By Bonnie Brown

Columnist

With tomorrow’s Thanksgiving feast just hours away, I wanted to share some information about the side dish of cranberry sauce/salad.  I recently subscribed to Reader’s Digest and found that it still contains lots of interesting reading.  What caught my eye in the November issue was the piece about cranberries.

Cranberries, but not cranberry sauce, were probably eaten at the first Thanksgiving, according to an article by C.A. Pinkham.  He cites that cranberries have a long history in Native American cuisine. Pemmican is a classic Native American dish made from dried meat and cranberries; it’s basically an indigenous energy bar. 

The Reader’s Digest article addresses the version of this side dish where cooks use whole berries along with various other ingredients to make a cranberry salad.  It is noted that others “swear solely by the stuff in a can.”  

At our house, I make a cranberry salad which involves cooking the cranberries, adding sugar and cherry Jello mix.  Then the cooked mixture is added to chopped apples, carrots, chopped pecans, and a pinch of salt.  My mother’s recipe called for the option of adding chopped celery but since my husband doesn’t really care for celery, it is left out.  This dish is the perfect accompaniment to our Thanksgiving dinner.  

Then there is the other crowd that swear solely by the “stuff in a can.”  You may know it as the canned cylinder of jellied cranberries which wriggles out of the can.  That process is recognized by Farmers’ Almanac as a satisfying “whoosh-plop.”  My family prefers that I maintain the integrity of the canned cranberry sauce as best as possible when I serve that version.  

According to this article on cranberries, the man who first crammed cranberries into a can was New Englander Marcus L. Urann.  He wanted to extend the berries short selling season and “developed a sauce that could be preserved in big batches and sold the jellied sauce under the name of Ocean Spray Preserving Company.” 

There are often images of farmers wading in knee-high, ruby red seas of cranberries.  However, cranberries do not grow in water.  They have air pockets that allow them to float.  According to Emily Tyra’s writing, the growers flood the bog the night before the berries are harvested.  Then, the next day they churn the water with giant water reels to shake the fruit from their vines.  The berries are then “wet harvested” where crews wade in and corral the berries with large brooms.  The berries are used mostly for juice drinks and sauces.  

However, some berries are “dry harvested.” In dry harvesting, the cranberries are gently “combed” off the vines and placed in burlap sacks.  The sacks are then airlifted via helicopter out of the bog and sold fresh in the produce aisle.  So, this is how I obtain my cranberries for my salad—from a plastic bag in the produce aisle.  Cranberries can be frozen for use at a later date.  

What struck me about the process is the fact that there are about 200 cranberries squeezed into each can of sauce.  How’s that for eating healthy when you aren’t even aware of the fruit you’ve consumed?  

So, whether your cranberries are served up in a salad containing cherry Jello, carrots, apples, and pecans or simply comes from the can in a “whoosh-plop” method, share your newly acquired knowledge of cranberry cultivation and harvesting with your dinner guests this Thanksgiving.  They will think you are brilliant!