 fl oz, giving about 3/4 cup of sugar.
- Half a pint of waterOne cup by American measure. That is generous for this quantity of fruit and will give a loose, spoonable sauce rather than a firm one; cut it back if you want something that holds a shape on the plate.
- Moistened sugarIn older English usage "moist sugar" means the damp, soft, partly refined sugar sold by weight, for which the nearest modern equivalent is light brown sugar; "moistened" may alternatively mean no more than sugar dampened with water. Either way, sprinkling it over the top rather than dissolving it first makes little practical difference here.
- Cook for half an hourThe hinge of the recipe, and the part to ignore. Cranberries burst in eight to ten minutes of simmering and their pectin sets as the sauce cools; thirty minutes cooks out the fresh acidity and leaves a flat, jammy paste. Pull it when the popping stops.
- Covered panKeeping the lid on traps steam so the berries burst without the liquid reducing away. Take the lid off for the last couple of minutes if the sauce looks too thin.
- MashingMashing with a spoon gives the coarse, skin-flecked texture intended. For a smooth sauce or a jelly, press through a sieve while hot; the skins are what keep it from setting clear.
- Yield and servingAbout 2 cups, enough for eight servings alongside turkey or game. It keeps a week covered in the refrigerator and thickens noticeably as it chills.
Cranberry sauce was already a fixed American accompaniment to roast turkey and game birds by the time Oscar Tschirky was running the Waldorf's dining rooms in the 1890s, and its presence in a hotel cookbook of this scale says less about invention than about volume: a kitchen serving hundreds of covers needed a reliable, cheap fruit condiment that could be made in advance and held. The berry itself is native to the acid bogs of New England and New Jersey, and commercial cultivation on Cape Cod dates to the first half of the nineteenth century, which is what put cranberries within reach of a New York hotel in quantity. The high natural pectin and acidity of the fruit mean it sets without added gelatine or long boiling -- something this recipe's half-hour instruction does not seem to trust.