Classic Cranberry

After Thanksgiving, several friends e-mailed me to ask, “What did you cook for dinner?” I e-mailed back a comprehensive rating sheet, listing all the dishes as well as ambiance features like table linens, place settings and centerpiece. My average was a “B+.”

If I’d baked a pie, I would have reached an “A,” but the vile frozen concoction we endured was the worst pie I’ve ever eaten. The smooth jelly, inside the cardboard crust, presumably a pecan filling, glinted green in the light. The resulting “F” killed my grade point average.

Now I feel under pressure to perform up to par for Christmas dinner. The two family members who make fresh cranberry sauce were not with us for Thanksgiving. We lost points by serving canned sauce. Since we can count on them for Christmas, that’s a certain “A.”

We’ll eat our traditional roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, not turkey, but we insist on cranberry sauce at Christmas. It tastes great with everything and looks so festive in our special cranberry sauce crystal dish.

Martha Stewart featured a segment on cranberries for her television show that aired just before Thanksgiving. If you would like to mix kumquats, pecans and pomegranate seeds into the classic cranberry-orange sauce, you may consult her website for the recipe.

Personally, I feel that devising something new, simply to be trendy, is pointless. In this case, it is heresy. Why ruin a classic? Nothing is better than the clean, tart taste of the cranberry-orange recipe that Ocean Spray printed for many years on their packages of fresh cranberries. One year we got a package without the recipe. Luckily we discovered it early enough to call Ocean Spray for the exact amounts of the ingredients. After that close call, I tucked the written card into my recipe box.

I learned my lesson over the rice custard pudding recipe that appeared on the box of our favorite brand of rice. We depended on it for 30 years. One day the company disappeared in a merger and so did the box with the recipe. I’m still searching for it.

In case you are collecting traditional recipes for your children, I am including both classic fresh cranberry-orange sauce and one for Yorkshire pudding.

Baking Yorkshire pudding is always a perilous adventure. One never knows for sure if it will be perfect. I hit perfect about 70 percent of the time and am proud of that record. My recipe comes from an old two-volume edition of Gourmet’s cookbook with my name printed in gold on the covers. Even though the recipes are formatted in an old-fashioned prose style, I treasure those books. I love to read the recipes out loud; they sound like poetry to me.

For readers who need a splash of something fun for the holiday, Ocean Spray’s test kitchen chefs suggest a Cranberry Raspberry Flirtini for the adults. Happy holidays from my family to yours.

Write Lynn Duvall at https://boblynn@ix.netcom.com or in care of the Valley Sun