We love to make fun of jellied cranberry sauce — those squirmy, slithery slices of alleged fruit that are a must at every Thanksgiving dinner.
As a kid, I cringed every time the wobbly red stuff appeared. It looked like something from “Alien,” tasted like jellied slime and what it had to do with turkey I had no idea.
“It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it,” acclaimed writer/broadcaster Alistair Cooke once said.
Nearly 50% of Americans, according to one poll, find canned cranberry sauce “disgusting.”
And yet we keep buying the stuff every Thanksgiving. In enormous quantities.
Ocean Spray alone sells 5 million gallons — 70 million cans — of jellied cranberry sauce every year. There are 200 cranberries in each can. If you laid out all the cans Ocean Spray sells every year, the line would stretch from New York City to Frankfort, Germany.
A total of 76% of Americans serve store-bought cranberry sauce rather than homemade at Thanksgiving, according to Ocean Spray. Nearly 40% say they “cannot live without” cranberry sauce. Fifteen percent love the way it “jiggles” out of the can.
I’m sorry, but I really don’t want my food to jiggle.
When I asked members of Jersey Eats, NJ Advance Media’s food Facebook page, about cranberry sauce, the overwhelming majority loved cranberries, the fruit, but detested the canned sauce.
“Never ever a can; make it yourself,” Meredith Zois said. “I make a low carb version with monk fruit sweetener, splash of orange juice, and Fireball (cinnamon whiskey).”
You had me at Fireball.
“Fresh cranberry sauce with brandy, and walnuts, and some spices like cinnamon and nutmeg,” Lesley Miedowicz noted.
Alcohol and cranberries: Perfect together, apparently.
Chefs, at least those interviewed by Food + Wine, seemed remarkably divided on the canned/homemade cranberry sauce question.
“Although the overly gelatinous, unnaturally red blob does remind me of my childhood; it doesn’t have a seat at the table anymore,” said Molly Martin, chef/partner at Juniper Green. “For me cranberry sauce is a must, but I like to use fresh (or frozen) berries cooked down with pomegranate juice, sugar, rosemary, and red wine vinegar.”
Jacqueline Blanchard, owner of Coutelier, disagrees.
“Yas on canned cranberry sauce! It’s one of those classics I’ll never get enough of,” she explained. “I’ve just had so many bad versions of homemade cranberry sauce, I gravitate back towards the lovely can ridges of Ocean Spray.”
A cranberry bog at Pine Island Cranberry Co. in Chatsworth.
Cranberries, of course, are a Jersey staple. The Garden State is the third-largest cranberry producer after Wisconsin and Massachusetts. New Jersey cranberry growers harvested 51 million pounds of cranberries last year. About 400 million pounds of cranberries are consumed by Americans every year — 20% of that during Thanksgiving week, according to Ocean Spray.
I spent a day at Pine Island Cranberry Co. in Chatsworth last year for a chapter in my book, “New Jersey State of Mind.”
“There is no more spectacular New Jersey color than the blazing crimson of a cranberry bog in the fall,” the chapter begins.
Pine Island, the state’s biggest cranberry grower, is one of 700 in North and South America that are part of the Ocean Spray cooperative, formed in 1930.
Which brings us to the lawyer who is responsible for every can of cranberry sauce out there. His name was Marcus Urann, a lawyer-grower who realized that the berries he harvested exceeded demand. “Hating to see good fruit go to waste, he perfected a tasty sauce that he canned and called Ocean Spray in 1912,” reads the cooperative’s official history.
Urann’s canned cranberry sauce and juice are “revolutionary” innovations because they produced a product with a shelf life of months and months instead of just days, according to Robert Cox, co-author of “Massachusetts Cranberry Culture: A History from Bog to Table.”
New Jersey played a key role In Ocean Spray’s founding. In 1930, Urann convinced competitors John C. Makepeace of the AD Makepeace company and Elizabeth F. Lee of Jersey-based Cranberry Products Company to join forces under the cooperative, Cranberry Canners, Inc., which later became Ocean Spray.
Urann also helped develop several cranberry products, including cranberry juice cocktail in 1933.
Cranberries
Were cranberries — one of three fruits native to North America, along with blueberries and the Concord grape — served at the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving? Who knows. But the fruit, and its later by-products — sauce, juice, candies — gained a fast foothold in the American diet.
“By the Civil War cranberry sauce was so ingrained as an American dish,” Martha Stewart reports, “that General Ulysses S. Grant ordered cranberries served to soldiers as part of their Thanksgiving meal.”
For Eastern Indians, the berries were known as sassamanesh. The Lenni Lenape called them ibimi, or “bitter berry.” Early German and Dutch settlers started calling it the “crane berry” because of the flower’s resemblance to a crane’s head and bill.
Hundreds of years later, we can’t get enough of cranberries, or cranberry sauce, or cranberry juice and, well, you get the idea.
Our counterparts at syracuse.com did a ranking of 19 canned cranberry sauces (gee, why didn’t I think of that?). The top three: Williams-Sonoma Jellied Cranberry, Trader Joe’s Cranberry Sauce and Ocean Spray Whole Berry.
I don’t think most of the folks at Jersey Eats would care much for the results.
“I love cranberries after they’re covered in sugar and mixed up with orange and pineapple,” said Amy Walter Giglio. “Want my Mom-Mom’s cranberry Jello relish recipe?”
Uh, no, thanks.
I’ve left out some important characteristics of cranberries: They contain vitamin C and fiber. And in disease-fighting antioxidants, cranberries outrank nearly every fruit and vegetable, including strawberries, blueberries, spinach, broccoli and red grapes.
Also, did you know that John Lennon said “cranberry sauce” at the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever”?
That’s still not enough to make me reach for canned cranberry sauce. Slimy, slithery, and yes, jiggly.
I’ll stick to cranberry juice, or homemade cranberry sauce, especially if it’s mixed with Fireball.
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Peter Genovese may be reached at pgenovese@njadvancemedia.com.
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