Cranberries are one of those foods that make an appearance on our tables this time of year and hang around for about six weeks before retreating into the shadows.

Although we may occasionally bake with them, cranberries have limited utility because of their bitter flavor and need to be combined with sugar, as they are in holiday recipes. They’re quite high in vitamin C and, because they work well as a dried fruit, were reportedly used as an antidote for scurvy by sailors who had few other options.

The sharp taste is no accident. Cranberries are so highly acidic that, at least as the old wives tell it, they can dramatically lower the pH of urine. I would wager that most of the cranberry harvest that isn’t eaten in holiday sauce is consumed as juice by people who are warding off urinary tract infections.

Cranberries, which grow as a low vine rather than a shrub, can be harvested in this climate, but they thrive in the highly acidic and wet soil found in a bog, which makes them ill-suited for backyard gardening.

Where I live, the ground is full of limestone, which pushes the pH meter into the alkaline zone. For me to establish a crop of cranberries, I’d probably have to generously amend the soil with peat. Moreover, cranberries don’t like dry dirt even in winter. This is one item of produce that I’m happy to let the grocery store provide.

As a child I thought my mother’s cranberry relish was one of the highlights of our Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. I don’t believe she did anything but boil cranberries and sugar, but she always submerged two whole cinnamon sticks in the sauce while it steeped and cooled :quot; one for my brother and one for me.

Holiday bliss generally gave way when one or the other of us made off with more than the allotted stick. I can well imagine a therapist digging around in this memory for some sort of deep-seated familial resentment. However, over the years this became something of a game, kind of a spy vs. spy thing, and I recall on more than one occasion stealing into the refrigerator late at night to fish both cinnamon sticks out of the cranberry sauce.

There. I confessed.

The kind of cranberry sauce she made is so incredibly easy that it makes me wonder how the canned version ever developed a following. The rule-of-thumb formula is:

2 cups of water

2 cups of sugar

1 pound of berries

Place the boiling water and sugar in a saucepan and boil about 5 minutes to make a syrup. Add the berries and simmer them another 5 minutes. Remove the saucepan from the stove and skim the foam from the top of the mixture. Let it cool before you refrigerate it.

This makes a chunky sauce, more like a relish. To make jelly, you simply run the mixture through a strainer before pouring it into a mold.

In addition to cinnamon sticks, some people add whole cloves or grated orange rind to the sauce after cooking.

– When she’s not writing about foods and gardening, Gwyn Mellinger is teaching journalism at Baker University. Her phone number is (785) 594-4554.