Wherein The Author Offers A Tribute To The Can-Berry

Yes, I know that Thanksgiving was yesterday (at least for those of us in the U.S. – our Canadian friends celebrated it last month). But what with all the leftovers in the fridge, this topic is still timely. Let’s call it an ode to the humble canned, jellied cranberry sauce.

Did you know that the Ocean Spray company is a cooperative of cranberry growers? It has been since 1930. But even before that, one of its founders was a lawyer named Marcus Urann, who decided shortly after the turn of the last century that he was ready to be finished with practicing law, and bought a cranberry farm. Cranberries are very choosy about soil and weather conditions, and the northeast was the place to go for growing cranberries.

Like with all other fresh fruit, freshly picked cranberries have a fairly short shelf life, and were only available following the annual harvest that would run from September to November. Mr. Urann started thinking about how to expand his business. His idea was to use broken or split cranberries (a common result from the picking process) and cook them into a sauce, which could be canned for a shelf-stable food available any time. Sold under the brand name of “Ocean Spray Preserving Company”, his product hit the shelves in 1912.

Cranberry sauce was not new, of course. Cranberries had provided dyes and medicines to native American cultures before the time of the Pilgrims, and it was known that cranberries could be boiled with sugar until they split open and release their naturally high levels of pectin that would thicken the mixture into a sauce that made a good side dish. Canning that sauce allowed the humble cranberry to reach areas of the country outside of New England. However, this early version of cranberry sauce is not the jellied version we know today – that story picks up in 1941 (or maybe 1939, depending on the source).

The jellied cranberry sauce log turned out to be the breakout star. Even today, when “factory food” is so out of fashion, Ocean Spray sells three cans of the jellied cranberry log for every one can of more traditional cranberry sauce. Oddly, there seems to be very little written about how this product came to be, but after its 1941 national debut, it became the thing that spread cranberry-love all across the country. The simple list of ingredients (cranberries, sweeteners and water) makes it one of the less worrisome products on the table.

Personally, I am agnostic between a more traditional sauce made with whole cranberries and the jellied log that can be so easily sliced into ruby red discs and slid up along side of the turkey and mashed potatoes. Either one can complete my festive Thanksgiving plate to complement the turkey, potatoes, gravy and stuffing. Maybe I should go open a can right now!

Every year I see bags of fresh cranberries (also an Ocean Spray product) on sale at the stores in the runup to Thanksgiving. Personally, I always wonder who buys them. I am perfectly happy with the little can-shaped loaves of jellied cranberry that requires the least preparation of any dish at the holiday table.

24 thoughts on “Wherein The Author Offers A Tribute To The Can-Berry”

  1. A constant subject of discussion at any Thanksgiving table for decades now! Our local high end grocery has a wonderful cranberry compote made with orange and lemon zest, as well as other ingredients, fit for a gourmand, which is quite a delight (as well as their Hungarian sausage dressing, recipe of the owners grandma, which makes doing your own dressing not worth the effort). There’s nothing like that canned cranberry, tho, and as kids, we used to take our slice, and additionally cut it as pie wedges on our plate as we ate it. Probably over the last 20 years or so, I’m happy to report, that rarely is there any snobbery among the hippest of hostesses regarding your cranberry proclivities. Most places I’ve been happy to be invited to for dinner have actually served both; I think most likely because there’s a difference in tradition between the husband and wives families, rather that the will to encompass all desires!

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    • For awhile I rebelled at my family’s tradition of the jellied stuff and bought the version with berry pieces in it. This year, one of the kids said “nope, everyone likes the jellied version” so that’s what we bought.

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  2. This makes me wonder if their sales are consistent throughout the year of if they spike at Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Mrs. Jason has a few recipes requiring cranberry sauce she makes throughout the year, so perhaps others have similar needs throughout the year…meaning cans don’t sit around on the grocery shelf as long.

    We did encounter a frustration yesterday with a can of cranberry sauce as the seal in the can had broken. We didn’t care to risk partaking of it, so thankfully the Mrs. had another can squirreled away in the pantry.

    Happy (belated) Turkey Day to you and all (current and former) inhabitants of Casa de Cavanaugh!

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  3. I have to admit I missed the cranberry sauce yesterday, which was a total oversight on an otherwise meticulous grocery story list. That little bit of sweetness makes a bite of turkey and gravy somehow seem complete. But I still can’t reconcile “sauce” with the jelly product we all know and love (not that “jelly” seems any more appropriate). I also wonder how many cans are sold in the run-up to Thanksgiving versus the rest of the year. Like my beloved mincemeat, I suspect they largely gather dust in the spring and summer months.

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    • Sales throughout the year is a great question. I suspect that they make most of their money from juices outside of the holiday season, but I could be wrong. And I agree, that little bit of semi-sweetness really works well on a thanksgiving plate.

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  4. Growing up, we had the “Cranberry Sauce Shaped Like A Can”…

    My wife makes cranberry sauce fresh from cranberries — from the first time, I never wanted to have the shaped-like-a-can stuff ever again.

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  5. I like both of them as well, although the new cans made it tricky to get the “loaf” out in one piece. It used to be that you could open one end, then open the other and push it through but the new cans prevent this. We still made it work with a butter knife, though. I can remember as a young boy my grandmother making the cranberries from scratch mixing frozen orange juice and sugar with them.

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  8. Well JP I was surprised to read that more people prefer the jellied version over the sauce version, especially since so many people grimace over Jell-O vegetable or fruit molds. I think we only had a small can of the sauce since it was just my parents and me, so we only had a turkey breast, not the whole bird. Many years ago when I still had cable TV, I remember watching “Thanksgiving Unwrapped” on The Food Network. It was an “Unwrapped” episode that went behind the scenes to feature all Thanksgiving dinner foods and how/where they were obtained. It was interesting, from showing how cranberries are harvested in cranberry bogs to how they create, then package Durkee Fried Onion Rings.

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  9. I’ve always been averse to the cranberry sauce brick, probably because as a kid I was made to take some on plate and I didn’t like it. It wasn’t until adulthood that I tried fresh cranberry sauce, and decided that I actually liked the stuff. My wife makes fresh sauce (from actual cranberries) for Thanksgiving, and one of my daughters actually prefers just the berries themselves, so she eats her cranberries that way.

    Thanks for the history here on Ocean Spray. It looks like Mr. Urann remained working in the industry into his 80s, and he was a big proponent of co-ops, noting that his firm brought together lots of different bog owners who were too busy squabbling among themselves to be able to innovate as far as selling their product. I’ll never look at a cranberry brick the same again.

    Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving!

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    • Thanks, our family meal is coming tomorrow. The co-op thing is unusual in big business, and seems to have been really successful here as a way to stay focused on one thing and to do it well. I read that a large percentage of owners tried to sell out to a big company a few years ago, but they could not get a majority.

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  10. Well, happy Thanksgiving. Still lots to be thankful for.
    My American mother in law does a jellied can at Thanksgiving and Christmas, I appreciate how it can be coaxed from the can in the can’s shape. It is semi affectionately known as cranberry goo in the family.

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