On Cranberry Sauce

 

   Chances are pretty good that, in the next week or so, readers will find themselves seated at holiday tables and confronted with gloppy, ridged, cylinders of a lovely, red, tart substance. I speak of the traditional (at least among us trailer trash) butter dish full of canned cranberry sauce that somehow is able to escape from its container intact, year after year. So, in honor of the season, let us study Cranberries Without Underpants. 

     There are two basic types of cranberry on this planet.  The smaller cranberry, originating and still cultivated in Europe, grows on a bush, has a single seed and has been given the botanical moniker, Vaccinium oxycoccos, which comes from the Latin “vacca”, meaning cow because, apparently, cows like to eat them. Oxycoccos refers to the sharp leaves of the plant.  

     Our North American table variety is Vaccinium macrocarpon, from “macro” which means large, and “carpo” which refers to its oval leaves. This variety grows on a vine. Cranberries are one of the few crops that can survive in acidic peat soil and they need plenty of water. Think bog. Once a vine is planted it will continue to produce for many years. Some vines between 75 and 100 years old are still producing a crop.

     Native Americans have, or once had, several names for the berry. The Pequots of Massachusetts and the Lenin-Lanape tribe of New Jersey called them ibimi, bitter berry. The Algonquins in Wisconsin referred to them as atoqua. Some of the eastern tribes used the word sassamanesh.  In Canada, a nation that has worked to retain some indigenous languages, the fruit is still called atoca. 

     Tribes found cranberries not only useful for food, but also figured out that they could be utilized as medicine and in the preparation of household items. Folks mashed the cranberries and mixed them with dried meat to make pemmican that could be kept for a long period of time without spoiling. Medicine men used the berries to create a poultice for treating arrow wounds. The art crowd used them to create natural fabric dyes for clothes, blankets, baskets and rugs. At tribal feasts, Chief Pakimintzen of the Lenni-Lappes distributed cranberries as a symbol of peace. We need him to return and run for President.

     The name "cranberry" derives from the Pilgrim name for the fruit, "craneberry," so called because the small, pink blossoms that appear in Spring resemble the head and bill of a Sandhill crane. European settlers adopted the Native American uses for the fruit and found the berry a valuable bartering tool. American whalers and mariners carried cranberries, which are full of Vitamin C, on their voyages to prevent scurvy. Nutritionally, one cup of cranberries provides 14 mg of Vitamin C, 71 mg of Potassium, and only 49 calories.

     Cranberries are, indeed, a health food. As early as the 1840s, German researchers were examining the connection between European cranberry species and urinary tract infections. They found that the urine of people who ate cranberries contained a chemical called hippuric acid. This acid prevents colonies of our old pal, Escherichia coli, or E. coli, from setting up shop on the walls of our urinary systems.

     How do they grow? In 1810, Captain Henry Hall became the first to successfully cultivate cranberries. By 1871 the first association of cranberry growers in the United States had formed, and nowadays the United States harvests approximately 36,000 acres (14,570 hectares for you metric freaks) of cranberries each year.

    Cranberries don’t grow in the water, even though a common image of a bog is one with cranberries floating on top of water. But as we’ve already learned, cranberries grow on vines. Water does play an important role in the way they're harvested, though.

     The berries are harvested in the fall and early winter. (In 1789 the New Jersey legislature passed a law fining anyone 10 shillings for picking cranberries before October 10.) Wet harvesting actually begins the night before. A grower floods the dry bog with up to eighteen inches of water. The next day water reels, called "egg beaters,” loosen the berries from the vines. Cranberries contain pockets of air, so the freed berries float to the surface of the water. Then these floating berries are corralled in large booms by workers wading through the bog. 

     Fresh berries, the ones you buy in the produce aisle, are harvested using the more human-intensive, dry method. In this process, cranberry growers use a mechanical picker that looks like a large lawnmower. It has metal teeth that comb the berries off the vine and deposit them in a hopper at the back of the machine. 

     Now, back to the substance on the table. The first truly historical mention of cranberry sauce was in the field notes of General Ulysses S. Grant who ordered it served to the troops during the siege of Petersburg in 1864. It was first commercially canned in 1912 by the Cape Cod Cranberry Company, which marketed the product as "Ocean Spray Cape Cod Cranberry Sauce." A merger with other growers in 1930 evolved into the well-known Ocean Spray Co-op now famous for its cranberry products.

    But, what unique quality does a cranberry possess that allows us to cut off both ends of a can and push the mashed sauce out onto the butter dish in a perfect image of the can? We owe our perennial can-o-berries sculpture to Johnny Peg-Leg Wilson, the cranberry dribbler.

     It was Johnny who first noted a special property of the cranberry. Because of his wooden leg, he couldn't carry his berries down from the loft of his barn where he stored them. Instead, he'd pour them down the steps. He soon noticed that only the firmest and freshest berries bounced down to the bottom; the soft and bruised ones didn't make it. This led to the development of the first cranberry bounce board separator, a device still in use today to remove damaged or sub-standard berries.

    So, according to current scientific opinion (mine), this bounciness is carried into the glop-o-sauce, and it is this resilience, this Superball quality, that lets the little ridges from the can compress, then spring back into place. Ultimate confirmation of this bouncy theory is still pending because, although I have dribbled a cranberry down a Safeway aisle, I have not yet been able to prove that cranberries of just the right caliber would be lovely, festive, organic, replacements for the ammo in a paint ball guns.