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Cranberry Sauce
One pound sound red cranberries, one pound granulated sugar, half pint cold water. Wash the berries in plenty of cold water and carefully pick them, rejecting all those that float on top of the water, over-ripe or spoiled. Place them in an enamelled saucepan with half a pint cold water, and as soon as the water comes to a boil add the sugar; mix well with a wooden spoon and let gently boil for thirty minutes, mashing the berries as much as possible with the wooden spoon while cooking. Remove the pan from the fire, let the sauce get thoroughly cold, and always serve in a saucebowl separately. N. B. The above amount of cranberry sauce will be considerably more than required for this occasion, therefore whatever is left over should be placed in a jelly jar, tightly covered and kept in a cool place, as it will keep in excellent condition for several months. A larger quantity than the above can be prepared if so desired.
A straightforward equal-weights cranberry sauce, with one timing that modern practice has cut by more than half.
- Cook it a third as longThirty minutes of boiling drives off most of the water and dulls the fruit to a flat, jammy brown. Cranberries are high in pectin and set on cooling after 10 to 12 minutes, once the skins have popped and the mixture coats the spoon.
- Half a pint of waterOne cup. With a pound of berries (about four cups) and a pound of sugar (about 2 1/4 cups), that is all the liquid needed; the berries release plenty of their own.
- The floating testSound cranberries actually float, thanks to internal air pockets — commercial growers harvest them that way. Discard the ones that are soft, shrivelled or split, and don't reject fruit simply for bobbing up.
- Enamelled saucepanThe instruction still holds for a reason: cranberries are acidic enough to pick up a metallic taste from bare cast iron or unlined aluminium. Stainless steel or enamel is fine.
- MashingPressing the berries with a wooden spoon gives the rough, half-crushed texture intended here. Leave some whole if you want visible fruit; a stick blender turns it to purée, which is a different dish.
- Storage, revisedThe note about keeping several months in a cool place assumes a cold larder. Treat the leftovers as a refrigerator preserve: covered and chilled, it holds two to three weeks. For long keeping, follow a current tested canning or freezing procedure.
- YieldRoughly three cups, enough for eight to ten servings alongside roast turkey or goose.
- Serve cold and separateThe sauce must be fully cold before it goes to the table — that is when the pectin has set. Serving it in its own bowl rather than spooned onto the platter is period table practice, and it keeps the sauce from bleeding into the gravy.
Cranberries — Vaccinium macrocarpon, native to the bogs of northeastern North America — were one of the few genuinely American ingredients to make it into the cosmopolitan hotel repertoire that books like this one drew on. The instruction to boil the fruit with an equal weight of sugar is essentially a preserving formula rather than a sauce formula, which is why the author can promise it will keep for months: sugar at that concentration, combined with the berry's high acidity and natural pectin, does the work. The aside that "the above amount will be considerably more than required for this occasion" suggests the recipe was written with a particular meal in mind, with the surplus expected to go into a jelly jar for later.