Cranberries for Thanksgiving cranberry relish
Until I was in middle school, I didn’t know there was any other way to eat cranberries on Thanksgiving save for my mother’s cranberry relish. And then one year, my grandmother wordlessly slid a red, can-shaped gelatinous mass onto my mother’s Thanksgiving table. My mother, siblings and I tried not to look too horrified and then just pretended the jiggly mass wasn’t there. After that holiday, I quizzed my mom about her (vastly superior) cranberry relish recipe. It was such a highly anticipated mainstay on our holiday table that I assumed it had been passed down for generations (and since my mother’s family counts controversial Revolutionary figures such as Benedict Arnold in her ancestry, this is not a strange supposition). I expected a story about her grandmother, Vanita, and a tattered card in a recipe box. But she surprised me by vaguely referring to a Good Housekeeping recipe she had stumbled on when I was a toddler.
So, what I thought was a generations old tradition had started with my mother clipping a recipe in her Iowa kitchen while her children toddled around at her feet. But that’s how family traditions are made, isn’t it? They’re often completely random and become etched into our family DNA over time. And, so it goes: this late ’70’s Good Housekeeping recipe, adapted over the years is a tradition that gets right to the heart of our family. When my daughters’ daughters ask them where it came from, they’ll have a story about their Grandma and how she found the recipe in a magazine decades before.
And so, because traditions are meant to be shared (and I’ll do anything to steer people away from that can-shaped cranberry menace), here’s the 411 on the Michel Family Cranberry Relish.
Enjoy it. And create some traditions of your own this holiday season.
Ingredients:
3 Apples
2 Oranges
1 12 oz bag of fresh cranberries
1/2 c. of sugar
Directions: Put all ingredients in your food processor (you may have to do it in batches so your food processor doesn’t overflow) and blend until everything is chopped and combined.
Note: This should be made a few days in advance so the flavors have time to combine. Can be served chilled or at room temp. Best of all, this will keep in the fridge for leftovers for 7-10 days.
Mollie Michel is a former editor of A Child Grows and South Philly resident.