My first experience with cranberry sauce was like that of many others: carefully picking the razor-edged lid off a can, then holding the open end over a plate to let the magenta cylinder shimmy out and land with a soft fwop. Even better than the sauce’s mesmerizing jiggle was the taste, intriguing in how it was both overly sugary but not sweet enough to hide its sourness.
Recipe: Shrimp Cocktail With Cranberry Cocktail Sauce
When I finally ate, and eventually cooked, homemade cranberry sauce, I loved the fruit even more. There’s a wildness inside that shiny red skin, pricks of tart, tannic, grassy flavors that are fruity but not sweet. It’s not a taste that’s immediately likable — eaten on their own, cranberries are too bitter and tart — but tamed, they’re a revelation. Sugar is the most common balm, mellowing the berries’ harshness to a lovely tang.
But going savory with cranberries on Thanksgiving and beyond brings out even more of their wild complexity. Here, a jammy sauce for cheesecake showcases the sweet side of cranberries we know and love, and a shrimp cocktail sauce, where cranberries replace tomatoes, surprises with its familiarity and freshness. It tastes just like the classic, but with a festive zing.
Recipe: Clementine Ricotta Cheesecake With Cranberry Compote
Cranberries were originally used as an addition to savory dishes. Linda Coombs, the author of “Colonization and the Wampanoag Story,” said that the Wampanoag harvested cranberries for thousands of years in the Northeast. On tribal reservation lands in Aquinnah, Mass., that practice carries on through Cranberry Day, now celebrated on the second Tuesday of each October when the community plucks the red fruit off vines in their bogs at the height of the short season.
In her deep research of the Wampanoag tribe’s history, Ms. Coombs found that its members dried cranberries to preserve them and added them, fresh and dried, to soups and stews. They also mixed cranberries into cornbread, both boiled and baked, and used them for medicinal purposes. Nowadays, Ms. Coombs said, “People either use them to make sauce or freeze them.”
With only about six weeks of harvest and a four-to-six-week shelf life, cranberries have to be frozen to be enjoyed beyond a small fall window. But it’s not a matter of relishing seasonality: Fresh and frozen berries can be used interchangeably. In fact, frozen cranberries are arguably better, especially in purées — and don’t even need to be thawed.
Patrick Rhodes, a vice president of Cape Cod Select and a member of the bogs’ fourth generation of family owners, said his company typically freezes within 24 hours of harvest, preserving their taste and quality at their peak. He added that there’s a molecular change that occurs when the berries are frozen that makes them softer and easier to blend.
That’s important in this cocktail sauce, which only works with frozen cranberries. They’re puréed, uncooked, with sugar and maple syrup for sweetness, horseradish for its bite and lemon juice for a pop of citrusy freshness. Deep-red frozen berries blend into a smooth sauce, releasing their natural juices into a mixture that looks like classic cocktail sauce, but offers a fruity zing that’s especially welcome around the holidays. (Fresh cranberries are too dry to break down completely and end up imparting an astringent bitterness.)
But fresh or frozen berries simmer equally well in this tangy topping for a ricotta cheesecake fragrant with citrus zest. Clementine juice sweetens the berries, and sugar thickens the sauce into a jammy compote thick enough to slice with the cake. It’s not quite as novel as the savory cocktail sauce, but it captures cranberries’ welcome wild side, too.
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