| Follow the Bouncing Cranberry | |
by Judy Sobeloff, from the December 2006 newsletter
“Eat one, Mama! Mama, open your mouth! Mama, do you want a ‘candy-cookie?’” my two-and-a-half-year-old entreated me many times daily until the bag of fresh cranberries was gone. Never mind that, according to cookbook author Mark Bittman, cranberries are “among the only berries that cannot be eaten out of hand.” Benji never tired of eating them straight from the bag or emptying them into cups and dumping them all over the floor. Certainly he never tired of feeding them to me.
As his vision for his installation piece expanded, he brought in rosehips and other red berries from our yard, added raspberries from the freezer, affixing them not just to the floor but to the walls, until our kitchen resembled a culinary measles attack. Later I read that another name for the cranberry is bounceberry, as fresh ones bounce when dropped. Benji, of course, had long since discovered this.
Along with the blueberry and the Concord grape, cranberries are one of only three commercially important fruits native to North America. The only berry that can be kept throughout the winter, cranberries were used as a preservative by Native Americans, who pounded the berries into a paste which they mixed with dried meat. They used cranberries for medicinal purposes as well, brewing them into a mixture to draw poison from arrow wounds (foodreference.com). There is no direct evidence that they brought cranberries to the Thanksgiving meal with the Pilgrims in 1621.
The official state berry of Massachusetts, cranberries grow on vines in boggy areas and were first cultivated in Massachusetts in 1816. The berries were named cranberry because the plant’s flowers dip down, resembling the head of a crane. Indeed cranes eat cranberries and live in the bogs where cranberries grow.
Currently about half the cranberries produced in the U.S. are grown in Wisconsin, about one-third in Massachusetts, with most of the remainder grown in New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington.
My own family’s lore includes the story of my father as a boy in Michigan diving beneath the ice of a frozen bog to get cranberries, a legend which has never been verified.
Locally, some may have heard rumors of a mythical cranberry bog north of here—located through a wardrobe, I believe. Those who’ve lived to tell the tale report having hiked and canoed for miles to reach this bog, then balancing precariously on sodden, shifting peat while scooping out boatloads of berries.
Scoops, wooden baskets with wooden teeth, were introduced as a picking method in the 1850s, though women were not allowed to use these until the 1930s. Currently, commercial bogs are kept dry and then flooded at harvest time. Machines shake the vines and then skim off the loose berries, which are then bounced down a stair-stepped processor to separate out the fresh ones. Because picking by machine damages the berries, these berries must be processed into juice, sauce, or jelly; berries sold whole must be picked by hand. There are 4,400 cranberries in one gallon of cranberry juice.
Like people, fresh cranberries are almost 90 percent water, which accounts for the bouncing. Because of this high water content, cooks are advised not to thaw frozen cranberries before cooking. For those who prefer not to bounce their berries down their stairs, cranberries will float in water when fresh. When cooking, cook only until they pop to avoid bitterness.
To give Benji more options, we made Cranberry Smoothies and two sauce recipes recommended by National Public Radio’s Susan Stamberg: Mama Stamberg’s Cranberry Relish and Garlicky Cranberry Chutney. As it turned out, we used horseradish sauce rather than pure horseradish in the relish, which may account for its tasting, as Fred put it, like “cranberry tartar sauce, sweet and rich and bad for you.”
With the cranberry smoothie eerily resembling the relish, it was perhaps the tastier and the less sweet. The chutney, however, was what pulled Fred from his relish-induced slump. “It’s pungent and gingery and good. Wow! Not for the timid.” As he dipped into a second helping, he could be heard muttering the “Diving Beetle’s Food-Sharing Rules:” “Mine! All mine! ... If I return and you have taken it, you are mine!”
Cranberry Smoothie (From www.state.nj.us/hangout_nj)
1 very ripe banana
1 cup fresh cranberries
1 cup milk
3 ice cubes
Put in a blender and mix until smooth. Makes 2 cups.
Mama Stamberg’s Cranberry Relish (Adapted from www.npr.org)
2 cups raw cranberries
1 small onion
½ cup sugar
¾ cup sour cream
2 Tbsp. red horseradish
Grind the cranberries and onion together. Add remaining ingredients and mix. Put in a plastic container and freeze. The morning or night before serving, move the container from the freezer to the refrigerator compartment to thaw (it should still have some little icy slivers left). The relish will be thick, creamy, and shocking pink, (OK, Pepto Bismol pink). Makes 1-1/2 pints.
Garlicky Cranberry Chutney
(From Madhur Jaffrey’s Cookbook: Easy East/West Menus for Family
and Friends)
1-inch fresh ginger
3 cloves finely chopped garlic
½ cup apple cider vinegar
4 Tbsp. sugar
1/8 tsp. cayenne pepper
1 lb. can cranberry sauce with berries
½ tsp. salt or less
Ground black pepper
Cut ginger into paper-thin slices. Stack them together and cut into really thin slivers. Combine ginger, garlic, vinegar, sugar, and cayenne in a small pot. Bring to a simmer. Simmer on medium flame about 15 minutes or until there are about 4 Tbsp. liquid left. Add can of cranberry sauce, salt and pepper. Mix and bring to a simmer. Cool, store, and refrigerate. It will keep for several days.
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