RIVER CITY JOURNAL: DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO FIND A WORD TO RHYME WITH RELISH?

The cranberry kind, that is. After being mixed with the proper ingredients, the cranberry becomes a noble food.

Over the years, as regular readers will recall, I have extolled various foods: noble cinnamon rolls, noble fruitcakes and, of course, noble tomatoes.

Each of these delicacies, which I classify as being in the noble food group, has its own virtues. You either know what they are by now, or you have different tastes. That's OK. You can like fish pie if you want. Heck, I just read about a popular chain of Mexican restaurants that closed in St. Louis to the dismay of loyal customers. It was famous for fish tacos. Does that tell you anything about life in the big city?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against fish. It's hard to be against Friday-night-all-you-can-eat-fried-catfish-filets in this part of the country.

(You probably recall that I have declared the No. 1 participation sport in River City to be All You Can Eat Buffets, and Friday night seems to be AYCE prime time.)

There are, of course, other goodies in the noble food group. With Thanksgiving coming up, a lot of traditional foods will get plenty of attention. Take turkey, for example. Does anyone eat dark meat anymore? It's hard to find a turkey these days that hasn't been genetically bred to be all white meat.

And deep-fried turkey. There's a treat those rascally Indians around Plymouth kept secret from the Pilgrims.

The potato -- mashed white or candied yam -- will naturally get its due.

Dressing will be prominent on Thanksgiving Day. No, I mean the kind you eat.

And pumpkin pie, although I personally don't see anything wrong with apple, cherry, pecan and chocolate pie on Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims would have liked some variety, I'm pretty sure.

But today, gentle reader, I want to draw your attention to the noble food of the season: the cranberry.

To be honest, I don't know much about cranberries. Until I was an adult, I thought cranberries were manufactured by Jell-O as a Thanksgiving specialty item that could be coaxed out of a can and festively sliced into round slabs for the big meal.

It came a quite a shock, then, to learn that cranberries grow mostly around where those Pilgrims were, usually in mud holes which the natives called bogs, and the name stuck.

A raw cranberry by itself, just in case you've never been brave enough to try this on your own, is pretty doggone awful. That's why you never see a heaping bowl of fresh cranberries on the Thanksgiving dinner table.

Somewhere along the line, someone figured out you could mix chopped-up cranberries with other things, and the result would taste pretty good. Thanks -- once again -- to the Jell-O folks, chopped cranberries and strawberry Jell-O make a colorful addition to a meal that would otherwise be downright bland: white-meat turkey, white mashed potatoes, white gravy and white dressing that turns khaki when it's baked. Therefore, that splash of crimson has usually served little more than to break the monotony.

"You mean we're supposed to eat that stuff?" is a comment that is heard at least once at every Thanksgiving dinner.

("That stuff," by the way, is a universal code for icky food. Ask any 8-year-old.)

I don't know who did it first -- like I said, I don't know my cranberries -- but someone came along and tried to give cranberries a good name. To do that, there had to be a lot more than strawberry Jell-O in the mixture. How about chopped apples? And walnuts?

Now you're talking about a holiday tradition that is elevated to noble status.

What's it called? Cranberry salad? Cranberry mix? Cranberry relish?

Who cares?

This cranberry stuff is, in a sea of steroidal white meat and stale bread soaked in chicken broth with giblets (a fancy name for pieces-parts you don't want to know about), something to give thanks for.

There you have it. The noble cranberry, which, by the time you get it at Thanksgiving dinner, is pretty much camouflaged and safe to eat.

Thank you, whoever dreamed up cranberry relish. Your birthday ought to be a national holiday.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.