Our Most Popular Thanksgiving Recipe of All Time

As a child of the 90s, I grew up with a very store-bought Thanksgiving. Boxed stuffing, envelopes of powdered gravy mix, and tubes of crescent rolls were all staples in the kitchen as my family prepared and hosted the holiday meal. Canned cranberry sauce, too, was an essential, both jellied (complete with ridges from the can it came in) and whole berry.

Truthfully, I assumed there wasn’t really another way to do things until I started helping my dad with the grocery shopping and noticed the bags of fresh cranberries right alongside the cans of sauce. It says a lot about the person I’ve since become that I had the instinct to spot a recipe for homemade cranberry sauce on those bags and insist that we buy a couple. That year, I made homemade cranberry sauce instead of prying open our usual can, and I never looked back.

Here at Simply Recipes, our three-ingredient recipe (two, really, if you don’t count water) is the most popular Thanksgiving recipe we’ve ever published with over 5 million clicks. And it makes sense because it’s one of the easiest on the planet—something I learned that Thanksgiving all those years ago. 

Why Cranberry Sauce Is a Forever Classic

Cranberry sauce isn’t just a nostalgic favorite for me—it’s an essential component of my holiday plate. It pairs perfectly with turkey and lends much-needed brightness, in both color and tang, to the often overly beige spread.

Most importantly, it’s the simplest Thanksgiving recipe you can make from scratch, it can be made days, weeks, or even months in advance, and is endlessly riffable. These reasons alone prove why it’s such a fan favorite on our site.

How to Make Cranberry Sauce Your Own

Our recipe is the most basic, with just cranberries, water, and sugar coming together on the stovetop to form a sweet-tart sauce but it’s truly a blank slate, allowing you to customize it to you and your family’s tastes. Here are just a few of the many ways to do just that:

• Stir in mix-ins like toasted nuts, raisins or chopped dried figs, orange zest, or ground spices like cinnamon or nutmeg.
• Reduce the sugar by up to half and/or swap in other sweeteners like brown sugar, maple syrup, or honey.
• Replace some of the water with orange juice, apple cider, or pomegranate juice.
• Add a splash of orange liquor, bourbon, rye, or port at the end for an adult spin.