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Cranberry Sauce
One quart of cranberries, cover with half pint of water; cook until berries begin to pop open, then add two cupfuls of sugar and cook twenty-one minutes, do not stir or the berries will break. When done they resemble a dish of candied cherries.
A whole-berry sauce rather than a jellied one, and the instruction not to stir is the whole point of it. Everything else is straightforward.
- Don't stir, don't agitateThe berries are meant to stay intact and translucent, like the candied cherries the author mentions. Stirring ruptures the skins and you end up with the standard mashed sauce. Shake the pan by the handle if it needs moving.
- A quart of cranberriesCranberries were sold by dry measure. A dry quart is roughly 12 oz to 1 lb of fresh berries, which is close to the standard 12 oz bag on shelves now. Half a pint of water is one cup.
- Sugar goes in late for a reasonThe recipe adds sugar only after the skins split, which lets the fruit soften first; sugar added at the start tends to firm the skins. Follow the order given.
- The twenty-one minutesAn oddly precise figure. On a modern burner the syrup may thicken well before that. Watch for a syrup that sheets off the spoon and berries that look glazed rather than collapsed, which may be 10 to 15 minutes.
- SettingCranberries are high in natural pectin, so the sauce thickens considerably as it cools. Pull it off the heat while it still looks slightly loose.
- Yield and keepingRoughly 3 cups, enough for several servings alongside roast poultry. It is a refrigerator preserve at this sugar level, not a shelf-stable one; keep it covered and cold.
- Pan choiceUse a wide, non-reactive pan (stainless or enamelled). Cranberries are acidic enough to pick up a metallic taste from bare aluminium or cast iron.
Cranberry sauce is at heart a sugar preserve of a native North American fruit, put up in quantity when the bogs were harvested in autumn and drawn on through the winter. Commercial cultivation of the large-fruited American cranberry had grown up on Cape Cod and in New Jersey through the nineteenth century, and by 1900 barrels of berries moved by rail to city markets, which is why a turn-of-the-century household book can call for a whole quart at a time without comment. The whole-berry style here was prized for looking like candied cherries; molded jellied sauce became the default only after canners standardized it in the following decades.