The holiday season is a time of year when people typically put aside their petty differences. But the debate over fresh vs. canned cranberry sauce is the culinary civil war that never ends.

Since home cooks figured out how to properly make Brussels sprouts in the past couple of decades, canned cranberry sauce may be the most divisive foodstuff on the holiday table. Though obviously a much more critical part of the Thanksgiving feast, cranberry sauce — both canned and fresh — still makes plenty of appearances at Christmastime.

Heather Armstrong, of Etna, serves her homemade cranberry sauce with duck at special December dinners, uses it to make her cranberry crumb bars, and also likes to spread it on crackers.

“To be honest, I would make the bars with canned in a pinch, but I always choose fresh when given the choice for anything with cranberry sauce,” said Armstrong, whose husband, Charles — a cranberry professional at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension — no doubt supports her in this.

The other side is dug in just as deep. “Give me ridges or give me death,” said Eliza Matheson, of Cape Elizabeth, referring to the iconic, can-molded grooves around each jiggly log.

“In my family, it’s a very passionate division,” Matheson said. “My mom really prefers homemade cranberry sauce, slow-cooking it with sugar and water and lemon, but growing up my brother and I always required the canned. My mother was like, ‘I can’t believe you guys really prefer this.’ My brother and I were united: ‘We are Team Canned Cranberry Sauce!'”

A MAINER’S INVENTION

It turns out we have a Mainer to thank for canned cranberry sauce. Marcus Urann, of Sullivan, was an attorney and cranberry farmer who is generally credited with pioneering commercially canned cranberry sauce after setting up a cooking and canning operation at his bog in Hanson, Massachusetts, in 1912.

Urann co-founded the cooperative that evolved into Ocean Spray in 1930, and by 1941 the company’s canned sauce was distributed nationally.

Ocean Spray and other makers also put out whole berry sauce, but the product that people either love or hate is what Ocean Spray officially calls “canned jellied cranberry sauce.” And for many, brand matters.

“It’s got to be Ocean Spray,” said Matheson’s brother, Cameron. “It’s like Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Heinz ketchup. You can’t go outside the boundaries. I’ve tested it out, and other brands fail miserably every time.”

Ocean Spray said it sold 85 million cans in 2024, and their cranberry sauce was featured at holiday meals in more than 27 million households that year. It’s the top selling canned sauce brand in the country, commanding more than 70 percent of the market, according to Adweek.

In an era when scratch cooking is revered and on-trend — home cooks take great pride and pleasure in baking their own bread, rolling fresh pasta, even making gummy candies — nostalgia might account for much of the charmingly retro log’s appeal. Proust had his madeleines, Eliza Matheson has canned cranberry sauce.

“You always have that sensory experience you can go back to,” she said. “No matter whose family I’m with, my family of origin, my in-laws, or my spouse’s aunt’s, if there’s canned cranberry sauce, I know that it’s consistently going to be something from my childhood.”

As a kid, Matheson was turned off by the skins, seeds and tannic bitterness in fresh sauce, though she’s developed an appreciation for it as an adult. Still, nothing beats the full-on sensory delight of plopping the jellied sauce onto a serving dish.

“We liked to hear it slurp out of the can. We liked to cut it along the ridges and make sure we had a patty of cranberry sauce. You don’t scoop it, you slice it.”

Cans of Ocean Spray’s jellied cranberry sauce are designed to have the rounded part of the can on top, which might look upside-down. But the canning process deliberately leaves an air bubble in the rounded end, so when you open the other side of the can, just a little gentle prying (or a few good whacks on the bottom) releases the sauce in all its can-shaped glory.

‘THERE WILL BE A LOOK AND SOUND OF DISGUST’

“We purposefully play up the suction noise when I dump it out on the plate in front of everyone for the full effect,” said Cameron, who hosted Thanksgiving this year at his Massachusetts home. He’s a foodie whose table was full of scratch-cooked dishes, including a heritage-breed turkey from a local farm. He takes devilish glee in putting cranberry sauce at the center of it all.

“We’ll have this beautiful table with all this beautiful homemade food, and then this canned sauce that sits upright,” he said. “It’s very theatrical when you put it in the middle of the table and it stands there on its own. It’s a beacon of hope for me.” And his mother and in-laws?

“Without fail, they’ll look at you as if you were a disgrace.”

“The moment she sees it, there will be a look and a sound of disgust,” Eliza said of her mom, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Matheson said she doesn’t get genuinely disturbed by as small a matter as cranberry sauce; she just sticks to the fresh cranberry sauce on the table, and leaves the canned for others. Still, she has no kind words for the canned.

“The jellied kind with can lines around it and people just plop it on a plate — it’s the worst,” she said. “I don’t like the looks of that. And it’s sort of boring. It doesn’t have that sweet-tart thing going, it just tastes like something you’d spread with peanut butter.”

Ocean Spray’s jellied sauce has some distinctive cranberry tang; cranberries are the first ingredient listed on the can. But the tartness comes swaddled in sweetness that lingers so long it practically loiters, which stands to reason because the only other ingredients (besides water) are high-fructose corn syrup and corn syrup.

The emphatic sweetness of the stuff is another part of its appeal, and likely why canned aficionados become fans as kids.

Cameron recalled first developing his love for Ocean Spray sauce at Thanksgiving meals when he was a kid in the ’80s. “The canned sauce was the one cheat of the meal,” he said. “Like you’re having your dessert while you’re having your Thanksgiving meal, even before the pie. It hit my sweet-tooth spot.”

A HOLIDAY TABLE MUST-HAVE

Even chefs aren’t immune to the lure of canned cranberry sauce.

“The flavor is good, and I personally like the jelly texture of it,” said Jordan Rubin of Mr. Tuna, who uses Whole Foods brand sauce, made from cranberries, sugar and lemon juice. “It’s a very simple side. I can’t do Thanksgiving without having some canned cranberries, personally.”

Rubin said he and his wife Marisa serve both fresh and canned — sliced into discs — at Thanksgiving. He grew up liking canned sauce before growing into fresh versions.

“I like both now. But when I was a kid, I wouldn’t eat a whole cranberry for the life of me. I didn’t like the skin or anything like that. For the day-after sandwich, though, you need the canned cranberry.”

Cameron Matheson said the next-day sandwich can serve as a stealthy delivery device for skeptics.

“When I’m doing leftover turkey sandwiches the following day, little do they know, I’ll use canned sauce as a spread. They don’t argue with it then,” he chuckles. “They eat it right up.”