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Cranberries
1½ cups sugar 1 cup water The general rule is: Use as much water as cranberries. Add one-third as much sugar as cranberries.
Have water boiling. Add berries, cover, and cook till berries have burst outer skin. Add sugar and boil few minutes longer. Pour into outer skin. Add sugar and boil few minutes longer. Pour into mold. If desired, cranberries may be strained before sugar is added.
The heading measurements and the "general rule" that follows do not quite agree, and a line has been duplicated in the original typesetting. Work from the rule and the recipe behaves predictably.
- The rule, in modern termsEqual volumes of water and berries, sugar at one-third the volume of berries. A 12 oz bag of cranberries is about 3 cups, so 3 cups water and 1 cup sugar. The 1½ cups sugar / 1 cup water at the top cannot be reconciled with the rule in either direction: 1 cup water implies about 1 cup of berries, while 1½ cups sugar implies about 4½ cups. Pick one set of figures and stay with it.
- A duplicated line"Add sugar and boil few minutes longer. Pour into" appears twice — a compositor's error. There is only one sugar addition and one pour.
- Sugar goes in last for a reasonCranberry skins toughen in syrup. Boiling the berries in plain water first lets them burst freely, then the sugar dissolves into the released juice. Reversing the order gives leathery fruit in thin syrup.
- How long "till berries have burst"Five to eight minutes at a steady boil, covered. You will hear them pop. After the sugar goes in, three to five minutes of boiling is enough to thicken; longer and the pectin begins to break down rather than set.
- Whole sauce or clear jellyStrained before the sugar, as the note allows, this becomes jellied cranberry — press through a fine sieve, discard skins and seeds, then return the juice to the pan with the sugar. Unstrained it is whole-berry sauce and will mold, just less cleanly.
- The moldRinse the mold with cold water and do not grease it; cranberries are high enough in pectin and acid to set firm without gelatin and will release from a wet mold. Chill at least four hours, ideally overnight.
- Yield and keepingCooked to the rule's proportions, three cups of berries makes a generous quantity of sauce — enough for eight or so servings alongside meat — though the exact volume depends on how far the syrup is reduced. Refrigerated in a covered jar it should keep a week or two.
Cranberries are one of the few fruits in these early twentieth-century American books that needed no importing and almost no explanation — the wild bogs of Massachusetts and New Jersey had been under commercial cultivation since the first half of the nineteenth century, Massachusetts generally dated to the 1810s–1830s and New Jersey to the 1830s–40s. The "general rule" phrasing is characteristic of the genre: rather than fix a quantity, the book gives a ratio that scales to whatever the cook has bought, which is how fruit was handled when it arrived by the peck rather than the punnet. Molding the sauce into a sliceable cylinder, whole or strained clear, is often said to have been common well before the canned version made that shape famous, and it survives in the recipe's instruction to pour into a mold rather than a bowl. The dish sits in a Fruit Desserts chapter here, a reminder that cranberry sauce was not yet strictly a turkey accompaniment.