Southerners love congealed things – sometimes we suspend fruit in it and ooh and ahh over its magical properties. Sometimes we add Cool Whip to turn it into a fancy “company” dessert.

So canned jelled cranberry sauce would seem to be the perfect Southern side dish for holiday meals – the only preparation required is opening a can and sliding out the ridged “loaf” to slice on a plate.

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

Cranberry sauce is a tradition at Thanksgiving and Christmas for most people in the U.S. and England. Although the majority of cranberries are grown up North – particularly in Wisconsin, Massachusetts, New Jersey – we in the South love having them adorn our 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. According to a 2023 article by Nina Friend on Food & Wine, 76 percent of Americans purchase their sauce in a can.

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A history of cranberry sauce

How did the sauce originate? 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 been growing and eating the fruit, which is indigenous to North America, for centuries,” Friend wrote. “An account from the American colonies in 1672 mentions the ways that both Native Americans and European settlers used cranberries, ‘boyling them with sugar for a sauce to eat with their meat.’”

As for pairing it specifically with turkey, the earliest known written account is in 1796’s “American Cookery,” Friend wrote.

Over time, cooks – as cooks do – experimented with the recipe and now there are hundreds of ways to prepare cranberry sauce. (Here’s what pops up in a search of the Food Network website, including recipes for Cinnamon Apple Cranberry Sauce, Jalapeno Cranberry Sauce and Baked Cranberry Sauce).

Origins of canned sauce

So how did the canned cranberry sauce “loaf” come to be?

Given where the berries grow, it’s not surprising that canned sauce was the creation of a New Englander, Marcus L. Urann, who was born in Maine in 1873 and died in Massachusetts in 1963. Urann was an attorney-turned-cranberry farmer who hit upon the idea of canning as a way 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 the 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 when fresh. Growers could sell their product for only six weeks per year. The fruit would have been unavailable to most people at Thanksgiving and certainly at Christmas.

Urann decided that pureeing damaged cranberries and preserving them in a can would help growers lengthen that window. He began selling canned cranberries in New England in 1912.

In a Smithsonian Magazine article, K. Annabelle Smith wrote that, to form his company, Urann bypassed antitrust and trade laws by getting other cranberry growers to join him to create an agricultural co-op. It was eventually called Ocean Spray.

Ocean Spray began manufacturing canned “Jelled Cranberry Sauce” and made it available nationwide 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 lay out all the cans of sauce consumed in a year from end to end, it would stretch 3,385 miles—the length of 67,500 football fields.” Looks like canned cranberry sauce will always have a place at the table.