Cranberry sauce.
Those cans of jellied cranberries that have
been served at Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and other festive Holidays
and meals. Who thought of it? Why cranberries? This thought has plagued me this
year. How tacky and unattractive it is to just scoop it out of the can and
serve it. My mother makes a cranberry salad out of oranges, walnuts and fresh
cranberries that is gloriously sweet, tangy, tart and crunchy.
My grandmother
made a frozen cranberry salad that was smooth, creamy, sweet, crunchy from
walnuts and cold in contrast to the other hot food on the table.
My favorite is
still the can of jellied goodness. I know it is a childhood comfort food memory
that says you are loved. Loved? By a can of cranberries? Yes, after hours of preparing
food that would tempt, tease and please adult palates my mother and my grandmothers
would take the extra couple of thoughts to buy, chill, open and serve canned
jellied cranberries to us children. It was more like a treat. You children are
having something special we are not getting with our meal. YES!!!! We would be
thrilled and be glad we sat at the Children’s table where the adults would not
know of our special treat.
Shall we explore the cranberry?
Cranberries are native to North America, growing
on low creeping shrubs or as vines that can grow about 7 feet long. The flowers
are dark pink with small green leaves (berries are actually larger than their
leaves). Cranberries start white and turn red as they ripen, and are incredibly
tart which overwhelms the sweetness. They
thrive in the chilly air and highly acidic soil of our northern states are
found growing in Massachusetts, New Jersey, West Virginia, Oregon and
Washington with wonderful Wisconsin producing over half of the cranberry crop
of the world.
Blueberries, and huckleberries are related to
the cranberry or craneberry as the first European settlers called them. The
flowers look like the head, bill and neck of a crane.
In England they are
called fenberries. A fen is a bog, marsh, wetland, forested swamp. Moss
commonly grows in bogs and in Canada cranberries are called mossberries. These
berries grow naturally in bogs and wetlands. Today they are cultivated by
flooding the bogs. This loosens them from the vines. The cranberry has four
small hollow chambers inside it and this causes them to be very buoyant. The berry floats to the top of the water and
can be harvested. So those guys in waders in the Ocean Spray commercial
standing in water surrounded by cranberries is how it happens.
The Algonquian people of North America had
used cranberries for food, and dyes as well as for medicine long before the
Europeans came here. They call the berries Sassamanash. In 1550 there was a reference
in a book about the people native to the New World eating cranberries. In 1633
a petticoat dyed pink with cranberry juice was sold at an auction. 30 years
later a recipe for cranberry sauce appears in a cookbook. It became very common
to create a sauce for meat from the cranberry in the soon to be country of
America.
Up until the 1930s cranberries were sold in
their raw and natural state in grocery markets and stores. Imperfect and
low-grade berries were soon being culled out and crushed, processed and canned.
In a book, New England Rarities Discovered, written
in 1672 by John Josselyn he says this of the cranberry plant: "Sauce for
the Pilgrims, cranberry or bearberry, is a small trayling plant that grows in
salt marshes that are overgrown with moss. The berries are of a pale yellow
color, afterwards red, as big as a cherry, some perfectly round, others oval,
all of them hollow with sower [sic] astringent taste; they are ripe in August
and September. They are excellent against the Scurvy. They are also good to
allay the fervor of hoof diseases. The Indians and English use them mush,
boyling [sic] them with sugar for sauce to eat with their meat; and it is a
delicate sauce, especially with roasted mutton. Some make tarts with them as
with gooseberries."
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