Six more sleeps until America gathers around tables for one of its most polarizing holidays.
And on some of those tables, the most divisive dish is a scarlet, jammy, sugar-laden plate of cranberries. A delight to some, a horror to others.
Cranberries are indigenous to North America; Native Americans were the first to cultivate the berry and dress their food with it, often using it in a dish called wojapi, made by boiling it with a sweetener. Other boiled berry versions featured what was nearby and in season, like chokeberries, blueberries, and huckleberries.
Of course, colonizers appropriated it, and in 1912, Marcus Urann—the Ocean Spray kingpin—invented canned cranberry sauce.
While some prefer the wibbly-wobbly obelisk of sucrose as a guest at their table, others make the sauce from scratch. Cranberries are naturally bursting with pectin, if cooking without a ton of added ingredients is your jam.
I don’t have a preference between the two because cranberries, in any form or fashion, are not welcome on my plate.
But do you know who does have opinions about it? My brother, who has worked as a cook at Undisclosed Upscale Dining Locations in the Triangle for a couple of years.
“The Thanksgiving meal can be such a homogeneous savory,” he opined to me over the phone this week. Green beans. Stuffing. Mashed potatoes. Turkey. That salty, fatty, yummy stuff.
“Cranberry sauce bridges that gap for me,” he said. “My pitch on cranberry sauce is that it’s a much different flavor than the rest of the meal.”
It’s tart, it’s sweet, and it can be mixed with other foods. It can add some extra flavor to a bite of dry turkey, smear on a roll, or take a bite of sweet potatoes to the next level.
“That’s what Thanksgiving is, it’s a combination of all those different things on the plate,” he said.
And while not everyone likes cranberry sauce—including and especially me, he acknowledged—he argued that it definitely has a place at the table.
“As long as you’re okay with it being there.” Just let the cranberry sauce exist, he said, sans judgment.
And am I a judger, I asked?
“A little bit,” he said.
True.
“But that’s the other part of Thanksgiving; that we disagree,” he said.
If cranberry sauce is the only thing my family clashes over this year, I’ll count us as incredibly lucky.
My brother believes in the “culinary integrity” of this dish, he said. That’s why his recipe is so simple—just cranberries, sugar, water, a bit of citrus, and, most importantly, time.
“It’s not a complicated sauce,”
Okay, kiddo. We’ll see about that.
So I set out to replicate his recipe, because sometimes life is about making things you don’t like for the people you love.
After grabbing a bag of cranberries, sugar, and a lemon from the grocery, I turned up the dial on my stove and got to work.
Just like he instructed, I threw the cranberries in a pot and poured enough water in to barely cover the berries.
It boils, I stir, I hear the pop, pop, pop! of the exploding berries.
I added some sugar, and after about an hour, the pot of fruit had boiled down to a quarter of its original size. I kept adding sugar until it balanced out the tartness of the fruits.
I taste-test tentatively and unsurprisingly, my face scrunches up at the first bite.
But it’s not for me. It’s for him.
See you next week, buddy. Love you much.
