Swedish-American Crossover Christmas Cranberry Sauce

My first meeting with cranberries was when I lived in the US for a year as a high school exchange student. I had cranberry juice, cranberry bread, cranberry muffins, and of course, cranberry sauce. I loved it all. We didn't get cranberries in Sweden, at least where I lived. But a few years later, you could finally get Ocean Spray cranberry juice in regular grocery stores (maybe the Sex & the City Cosmopolitan effect), and more and more recipes using cranberries, especially dried ones, showed up. Fresh cranberries are still kind of hard to get hold of, so I was very happy when I found them in our small, student-oriented neighborhood store.

Most of the cranberries went into a rye sourdough fruit and nut bread that Markus made, but the rest were reserved for cranberry sauce. We had a leftover bottle of glögg from last year (actually, maybe from two years ago, since we spent the run-up to last Christmas in Hong Kong) and I got the idea of making a cranberry sauce flavored with glögg. The tart cranberries and the sweet, spiced glögg worked perfectly together! The glögg I used was the low-alcohol version that you can buy in regular grocery stores here in Sweden, but using glögg with higher alcohol content will work as well! The alcohol will vaporize during the boiling.



Cranberry sauce with glögg

80 g sugar
½ dl water
3/4 dl glögg (the regular red-wine kind)
3½ dl cranberries

Bring water and sugar to a boil. Add glögg and cranberries and let simmer over low heat for about 10 minutes or until the cranberries pop.