Cranberry sauce or cranberry jelly is a sauce or relish made out of cranberries, commonly associated with Thanksgiving dinner in North America and Christmas dinner in the United Kingdom. There are differences in flavor depending on the geography of where the sauce is made: in Europe it is generally slightly sour-tasting, while in North America it is sweetened.
The most basic cranberry sauce consists of cranberries boiled in sugar water until the berries pop and the mixture thickens. Some recipes include other ingredients such as slivered almonds, orange juice, zest, ginger, maple syrup, port, or cinnamon.
Commercial cranberry sauce may be loose and uncondensed, or condensed or jellied. The jellied form may be slipped out of a can onto a dish, and served sliced or intact for slicing at the table.
Cranberry sauce is often eaten in conjunction with turkey for Christmas or Thanksgiving in the United States and Canada, and it is only rarely eaten or served in other contexts there.
Some commercial brands of cranberry sauce may not be appropriate for vegetarians as they may contain gelatin.
Famous quotes related to cranberry sauce:
“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.... There are some things in every country that you must be born to endure; and another hundred years of general satisfaction with Americans and America could not reconcile this expatriate to cranberry sauce, peanut butter, and drum majorettes.”
—Alistair Cooke (b. 1908)