As you work on finishing off your leftover turkey and potatoes, here’s a bit about how Thanksgiving works around the DeGroot household:
Like many American families, my family eats a standard Thanksgiving meal. Potatoes, green beans, stuffing, and pies all surround a huge turkey. It is the same meal whether we make it at home or go eat with relatives or friends. Variations in recipes or ingredients are acceptable, and even add some variety to the table, but there is one dish that my mom will not let anyone make but herself. If we are coming to your house for Thanksgiving, you better save a spot on the table for my mom’s cranberry dressing.
Everyone in my family loves to pile the cranberries alongside the turkey, so they are a mandatory part of the meal. My mom would argue that there is a very thin line between under-thinking the cranberries and over-thinking them. Let’s begin by discussing how they might be missing their potential.
If a Thanksgiving police unit existed, my mom would apply for the job and make it her number one priority to get rid of all canned cranberry products in the grocery store. She almost finds it insulting to put a dish of cranberry jelly, usually still shaped the can it came in, next to a beautiful turkey that has a lot of love and cooking time in it. It is worse than putting ketchup on an expensive steak. These cranberry products often include more extraneous ingredients than they do cranberries. Unless they were homemade and put in a jar by someone who loves you, it is probably not worth putting on the table.
There is another crime that can be committed in the Thanksgiving kitchen, the overloaded cranberries. This concept is one that equally bothers my mom and me. I love turkey, and the rich, savory experience it brings to my taste buds. That flavor is only is enhanced by the addition of lightly sweetened cranberries. The experience, however, can be completely ruined if those cranberries bring all their friends to the party and overcrowd the place. I’m talking about superfluous ingredients in the dressing. This becomes a problem when we go to a new place for Thanksgiving. Someone hears that my mom is picky about her cranberries, so they look up and prepare the most extravagant recipe on the Food Network website. The addition of oranges, other dried fruit, nuts, anything green, and apples is what transforms it from a condiment for my turkey into an autonomous side dish.
We have some very simple rules for creating a good cranberry sauce. The first rule: It must be home made. Don’t heat up a can and pretend you made it yourself. We are smarter than that, and we will point out your deception. Second rule: There are only 3 ingredients you may use — whole cranberries, sugar, and water. Don’t use orange juice, because then you are making orange sauce with cranberries in it.
I wish we had a great reason for our cranberry sauce purism, but the truth is that we simply think it tastes the best that way. If it really came down to it, I would argue that we are trying to keep Thanksgiving “historically correct.” I have researched the topic, and cranberries are one of a handful of fruits that grew natively in North America. At the time of the pilgrims, they probably didn’t have things like oranges and almonds available to add to the meal, but they had plenty of cranberries. I know that there are other elements of the meal that are historically inaccurate, and that conversation would make for some good mealtime entertainment.
Hope you had a great Thanksgiving, and have Happy Holidays!
Luke
Luke DeGroot is an agribusiness senior at California Polytecnic State University, aka Cal Poly, in San Luis Obispo. Don’t try to sneak canned cranberry sauce into his Thanksgiving traditions; he’ll catch you and make you sit at the kid’s table. Your voice matters so we we hope you share your story with us. Send it to anthony@ilovefarmers.org.
