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Cranberry Sauce
Mrs. Bartlett.
One quart cranberries, one quart water, one quart sugar, stew slowly,
Three ingredients in equal measure, with no time given and no indication of whether the result is a whole-berry sauce or a jelly. A few notes fill the gaps.
- What a quart weighsA quart of fresh cranberries is about 12 oz to 1 lb — roughly one standard supermarket bag. A quart of granulated sugar is close to 1 lb 12 oz, or about 4 cups. A quart of water is 4 cups.
- The water is generousModern cranberry sauces typically use roughly a third to half as much water as fruit. At equal volumes you are effectively making a syrup, which means a longer reduction — considerably longer than the ten minutes a modern recipe calls for.
- The sugar is not optionalEqual sugar to fruit reads as excessive, but cranberries are extremely sour and high in pectin, and the sugar is doing preserving work as well as sweetening. Cutting it substantially will give a looser, sharper sauce that will not keep as long.
- "Stew slowly" is the hingeA bare simmer, uncovered, stirring occasionally. A hard boil will scorch the sugar against the pan bottom and drive the berries to mush before the syrup has thickened.
- Knowing when it is doneThe berries burst within the first few minutes; that is not the finish. It is ready when a spoonful dropped on a cold plate sets rather than running. It thickens considerably as it cools, so stop while it still looks slightly loose.
- For a jelly insteadIf you want the sliceable moulded kind, press the cooked fruit through a fine sieve or food mill before the final reduction, then return the strained purée to the pan and cook down. Moulded cranberry jelly does appear in cookbooks of the period, set in bowls or tins.
- Yield and keepingThis makes a good deal — well over a quart unless you reduce it hard — enough for eight to ten servings alongside roast poultry. Refrigerated in a covered jar it keeps two to three weeks; do not treat the high sugar as a substitute for proper canning if you intend to store it on a shelf.
The cranberry is one of a small handful of fruits native to North America that entered the general cookbook without ever losing its regional accent — it grows in the acid bogs of New England, the Upper Midwest and the Maritimes, and nineteenth-century North American cookbooks commonly pair a sauce of it with roast turkey and other roast meats and game. Terse one-line formulas of this kind are common in household manuals of the period, which assume the reader already knows the rest. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in the 1870s from contributions credited to named local women, is a community cookbook of exactly the sort that circulated such shorthand: Mrs. Bartlett is a contributing neighbour rather than a professional, and "stew slowly" was evidently taken to be direction enough.