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Cranberry sauce is a sauce or relish made out of cranberries. There are differences in flavor depending on the geography of where the sauce is made: in Europe it is generally slightly sour-tasting, while in North America it is sweetened, sometimes with cinnamon.

The most basic cranberry sauce consists of cranberries boiled in sugar water until the berries' skins pop and the mixture thickens. Some recipes include other ingredients such as orange juice or zest and flavorings such as cinnamon.

Cranberry sauce is often eaten in conjunction with turkey for Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner in the US, and it is only rarely eaten in other contexts. Despite being called a sauce, cranberry sauce is most often consumed as a food itself, not as a garnish for other food items.

Commercial cranberry sauce may be condensed or jellied and thus shaped like a cylinder due to the shape of steel cans that often contain the sauce, or it may be loose and uncondensed. Some commercial brands of cranberry sauce may not be appropriate for vegetarians as they may contain gelatin.

John Lennon repeated the words Cranberry sauce (rather than the often-rumored "I buried Paul") at the end of the song Strawberry Fields Forever, a fact that Lennon confirmed in a 1980 interview. He stated it was a kind of icing on the cake of the weirdness of song, where anything he might have imagined saying would have been appropriate.

Comedian Neil Hamburger, performing to hostile crowds on Tenacious D's 2006 world tour, would not leave the stage of large venues such as Madison Square Garden until he had gotten the entire audience to chant the phrase cranberry sauce several times.

• The strength of cranberry sauce

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