Before I became interested in cooking, I had no idea how weightless a cranberry would seem in the palm of my hand, or how smooth and glossy the surface of it would be. I didn’t know that once you cut into it with a knife that it was white inside, with the tiniest of seeds inside its four chambers (the hollow pockets hidden inside that allow these berries to float in a flooded bog at harvest time). Having had cranberries only in odd and canned-shaped sauce forms, or as a “juice” that was often used in my college era cocktails, I didn’t know that biting into a fresh cranberry would make my mouth pucker and my whole face react to the extreme tartness.
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