Tart Nouveau | Sweet Cranberry Recipes
If you think of cranberries only as a side dish to turkey, these colorful treats will open your eyes.
Cranberry Sugar-Pecan “Bundt” Bread with Cranberry Glaze
Photo Credit : Liz Neily | Styled by Liz Neilyby Jessie Sheehan
The cranberry bogs of southeastern Massachusetts put on such a brilliant display every autumn, you could argue that the best fall color there can be found by looking down, not up. Growing on long, running vines in freshwater bogs, native cranberries are at their most beautiful when the bogs are flooded and the berries are loosened from their vines, causing them to float up and form a watery crimson carpet. This is the traditional harvest method for most growers, but about 10 percent of the Massachusetts crop is dry harvested with a mechanical picker, a practical but less eye-catching approach.
The vast majority of cranberries are processed into sauce and juice, or dried. The rest of the crop is sold fresh to be cooked down into sauces and compotes or baked into some seriously delicious treats.
From mid-September through November, long-keeping cranberries are at their peak. The color alone makes them an ingredient worth embracing, but their sour flavor combined with the sweetness of, say, a cobbler with cream biscuits, a fluffy sugar-pecan pull-apart bread, an easy cinnamon-sugar snacking cake, or even a chocolate icebox cake is the reason I turn to them repeatedly through the fall.
Yes, cranberries offer myriad health benefits, due to their high vitamin and antioxidant content. But for lovers of bold flavors and high contrast, they are simply a very tasty, stunningly beautiful fruit. The following recipes are mostly sweet, but we begin with a cheddar-infused popover served with a gorgeous cranberry compound butter.
