Cranberry sauce

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Cranberry sauce is a sauce or relish made out of cranberries, commonly associated with Thanksgiving dinner in North America. There are differences in flavor depending on the geography of where the sauce is made: in Europe it is generally slightly sour-tasting, while in North America it is sweetened.

The most basic cranberry sauce consists of cranberries boiled in sugar water until the berries' skins pop and the mixture thickens. Some recipes include other ingredients such as orange juice or zest and flavorings such as cinnamon.

Cranberry sauce is often eaten in conjunction with turkey for Christmas or Thanksgiving in the US and Canada, and it is only rarely eaten or served in other contexts. Despite being called a sauce, cranberry sauce is most often consumed as a food itself, not as a garnish for other food items.

Commercial cranberry sauce may be condensed or jellied and thus shaped like a cylinder due to the shape of steel cans that often contain the sauce, or it may be loose and uncondensed. Some commercial brands of cranberry sauce may not be appropriate for vegetarians as they may contain gelatin.

[edit] Trivia

At the end of the song Strawberry Fields Forever, singer John Lennon can be heard repeating a phrase which, to many listeners, sounds like "I buried Paul". In fact, close listening of studio tapes (released unauthorized by former manager Neil Aspinall) reveals he actually says Cranberry Sauce. Lennon confirmed this in a 1980 interview, stating it was a kind of "icing on the cake" of the weirdness of the song, where anything he might have imagined saying would have been appropriate, and had no special meaning.

Comedian Neil Hamburger, performing to hostile crowds on Tenacious D's 2006 world tour, would not leave the stage of large venues such as Madison Square Garden until he had gotten the entire audience to chant the phrase cranberry sauce several times.

Cranberry Sauce is essential for the turkey-stuffing-cranberry Pilgrim sandwich popular in New England.