Damon Lee Fowler

26 November 2024: Thanksgiving Cranberries

In the best-laid plans department, this essay was intended for posting on Monday, but we had some last minute changes to our plans for the week and I had to shift gears with the intention of posting it early this morning. But then the electrical company shut off the power to work on our area's grid for several hours, so I'm awfully sorry to be several hours late with it.

The reason it ought to have posted yesterday was because the recipe that follows needs to be made at least 24 hour ahead, and is all the better if it's made 36-48 hours ahead.

Cranberry relish has been a standard in our family for almost as long as I can remember. But the traditional recipe makes more than half a gallon of the stuff Read More 

In her memoire, Amarcord, the late Italian cooking maven Marcella Hazan humorously related her first encounter with one of our country's most enduring Thanksgiving traditions, that of accompanying the turkey with a tart-sweet condiment made from cranberries.

Thinking the sauce that her host had solicitously spooned over her turkey was akin to peperonata (a savory sauce of red peppers and caramelized onions), her first bite was such a shock that it took all her self-control to keep from spitting it out.

Eventually, Signora Hazan was able to embrace the sweet tomato ketchup that was persistently slathered on her hamburgers, but never made her peace with cranberry sauce. I couldn't blame her: Read More 

This year, I’m not doing my usual planning and precooking for Thanksgiving dinner, which has not been easy. For the first time in years my house isn’t fragrant with turkey broth and roasting pecans and my refrigerator isn’t crammed with more food than will fit into it.

My father turns ninety on Thanksgiving Day, so Tim and I are heading up to my parents’ house to be with them. I’ll be cooking, but it will be my mother’s way and there will be a lot of things that I usually do that won’t be on the table this year.

Never mind.  Read More 

On Thanksgiving day, practically every table across the country on which the centerpiece is our quintessentially American bird, one can almost take for granted that the turkey will be mated with another quintessentially American thing: cranberries.

And despite the hundreds, if not thousands of cranberry sauce, compote, chutney, and relish recipes that are presently cluttering the internet, most of those berries will be served straight out of a can, which is odd. Read More