My mom was a home-canner. She had a big canning pot, a pair of those jar-lifting tongs, a wide-mouth funnel and a food mill. With those tools and a box of canning jars, she would can tomatoes from the garden and we would enjoy them all year long.

Her bible in this endeavor was the “Ball Blue Book,” a publication of the Ball company, the people that make the canning jars. About the size of a magazine, the book explains why canning works and why it sometimes doesn’t.

In some foods, natural acids prohibit the growth of harmful bacteria, and a boiling water bath – heating jars filled with these acid foods in boiling water for a period of time – kills the molds and yeasts that can live in acid foods and contribute to spoilage.

With low acid foods, acids and salt must be added and much higher temperatures must be reached in order for them to be preserved safely. For that, you need steam pressure canner, something we didn’t have. So we stuck with the tomatoes.

My interest in canning grew when I discovered that it was possible — in fact, it was easy — to make jellied cranberry sauce, just like the kind in the can only without the metallic undertones.

I first tasted homemade jellied cranberry sauce that had been made by a friend’s grandmother. She would whip up a fresh batch whenever she cooked a turkey. She’d use a narrow Pyrex loaf pan as a mold. The glistening, garnet-colored jelly would sparkle like a ruby in that dish, and she’d serve the sauce in little rectangular portions that she’d sliced from the loaf.

I fell in love with this sauce, and when I later discovered a recipe for it in the “Ball Blue Book,” I was hooked.

Cranberries are high in acid and natural pectin, the stuff that makes things gel. These natural attributes, when combined with a lot of sugar and some heat, magically turn a liquid — cranberry juice and pulp — into a solid — jellied cranberry sauce.

And once you’ve tasted it, you won’t return to the can. You may add additional flavorings if you’d like — orange peel, cinnamon and a few cloves. But I like it plain, perfectly tangy and sweet, with a bit of texture from the tiny, crunchy seeds that slip through the food mill.

I like it so much that I make a lot of it, doubling or tripling the recipe then canning the sauce to give as gifts. You can use the tiny jars for your single friends, or the big jars for families. You can bring it to a potluck, or bestow a jar as a hostess gift or as a Christmas present. If you're going to eat the sauce within a week or two, you can skip the canning. Just store the jars of sauce in the refrigerator until serving.

I once went to a book-signing in Providence where Julia Child was signing copies of her latest cookbook, and I brought her a jar of my cranberry sauce. Julia seemed delighted and said she would enjoy it with her Thanksgiving turkey. I chose to believe her.

I inherited my mom’s canning equipment and her “Ball Blue Book,” a 1991 edition, and when I use them, it brings out the mad scientist in me. I will be forever amazed by what’s possible in the kitchen.

Enjoy!

Jellied Cranberry Sauce

Yield: 2 pints

4¼ cups cranberries

1¾ cups water

2 cups sugar

Wash, sort and stem the berries.

Boil the berries and water together until the skins burst. Press the mixture through a sieve or food mill. Discard the skins and add the sugar to the resulting pulp and juice. Boil almost to the jellying point. (See note.)

Pour hot sauce into hot canning jars, leaving ¼-inch head space. Screw on the lids. Process for 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath.

Jellying point: To test for the jellying point, dip a cool metal spoon into the boiling sauce mixture. Lift out a spoonful and tip the spoon so the juice drops back into the kettle. At first, the drops will be light and syrupy. Later, they’ll become larger and thicker, and will drop off the spoon two at a time. When the two drops form together and run off the spoon like a sheet or flake, the jellying point has been reached.

Original recipe from “The Ball Blue Book: The Guide to Home Canning and Freezing.” Jill Blanchette is the multiplatform production manager at The Day. Share comments or recipes with her at j.blanchette@theday.com.