Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, partly because of what it doesn’t include. It doesn’t involve wrapping a shipping container’s worth of presents. To the best of my knowledge, there are no Thanksgiving cookie exchanges, white elephant gifts, or themed muzak (although, admittedly, big box stores have been piping out Christmas musick since the day after Halloween).
Instead, this is a day centered around the things that make me the happiest: gathering with family and friends, expressing gratitude, and eating way too much.
Even better, on Thanksgiving, I can spend the day looking forward to the same dishes I’ve been annually pounding down since I was old enough for solid food.
Turkey. Dressing. Gravy. Mashed potatoes. Probably sweet potatoes as well. Some form of otherwise healthy vegetables rendered inexcusably decadent via an abundance of cream-of-something soup and possibly also actual cream and maybe topped with those crispy canned shoestring onions that we don’t eat at any other time of year.
And of course, fluffy rolls or biscuits, like anyone at the table needs more carbs.
This year, like many previous years, I am confronted with articles, posts, Insta-whatevers, by those who profess to overthrow the tired, traditional Thanksgiving menu with groovier dishes. Grilled octopus instead of turkey! Kale and halloumi soufflé topped with parsnip ash! Roasted cashew and chickpea loaf!
No. Just no. Unless you’re a committed vegan, that’s wrong.
A major point of Thanksgiving is its comforting familiarity, its predictability. It’s not the day for foodie adventuring. Some tweaks to the basic menu and maybe some interesting additional sides are permissible and even welcome. I didn’t grow up having mac and cheese on Turkey Day, for instance, but I’m never disappointed to see it included.
Which brings me to cranberry sauce.
It has to be there.
A Thanksgiving spread without cranberry sauce is like a baseball game without hot dogs: it’s not the central feature of the whole operation, but its lack would make the table, or the stadium, feel empty.
I realize that lots of people never even eat the cranberry sauce. That doesn’t matter. It still belongs on the buffet table, a cheery, glistening crimson in contrast to the platters and bowls of beige and brown food.
Unsung hero of the holiday feast though it may be, according to a November 2017 blog post in the Smithsonian Library and Archives, the cranberry was a staple foodstuff long before European settlers arrived in North America. It can justifiably lay claim to being a Founding Fruit.
Indigenous Americans used it as a component of pemmican, a mixture of dried and chopped or pounded meat, tallow, and cranberries or other berries that was then shaped into cakes and sun-dried. Shelf-stable for months, highly nutritious, and perfect for travel, pemmican was an original power food.
Cranberries also had medicinal value to Indigenous peoples. With high amounts of Vitamin C and benzoic acid (a natural preservative), they fended off scurvy, were helpful in reducing fever, and were used in poultices to promote wound healing, reduce swelling, counter blood poisoning, and calm indigestion.
In fact, if it weren’t for cranberries, the Pilgrims would have had an even dicier chance of making it through the harsh winters in Plymouth Colony.
Also, it must have been a surprise to the Wampanoag people that the land they’d been living in harmony with for 12,000 years was called New England.
It’s regrettable, really, that most of us settler-descendants barely see a cranberry until November, when supermarkets start stuffing the end-cap coolers in their produce departments with cellophane bags of the small, scarlet spheres.
Cranberry sauce is deeply embedded in my Thanksgiving memories. As a wee tot in the Eisenhower years, I remember my delight as my mother coaxed a gelid blob of sauce onto a parsley-wreathed plate where it wobbled and shone, retaining the corduroy-like indentations of the can from whence it issued.
As I got older and my mother shed some of her Iowa-bred food habits and adapted her tastes to the San Francisco Peninsula, we switched from the canned glop to making sauce from fresh cranberries. It was not a heavy lift: all it takes is boiling the cleaned berries in a cup of water and a cup of sugar for about ten minutes.
Mom would immerse the berries in a big bowl of water to rinse them. Then it was my job to pick through them, discarding any stems or leaves and rejecting any berries that had grown soft or moldy.
It was a job that kept me busy and absorbed, so she could continue her Herculean task of preparing the rest of the feast, free from my constant interruptions for at least 20 minutes.
Once the fruit bobbed merrily in the bubbling sugar water, Mom let me do the best part: using the flat of a wooden spoon to rupture any berries that hadn’t split on their own. That was worth another ten minutes of happy absorption in a task as I hunted through the thickening, tart syrup for whole sphericals so I could squish them against the side of the saucepan with a satisfying pop.
That extra time may have accounted for why our cranberry sauce tended to be thicker than some of the soupy stuff I have since encountered.
Which, again, is wrong.
These days, with an extended family clan that includes young, accomplished, and enthusiastic chefs, my days of wrangling the whole damn meal are in the rear-view. I can’t say I’m sorry, as long as I can finagle access to some of the leftovers (gobbler sandwiches are the food of the gods).
But it’s understood that Aunt Jannie makes the cranberry sauce.
Nowadays, I zhush it up a little by replacing some of the water with orange liqueur, reducing the sugar a bit, dashing in a few drops of vanilla extract along with the finely grated zest of half an orange. At the end, I toss in some roasted pecans.
For those who like cranberry sauce and actually eat it, it’s always a hit. For everyone else (my husband included), it’s a nice visual component to the holiday spread.
I still love popping those berries. And thinking about how grateful I am to enjoy another round of the holidays.
May yours be peaceful, joyous, and abundant.
But don’t forget the cranberry sauce. After all, it’s good for indigestion.
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