I have something to say about cranberry sauce but before I say it, please take my hand and allow me to walk you back into my childhood for a personal story about food.
There were very few meals my mom actually made from scratch. Most of the food my mom made for our family was pre-made by someone else named Kraft, Betty Crocker, or Chef Boyardee. My mom would follow a few instructions given by these people on their boxes or jars. She would boil noodles and add pre-made sauce; she’d open a bag of dehydrated spud slices, add milk and butter and a flavor packet and bake it into scalloped potatoes; she’d mix egg, water and oil with the flour combination inside a cake box and bam! Cupcakes. There were exceptions to the baking, like certain cookies and my grandmother’s nut roll, but those exceptions were few and far between.
I say this not with the slightest ounce of judgement. I’m sure these prepackaged foods were a life saver to someone of my mom’s generation. She never grew up with them and the ability to buy and prepare a meal in a short amount of time must have felt like a luxury. And due to their ease of preparation, she simply couldn’t understand why anyone would take the time and effort and expense to make something from scratch when you could buy the prepackaged version.
I recall making my first chocolate cake from scratch. I was 18. I had purchased all the ingredients and wrecked the kitchen and had to contend with my mom looking at the mess saying, “Why on earth would you spend all that money on ingredients and take all this time when you could have just used a mix?” but my hand to Jesus, it was the best chocolate cake I had ever tasted.
This serving of prepackaged foods extended to holidays as well. I had no idea that sweet potatoes and brussels sprouts were good. I mean, none at all. I thought they were the foods you give to punish children.
We had sweet potatoes twice a year: Thanksgiving and Christmas, and they came to us courtesy of a square frozen packet of Mrs. Pauls Candied Sweet Potatoes which my mom would plunk into a pot of boiling water. Same goes for brussels sprouts. My mom would boil the packets, snip open the bag and dump the contents into a beautiful bowl for the holiday table. Even as a kid, I would sit at the holiday table, look at that mess in the bowl and think, “Yeah, this can’t be right.”
Now, let me clarify, lest you think my mom was a slacker.
She wasn’t.
The woman IRONED BED SHEETS.
She kept an immaculate house. She used to clean her baseboards weekly. I often glance at the baseboards in my own house and think, “Good thing mom isn’t here to see this.”
She was a hard worker, my mom. But the food thing? Yeah, other than meatloaf, mashed potatoes, steak fingers and fried chicken, I don’t recall a meal completely from scratch ever. In no way am I complaining; I’m just saying I know my way around prepackaged/pre-made foods.
I tell you this because what I’m about to say next might sound snobbish and I mean no disrespect. My statement is not born of the belief that boil-in-the-pouch “candied sweet potatoes” are made in Satan’s warehouse, but rather, the firm belief that words mean things. We can’t simply assign meaning to a word because we feel like it. A dog is not a cat; a car is not a turtle; the color blue is not the color yellow.
With that in mind, we need to rethink the definition of a word; a word that the cranberry industry has gotten away with playing fast and loose with for far too long.
That word is “SAUCE.”
Sauce implies a liquid—something you pour or ladle or stir. (Or drink from a glass. Hey-ho! Cocktail joke!) If it exits a can as a solid it is not a sauce. Once on the plate, if you slice it to serve it, it is not a sauce.
People, you do not cut “sauce” with a knife. No one has ever opened a can of Spam and thought, “Mmmm…sauce.” Solids aren’t sauces, which takes me to that wonder of wonders: “jellied cranberry sauce.”
I know I’m stepping on some sacred cranberry cans with this one, but it must be said:
“Jellied Cranberry Sauce” that wiggles out of the can as a solid is not cranberry sauce.
Gelatinous Cranberry Tube? Yes.
Cranberry Log of Jiggle? Absolutely.
Delicious? Okay.
“Cranberry SAUCE?” Nope.
I mean, it’s more than fine if that’s what you like, a lot of people do. It’s a holiday tradition to many and I am all about traditions. So, go! Go eat and enjoy your jellied cranberry. Cut an extra thick slice. You deserve it. You had to endure this entire post and for that you should reward yourself.
But as you carefully cut that gelatinous red tube, I hope you hear my voice in your head saying,
“Yeah, that may be delicious, but it ain’t sauce.”
And if, perhaps, I am wrong about this whole thing and we CAN now categorize a solid that wiggles and jiggles as “sauce,” then my thighs just got a whole new identity.