“Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... Now you tell me what you know.”
Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding
Cranberries have been around for a long time - foraged for by Arctic nomads for millennia - but there are many American growing associations who insist they originated in North America. Native Americans partook of their tartness and were good enough to share them with the starving English settlers in Massachusetts in 1620, which is likely how they came to be part of the Thanksgiving repast. Since they had not seen the fruit before, the pilgrims assumed that they were obviously from a native plant. There is a popular myth that there are three fruits native to North America – the cranberry, which is found wild in ancient Russia and Scotland, along with the Concord grape (a hybrid) and the blueberry (known to Pliny and Virgil by other names) – though the blueberry is related to the Huckleberry of which a 13,000-year-old plant lives in Pennsylvania. There are real health benefits to the cranberry: high in vitamin C, low in calories, high in fiber and potassium.
The name we use morphed from “craneberry”: the flower resembles a crane and more likely because cranes love ‘em. Native New England tribes used them to flavor their pemmican – a wonderful concoction of meat, fat, and fruit, preserved by drying, to savor through the long winter months. This was such an important food product that the North West Company and the Hudson Bay Company fought the Pemmican War, which began in 1814, ending when the HBC absorbed the NWC in 1821. Kind of jerky, huh?
Cranberry sauce is yay-high, shaped like a can.
Kevin Burke
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment