Southerners love the frozen stuff – sometimes we suspend fruit in it too oh and ahh on its magical properties. Sometimes we add Cool Whip to make it a fancy “company” dessert.

So canned gelatin cranberry sauce would seem to be the perfect Southern side dish for holiday meals—the only preparation required is opening a can and sliding the notched “bread” to slice onto a plate.

But like all good things, it has its detractors. It’s not so much the taste – we all know it’s delicious. But there are those who don’t like the fact that those ridges on the box indicate that the dish is not homemade and therefore not enough time/love was spent making it. There are those who have decided that cranberry sauce should have “fresh” or “organic” fruit. There are those who turn their noses up at the canned log.

Cranberry sauce is a Thanksgiving and Christmas tradition for most people in the US and England. Although most cranberries are grown in the North – especially in Wisconsin, Massachusetts, New Jersey – we in the South like to decorate their holiday tables.

The main question is: do more people serve canned or homemade sauce? So far, canned sauce has thrived in the face of trends toward fresh and organic foods. Conformable a 2023 article by Nina Friend on Food & Wine76 percent of Americans buy their sauce in a can.

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A history of cranberry sauce

How did the sauce come about? It began centuries ago with Native Americans, Friend wrote.

“It’s hard to pinpoint exactly who invented the concept of cranberry sauce. Native Americans have grown and eaten the fruit, which is indigenous to North America, for centuries,” Friend wrote. “An account from the American colonies in 1672 mentions the ways in which both Native Americans and European settlers used cranberries, ‘being them with sugar for a sauce to eat with their meat.’

As for the association specifically with turkey, the earliest known written account is in “American Cookery” from 1796, Friend wrote.

Over time, cooks—as cooks do—have experimented with the recipe, and now there are hundreds of ways to prepare cranberry sauce. (Here’s what appears in a search on the Food Network websiteincluding recipes for Apple Cinnamon Blueberry Sauce, Jalapeno Blueberry Sauce, and Baked Blueberry Sauce).

The origins of canned sauce

So how did canned cranberry sauce “bread” come about?

Given where the berries grow, it’s no surprise that the canned sauce was the brainchild of a New Englander, Marcus L. Urann, who was born in Maine in 1873 and died in Massachusetts in 1963. Urann was a lawyer turned blueberry farmer who hit upon the idea of ​​canning as a way to minimize losses from the crop’s notorious instability. (He also helped form the first football team at the University of Maine in 1893 and founded the Phi Kappa Phi fraternity, according to his 1963 obituary in Portland Press Herald).

Urann was trying to find a way to make cranberries a year-round product. Before canning, cranberries were harvested between mid-September and early November and had to be eaten fresh. Producers could only sell their product six weeks a year. The fruit would have been unavailable to most people at Thanksgiving and certainly at Christmas.

Urann decided that passing damaged cranberries and preserving them in a box would help growers extend that window. He began selling canned blueberries in New England in 1912.

In an article in Smithsonian magazineK. Annabelle Smith wrote that to form his company, Urann circumvented antitrust and trade laws by joining with other blueberry growers to create an agricultural cooperative. It was eventually named Ocean Spray.

Ocean Spray began canning “Jellied Cranberry Sauce” and made it available nationally in 1941, the Smithsonian article said, when easy-to-eat prepackaged foods were becoming popular as more women went to work outside the home .

In her article, Smith wrote, “If you laid out all the cans of gravy consumed in a year end to end, it would stretch 3,385 miles—the length of 67,500 football fields.” It seems that canned cranberry sauce will always have a place at the table.