Autumn is cranberry time in America and it has been for centuries: Native Americans along the North Atlantic coast were eating these indigenous fruits long before the Pilgrims arrived. They often consumed them in a dried fruit-nut-jerky-like mixture called pemmican. Native tribes also introduced cranberries to the colonists who came to their shores. (That’s a modern-day fave, my cranberry-apple crumble pictured above and posted here.)
By the 17th century a version of the traditional cranberry sauce we still enjoy was already being served at Colonial American tables. In a 1680 letter written to his brother back in England, Mahlon Stacy commented from the Delaware Valley: “The cranberries are much like cherries for color and bigness … an excellent sauce is made of them for venison, turkeys, and other great fowl …” Stacy’s remarks also indicate that cranberries were already being used in baked goods: “… they are better to make tarts than either gooseberries or cherries.”
Sometimes called bounce berries because they bounce when dropped, cranberries were given their modern-day name by Dutch immigrants. “Kranbeere” actually translates as “craneberry,” a reference to the fact that the nodding blooms of cranberry plants have long, thin stamens that look like cranes’ beaks.
The pics left and above show the berries at harvest time at a New Jersey cranberry farm I visited: In the left pic the berries are floating on the surface of the flooded bog, waiting to be gathered, loaded and taken to an Ocean Spray processing plant. On the right, the bogs had been flooded, and I was shooting down into water; look closely and you can see the berries still attached to the plants. At left a bog is partially flooded. The equipment shown on the bank includes a rotating reel that churns through the water and loosens the berries, which then rise and float. This wet harvest method is modern and dates to the 1960s.
Getting hungry for some cranberries? Try my Cranberry-White Chocolate Cookies
or my Cranberry-Cherry Crumb Bars. Or how about my Cranberry-Pear Muffins here?
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