The Story Behind Thanksgiving's Most Polarizing Dish (2024)

FAQs

What's the deal with cranberry sauce? ›

An account from the American colonies in 1672 mentions the ways that both Native Americans and European settlers used cranberries, "boyling them with sugar for a sauce to eat with their meat." And one of cranberry's earliest documented appearances with turkey can be found in the 1796 cookbook American Cookery, where ...

The Pilgrims might have been familiar with cranberries by the first Thanksgiving, but they wouldn't have made sauces and relishes with the tart orbs. That's because the sacks of sugar that traveled across the Atlantic on the Mayflower were nearly or fully depleted by November 1621.

By the 1860s, cranberry sauce was so ingrained as an American dish, that General Ulysses S. Grant reportedly ordered that cranberries be served to soldiers as part of their Thanksgiving meal. Whichever cranberry recipe you end up eating on Thanksgiving, it just might be the most venerable dish on your menu.

Turkey is often dry, salty, and bland, which makes it the perfect partner for something sweet and moist. Cranberries are not overly sweet. Their tartness pairs well with the more bland-tasting turkey.

Cranberry sauce or cranberry jam is a sauce or relish made out of cranberries, commonly served as a condiment or a side dish with Thanksgiving dinner in North America and Christmas dinner in the United Kingdom and Canada.

It's perfectly fine to serve up cranberry sauce — whole berry or jelled — straight out of the can. But in my experience, heating the canned sauce up takes its flavor to the next level. Plus, it becomes a little more aesthetically pleasing.

When someone mentions Thanksgiving dinner, the image that traditionally comes to mind includes turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. As one of the very few commercially grown fruits native to the United States, the cranberry symbolically represents an American harvest on our holiday tables.

But according to the two only remaining historical records of the first Thanksgiving menu, that meal consisted of freshly killed deer, assorted wildfowl, cod, bass, and flint, and a native variety of corn harvested by the Native Americans, which was eaten as corn bread and porridge.

Cranberries can actually be found from the Polar Regions to the tropics, in both hemispheres. Due to the importance of cranberries in the 1500s and their abundance, it is believed that the pilgrims and the American Indians would have eaten them at the first Thanksgiving.

What is America's favorite Thanksgiving side dish? ›

What is America's favorite Thanksgiving side? Mashed potatoes took home the top spot for this year's favorite side. The top five most popular holiday side dishes include: Mashed potatoes.

Thanksgiving-type celebrations were common at the turn of the 19th century with many opting to put a turkey on the table instead of slaughtering a useful animal like a hen or cow that was producing other needed products, according to Britannica. Turkeys at the time, and still today, were raised to be meat birds.

Of all the states, residents of California consume the most turkey per person, but California is not one of the five. Missouri is. It's number five. The top turkey producing state is Minnesota, followed by North Carolina, Arkansas and Virginia.

An estimated 46 million turkeys are eaten each year as part of Thanksgiving meals, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

I love the texture, shape, ridges, and dependability of the cranberry sauce that comes from a can. Each year, no matter what happens or may go wrong, I know the cranberry sauce will taste exactly as it has for as long as I can remember.

Why Do We Serve Cranberry Sauce at Christmas? Following in the footsteps of America, we traditionally add cranberry sauce to our plates at Christmas to add a sweet and tangy taste to our turkey.

“Before canning technology, the product had to be consumed immediately and the rest of the year there was almost no market.” Then suddenly, there was. The jellied log became available nationwide in 1941. Thanksgiving history was forever changed.

But that's not the case for prepared cranberry sauces, where prices are up. Lochner pointed out that processors set those prices, not growers, and that there are higher input costs unrelated to berries — like “processing the fruit and getting it to market.”