As everyone who has eaten a Thanksgiving meal knows, the meal is traditionally full of a lot of orange and brown foods – mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, bread, stuffing, turkey. Don’t get me wrong, these foods are delicious, but you need the acidity and tartness of cranberry sauce – not to mention the bright red color – to balance out the other foods and make them really sing. Thanksgiving without cranberry sauce is like…well, it’s like Thanksgiving without stuffing or gravy or sweet potatoes or pie. Simply unimaginable. 

Over the years I have tried many a cranberry sauce. I’ve experimented with ones where you cook down the cranberries to a gelatinous consistency, or where you add orange juice to make it sweet, or walnuts to make it crunchy. But nothing beats this most simple recipe. To even call this a recipe is, in some way, to cheat – it’s really a five-minute-throw-everything-in-the-food-processor-and-combine activity. Moreover, this is (I’m almost ashamed to admit) the recipe on the back of the Oceanspray bag of cranberries, albeit with much less sugar.