Canned or cooked cranberries? That’s a good opening question on Thanksgiving when seated next to your cousin twice removed. Go ahead and ask while the dish is being passed. Hopefully you both like each other’s answer.
What version did you grow up with? Maybe you turned up your nose or shook your head with the “no way” universal food language of “please remove that red concoction from the house.”
Let’s step back a little before we pass too much judgment on this traditional holiday side dish. We all agree that cranberries look pretty; they’re shiny, red and just the right size to pop in your mouth. But a raw cranberry can be bitterly tart eaten straight up. On the bright side, as a kid when you saw the bags of cranberries show up in the grocery store, you knew Thanksgiving was getting close and Christmas was not far behind.
First, the name. The internet says “cranberry” was originally called “craneberry,” in 1647, so named after the German word kraanebere by John Eliot, a Native American missionary from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Seeing cranberries for the first time in their new country, Eliot, and perhaps other colonists, saw the resemblance of blooming cranberry flowers, petals and the stem growing on the shrub to the head, neck and bill of a crane.
Back in the day, Native Americans picked lots of cranberries. Algonquins called them sassamenesh, which translates to “sour berries.” They pounded cranberries into the first-ever energy bar, combined with dried deer meat and fat, and stored them in small animal skin sacks to last several months. Tasteeee!
Cranberries have excellent antibacterial properties and were historically used by Native Americans to make poultices for wounds, to treat stomach problems and fevers. Dyes from the red skin of the fruit were used for clothing and jewelry.
Later, when European colonists arrived, they figured out quickly that cranberries and all their vitamin C helped keep away scurvy, a disease caused by lack of vitamin C in a diet. Today, cranberry juice and tablets are often taken to prevent urinary tract infections. Cranberries are full of the chemical proanthocyanidins, which keeps bad bacteria from sticking to the surface of the tract.
(So much for passing on that dish of cranberries at Thanksgiving, right?)
The cranberry (Vaccinium macrocarpon) is native to the swamps of the Northeast. It belongs to the heather family (Ericaceae), which also includes huckleberries, blueberries and rhododendrons. The latter two and cranberries don’t grow well in the Western U.S. because of our dry, alkaline soils.
Cranberry shrubs are low-growing, woody perennials with small oval leaves on their vine-like shoots. They form dense mats from their runners, or horizontal stems that grow and root along the soil surface.
Cranberries flower dark pink from May to June, which then form berries in late September to October. The shrubs don’t constantly grow in a lake of water like the television commercials. Rather, fields are flooded for ease of harvest.
Today, five states grow the most cranberries: Wisconsin, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington.
Now for the decision. Do you prefer molded jellied cranberry? Directly out of the can, slices of this wiggly gelatinous tube slide witih simple ease onto any plate no matter how highly piled with other Thanksgiving Day tasty eats.
Or, do you prefer the stove-top cooked version of whole cranberries with cups (the number is up to you) of added sugar? The end result looks more like pie filling.
I’ll take whatever you’re serving on Thanksgiving!
