Crying Over the Cranberries
“There’s nothing like duck grease to oil a pan.”
–Grandfather Chick
Or maybe he said goose grease? . . .
I used to work at the public library, and I was scheduled at the reference desk on Wednesday nights. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the desk was fully staffed but the public was not, and we had plenty of time to “familiarize ourselves with the collection”–scour the cookbook collection for what we would take to the dinner we’d been invited to the next day. Oh 641s, how you whiled away our hours!
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the library stayed open. The night before and after Christmas, however, the board looked at the traffic data and started to close for a few days. My mom and I seized the lull and dashed up to Chicago to spend Christmas with my grandfather. He hemmed and hawwed but his wife got them a tree; we got up at a reasonable hour and opened gifts, him having to reassure that he was not senile, he knew there were more presents for him but this one was very interesting, thank you very much. One year I guiltily rewrapped the white elephant I’d gotten at the staff Christmas party and gave it to my step-grandmother; she loved it and it remained on their counter for years after.
My grandfather was old school. They had goose for Christmas dinner when he was a kid. They went skating on rivers, not rinks. He could happily eat turkey and all the trimmings year round (“no, I am not senile now, either”), but his favorite was the cranberry sauce–the real stuff that you could see the berries in, not the canned gelatinous cylinder. A cylinder was served one year–schlooooped out of its can by someone saying, “Oh lord, Chick’ll have to have cranberry.” He pretended–I think he was pretending–not to know what it was.
So one year at the library two cranberry recipes crossed my desk at about the same time, and I decided to give them a whirl. Cranberry and sage, together–how could you miss! The other recipe was from Julia Child, a hero of my grandmother, who got some ribbing for her food experiments but everyone kept showing up for meals. Better yet with these cranberry recipes, you could jar them up and give them as gifts (solving another ongoing problem: what do you give the ninety-year-old who keeps hoping you’ll apply for a job at Monsanto).
I found interesting Mason jars and made some up. I left the sage leaves and onions chunky. It was a hit with my grandfather and me, but I suspect no one else ate it. No one else eats it when I make it down here, which I do about every third year when I remember to grab fresh berries.
This year I made the sauce in the middle of all our duck experiments.
Our own Thanksgiving dinner was Asian and I forgot to bring it to the traditional one, so I’ve got the full batch, all for me, in the fridge. And the first time I got it out to eat, I cried. My grandfather has been dead for nearly twenty years now, but still sometimes the missing him blindsides me–some smidgen of rules or carpentry or curmudgenness clenches my throat tight and I must chant “Monsanto” until it passes, eating this relic cum snack on what used to be his dining room table. But it does pass, and I go on to the next building or cooking or reading project knowing that some he would love and some he would hate and that I knew him! As an adult, I was there enough to know him, and what a gift is that.
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Chutney is a generic name for fruit and spice sauce; ketchup is tomato chutney.
I semi-combine versions of the below two recipes to make this year’s sauce.
- Julia Child and Jacques Pepin’s cranberry chutney
- Cranberry sage chutney
I almost never have nuts handy, use regular ginger instead of crystallized, and figure the cranberries are the fruit course–no need to make a special trip for raisins.
How Grandfather Chick sometimes signed his letters
January 5th, 2012 at 9:43 am
This is gorgeous. Thank you for sharing.
Whole berry is the only way to fly. It’s seriously easy to make, and it baffles me that people will settle for the cylinder if they’re not specifically craving it.
(To be fair, I grew up on the cylinder and occasionally find the sucking noise, the grooves, and the fact that I can carve sculptures out of its dense gel charming.)
This chutney business, however, is a thing I clearly need to investigate. Mmm.