I sat down before first light on Thanksgiving morning to list out the people and plentiful good fortune I’m so thankful for.
My gratitude honestly knows no bounds.
But Thanksgiving to me, everything else aside, is about my Mom’s raw cranberry mix and the special bond that over decades she, my son Asa, and I developed as we ground this to perfection, laughed unabashedly, and noshed on this scrumptious rough and simple holiday fare.
Three people spanning three generations hanging around the refrigerator with spoons in hand shaking their heads in the pleasure of the moment.
It’s beyond simple to make.
Get a couple of bags of organic cranberries, three or four oranges, and grind them together with the orange peels, adding wild flower raw honey to sweeten. Mix and let it steep for a few days in the frig.
I can’t remember when I first started making it with her or even its importance on the holiday table growing up, though family folklore is that she learned from her mom when they lived on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx from the 1920s till after WW2.
Our family story inexplicably connected to this condiment in now unknowable ways.
For decades as my son Asa grew up, he and I made the trip from California where we lived to Jersey to see my mom.
Taking her ancient, green enameled hand grinder and putting this together, making a monumental mess, just loving the whole process.
Granny’s Raw Cranberries are so rich, so natural, so tart and sweet. So wonderful and so much this special thing for the three of us.
The goal is to make it a few days before the holiday and snack incessantly.
On well browned toast or a bialy. On Matza. On anything or basically nothing. Adding a bit more honey as needed and constantly, endlessly, dipping table spoons in the bowl to taste.
I’m tempted to take the easy and poetic holiday narrative here. That’s the romantic license of memory.
Talk about how it’s a palimpsest for my life, pulled back layer by layer, over endless family changes and experiences and today a bond that my son and I share. Some truth there.
Or lay a Proustian veneer on it, making the deep red rich cranberry the stuff of his Madeleine, unlocking a past life that wafts across the memory of mine and my son and my mother’s life. Feels less my story.
It’s simply something special that is uniquely our own.
This past week while Asa was in Colorado, I in NY, we exchanged calls and texts as we both made Granny’s Raw Cranberry mix.
I used a food processor, he a Vitamix this year. Pics and yummy self congrats went back and forth a plenty but this is neither a metaphor for life, nor a knotted rope of memories.
It’s way better.
A shared personal memory that we renew year after year.
My son and I just doing this little thing–apart or together–thinking of my mother in this act of eating, of remembering, and tradition.
Our way to reenact and reify our love of this amazing women.
This is the great stuff of life.
It doesn’t make me want to mourn for my mom, but be happy that we had this thing together. She lived long and well.
To all of my friends, I wish you a great holiday.
This is my personal ditty that defines the day.
The power of food as a source of tradition and an eternal edible moment in time as something to relish.
Something truly worth eating.
This has turned out to be a happy homage to my mom’s passing so I’ll end with a few pics.
Granny and Asa when she was probably 90.
Our favorite spot with Jackson Pollack at MoMa around the same time.
