Don't Dis Canned Cranberries

Gird your loins, everyone. We’re tiptoeing into highly emotional territory.

It’s Thanksgiving week and that means family, friends, football and fights.

There are those who will spar over politics this Thursday – but serious dust-ups begin with side dishes.

People feel strongly about them because Thanksgiving is more than just a turkey supper. It’s decades of memories spun into one big feast. Who hasn’t looked around the table and seen the ghosts of family members? Who hasn’t prepared a side no one likes in memory of poor old Uncle Zeke, who loved it?

I’m agnostic about most side dishes, except one.

Cranberries.

If you’re at my table, you’re getting the canned variety – whole berries in a bowl and the log on a plate.

It’s a family tradition I never break.

I grew up on canned cranberries and didn’t know there was any other way to eat them until I was an adult. My grandmother had a flat silver utensil that she insisted was designed solely to cut that gelatinous cylinder along its ridges.

Yet some cooks, who apparently weren’t busy enough on Thanksgiving, began boiling the tart little orbs with pounds of sugar even though the good folks at Ocean Spray had already done that for them.

I’ve met some of these cooked-cranberry zealots. I don’t understand them. Nothing done in a saucepan surpasses cranberries out of a can.

I never realized how passionate some were about fresh cranberries until a few years ago when I was hosting Thanksgiving for friends.

As we sat down to eat, one woman I didn’t know well scanned the table and blurted out, “CANNED cranberries? I should have brought my own.”

I was stunned.

If I were a native Southerner instead of a come-here, I would have immediately said something like “Well, bless your heart.”

Instead, I muttered an insincere apology and joked about my laziness. After baking dozens of sweet potato rolls, seven sides, two types of stuffing and four homemade pies for about 20 guests, I’d neglected to make my own cranberry sauce. What a sloth.

The truth is deeper than that. I’m loyal to those humble cans because my grandfather died in the break room at the Ocean Spray plant in Bordentown, N.J., in 1952, giving our whole family – even those of us who were not yet born – a sentimental attachment to the products from this cranberry giant.

That does not include bags of the company’s fresh berries, however, which were not a part of my childhood.

My grandfather, Randall Dougherty, didn’t own a car. On the night he died, he grabbed his lunch sack, hopped on his bicycle and pedaled a mile or so to his job at the cranberry plant.

He was a janitor. Once the day-shift workers went home, my grandfather began his shift, sweeping and mopping and doing whatever else janitors do during the nighttime hours.

He was an avid reader and during his dinner break he unwrapped the wax paper from the sandwich my grandmother made and opened a book.

We know that because that’s how they found him the next morning. Slumped over in his chair, book on his lap, partially eaten sandwich on a table. I like to think it was turkey and cranberry jelly on white bread, but I don’t know for sure.

When we were kids, my dad would solemnly slow the car when we passed the factory to remind us of the place where his father had died.

I never knew my father’s father but that Ocean Spray logo – juice was bottled in his plant – became synonymous with our patriarch.

If I’d been thinking when my guest mocked my right-out-of-the can offering, I would have stared her down.

“How dare you,” I would have said slowly. “My grandfather died so you could eat canned cranberries. Now pass that delicious log.”

A version of this originally appeared in The Virginian-Pilot on November 19, 2017.