Just as your autumn stash of pounds and pounds of apple baskets filled with large blushing round crisp apples you personally picked, is waning, the season for those little jewelled round and plump bead like cranberries, is peaking.
Growing up in Israel, I had never heard of cranberries — not until I moved to America. There is something quintessentially American about them.
Those cranberry bogs certainly are a sight to behold. I loved the Ocean Spray commercials of the cranberry juice guys standing knee deep in what looks like a bathtub or better yet a huge pool of red cranberries, almost like a cranberry carpet, or cranberry sand you can swim in. Until those commercials I had never really thought about how cranberries are harvested, and had just assumed they grew on a tree or bush, and were picked off just like any other berry or fruit.
These last few years, I’ve been tossing these hard frozen cranberries with their burst of tartness (together with its perfect twin, the Orange Zest) into practically anything I have been cooking or baking. From corn muffins, pear crisps, pancakes, pumpkin tea breads, upside down cakes, bread puddings, and roasted butternut squashes to experimenting with sweet cranberry orange challah (it was yum!).
There is something about those bight, tart and vibrant cranberries that instantly liven up any dish, taste-wise. Simmered along with spices, its bracing flavor perks up just about any food or meal.
But literally, they liven up a dish. Take, for example, the most classic cranberry dish of all, cranberry sauce.
Now I know there are heated debates about this. Homemade versus canned. But bear with me. As a kosher consumer, the canned variety wasn’t certified kosher when I was young, so for years all I ever knew was homemade cranberry sauce (plus, even once it was kosher, my mother indoctrinated us to hate the canned stuff).
Only later in an emergency, or when the weird mood of intentionally eating canned junk food struck, did I come to appreciate the plop of the jiggly canned cranberry “sauce,” slipping out of its can in all of its cylindrical beauty with the depression of the tinned lines etched, the whole thing actually standing on its own, and then so firm it is still in cylinder form as it resists the pressure of being sliced into actual jello-like circles.
But when it comes to homemade cranberry sauce, unlike the canned version where the experience is in the un-canning of the thing, the joy is in the process of simmering it. The cranberries liven up the dish with their high dose of pectin that is released upon the bursting of their skins, which helps the sauce gel on its own.
Part of the pleasure and charm of simmering and foaming, bubbling and melting these firm cranberries into soft submission of pink-streaked and seed-flecked sauce, is the sounds of popping cranberries. Although sometimes it is a cacophony of cranberries bursting with popping sounds all at once, usually, like a wine bottle being uncorked, out of the steamy pot, one by one, come the playful “pop” “pop” “pops.”
In my family we love cranberry sauce so much that you will sometimes find us eating it out of bowls with a spoon, more like a dessert than a relish. Frozen, it makes the perfect tart sorbet, too.
The basic sauce recipe on the back of the cranberry bag is so easy, it takes all of just a few minutes to prepare. You can jazz the sauce up with whatever tickles your fancy, and you can’t go wrong.
You can substitute brown sugar or pure maple syrup for the sweetener, add spices such as cinnamon, ginger and cloves, even a dash of cardamom, or dried or fresh fruits such as currants or apricots, oranges or apples, maybe some pomegranate and even a little liquor. You can add toasted pecans, or mint.
Really, whatever floats your boat.
There is something to be said for the simple classic sauce, though.
So, what are you waiting for? Go forth and pop some pretty and delicious bursts of tartness in your mouth! Turn on your stove and make yourself some sweet and tangy cranberry sauce. Bon appetit!
Copyright © 2013 by the Intermountain Jewish News
