Gardening: Cranberries in the spotlight on Thanksgiving table
Our Thanksgiving dinners are often all about tradition. Family traditions centered around whose recipe for the green bean casserole will be featured. Is it corn bread or bread stuffing? Do the mashed potatoes have sour cream in them or not. And last but not least, which recipe for cranberry relish are we having? Yes cranberries; that tart fruit that finds its way into several beloved Thanksgiving dishes and as a garnish for the day-after turkey sandwiches. Given its history, I think it deserves a more prominent place at our celebration.
Cranberries were a part of the first Thanksgiving celebrated between the colonists and the Native Americans at Plymouth in what became Massachusetts. At that celebration, the local tribes shared their berries, corn, squash and meat with the settlers who were short on rations and hadn’t yet learned to plant crops in their new land. The Algonquin, Chippewa, Cree, Wampanoag and Lenni-Lenape people had long used the berry as food, medicine, a dye plant and its leaves as a form of tobacco for smoking. The Algonquin people called it sassamenesh while the Wampanoag and Lenni-Lenape called it ibimi both of which translated literally as “bitter fruit” or “sour berries.” Just taste a raw cranberry and you will fully understand the truth to the name.
Probably the most important food the native people used the cranberry for was in the making of pemmican. Dried deer meat was pounded together with fat and dried cranberries to make a highly nutritious and long lasting cake that saw the Indians through the winter and on long journeys. Some would say it was the original energy bar. The Chippewa and Iroquois people also used cranberries for a wide variety of medicines to treat fevers and stomach cramps, as a laxative and as a blood purifier. Some tribes would boil the berries to make a red dye that would be used to dye porcupine quills used to decorate clothing and make jewelry.
The Indians would harvest the berries in the fall from long woody vines that grew in sandy, boggy areas along the coast of Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey and as far west as Wisconsin. Today the berries also are grown in the coastal areas of Washington, Oregon and southwestern British Columbia. Commercial growers plant the vines in sandy artificial bogs and leave them to grow for the summer. In the fall, the bogs are flooded and a machine called a beater gently separates the berries and they float to the surface of the water where they are easily gathered. In 2012, Oregon and Washington’s cranberry crop was valued at more than $25 million. Yes, the cranberry farmers in the television ads are for real.
Like the Indians before us, modern society has found that cranberries have a number of medicinal properties. They are high in Vitamin C which helped prevent scurvy for sailors in the 1800s, and with the help of modern chemistry were found to be full of antioxidants.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
Pat Munts is co-author, with Susan Mulvihill, of the “Northwest Gardener’s Handbook.” Munts can be reached at pat@ inlandnwgardening.com.