Italian style meals, sustainable gardening tips, and lots of segues in between

What is not to love about the cranberry?

The berry’s gorgeous, soothing, deep red color screams, “Hello, holiday cooking, I’m back!”. The raw fruit is acidic and bitter but is easily tamed by simmering in sugar, water, and a few other goodies to make cranberry sauce,

or by baking them in a delicious nutty pie,

or by sugaring the fruit to make a cheery holiday cake.

Cranberries always add a distinct zing that makes them an excellent addition to sweet and savory culinary dishes and, many, a pretty cocktail.

My fascination with cranberries began as a child growing up in Southeastern Massachusetts, thirty miles from the Ocean Spray Cranberry House restaurant. My mother and stepdad could not pass that restaurant without stopping for the cranberry and cheese Danish pastries. It must have been the sourness of the cranberries that made my mother crave those pastries while pregnant. She would sweetly ask one of us to drive to Wareham to pick up a few. As teens, we were happy to get in her car and go wherever she asked.

Flowers, Berries, and Bogs

Early New England settlers called the cranberry a crane berry because the fruit’s pink blossom resembled the head and bill of a Sandhill Crane. Thanks to Johnston’s Cranberry Marsh for letting me use this striking image:

Cranberry fields look like other farmlands along the roadside

until late summer when, if you look closely, you will see red berries among the green vines that carpet the ground.

In October, the bogs are flooded, the fields are raked to dislodge the fruit, and the berries float to the surface.

If you dissect a cranberry, you will see four interior chambers filled with seeds and air. These air pockets allow berries to float.

The same air pockets cause berries to bounce when dropped and to pop when cooked as the air expands. As a middle-schooler taking Home Ec, we were taught to rinse berries in a bowl of water and to discard those that didn’t float.

Horticulturally, cranberry vines are perennials, some of which have been growing for over a hundred years. Cranberry bogs consist of different layers of soil. The first layer is a naturally occurring clay base. It keeps the ground watertight. Next is a layer of gravel for drainage, followed by a layer of spongy, acidic soil called peat, and topped off with sand.

The Harvest

Originally, cranberries were picked by hand. In the 1890s, wooden scoops with built-in screens were invented and replaced hand-picking. My friend Kendra has a marvelous collection of these harvest implements.

In the 1920s, a “walk behind” mechanical harvester was invented, which is still used today for the ten percent of cranberries that are “dry-harvested.” These carefully handled cranberries are packaged in bags and sold for baking. By the way, if you are making a recipe written before 1980 that calls for “one bag of cranberries,” they mean a 16-ounce bag. In 1980, Ocean Spray switched to 12-ounce bags after a cranberry shortage. Regarding weights and measurements, a 12-ounce bag has 3½ cups of berries.

In 1960, a “wet harvesting” machine was invented. It required a foot of water to be piped into a bog to flood it.

Once flooded, a wet harvesting machine crawls over the field and dislodges berries from their vines, allowing them to float to the surface

where they can be corralled.

Next, they are “vacuumed” by growers.

Ninety percent of cranberries used for juices, dried cranberries, and canned sauces are harvested in this manner.

I am indebted to Minda Bradley for photos of her family harvesting cranberries in Kingston, MA.

Sometimes, water is piped in before a winter freeze to protect vines from the cold. As the warm weather arrives, growers drain the fields to allow vines to come out of dormancy and begin their next growing season.

Cranberry plants were traded by early colonists in exchange for goods from Europe. Sailors ate the high in vitamin C berries while crossing the sea to prevent scurvy. The plants were eventually transplanted to Europe, but soil conditions were not the same, resulting in a different acid level and flavor. Lingonberry or English moss berries are examples of the European version of cranberries.

Ocean Spray Cranberries

Grower-owned Ocean Spray is a cooperative of over 700 farming families across North America who grow over 60% of the world’s cranberries. The cooperative was started in the 1930s in Wareham, MA. It is a treat to stumble on one of these old weathered Ocean Spray signs nestled on the side of the road in Cape Cod.