Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [103]
But then again, a man who complains about New England boiled dinner and red flannel hash is only worth taking so seriously. And though cranberry sauce can be stultifyingly sweet, cranberries themselves are bitter; several of their Native American names, like the Wampanoag sasemineash, simply mean “bitter (or ‘sour’) berry.” That’s probably one reason that cranberries with roast turkey are tied to Thanksgiving on a nearly genetic level; a balanced, bright, acidic cranberry sauce is the perfect foil for a rich bird with buttery stuffing and potatoes.
Cranberries are a truly traditional American food, gathered by Native Americans as far west as Minnesota, and one of the few North American berries ever cultivated commercially (the others are blueberries and Concord grapes). The story of that cultivation is unusually specific: they were first grown by Henry Hall, in 1816, near Kiah Pond in the Cape Cod town of Dennis. Compared with crops like potatoes, which were first grown somewhere in the Andean highlands sometime around 5,000 B.C., that’s truly pinpoint accuracy; and because the history is so recent, we know that the cranberries we eat today are often virtually identical to those first pulled from wild bogs and cultivated nearly two centuries ago.
Hall’s major innovation was sanding. A schooner captain, he started a saltworks on the Cape, heaping up sand alongside adjacent bogs as he went. When sand blew over the bogs’ cranberry vines, Hall expected it to smother them. Instead they thrived, their roots and uprights growing notably stronger. Sanding, whether done on winter ice or rails or even using barges, is still one of the most important techniques in the cranberry grower’s arsenal; it protects against frost and disease while also helping bog leaf litter to decompose and release nitrogen. Hall’s simple observation changed cranberries from something foraged into something farmed.
For decades, growing cranberries blurred the line between cultivation and wild harvest. Growers transplanted vines, sanded the bogs, and weeded out the competition, but their cranberries were often a single generation removed from those that had grown alongside cinnamon fern, white water lilies, and carnivorous pitcher plants. Even today, when the UMass Cranberry Station research center in Amherst has developed ultra-high-yielding hybrids, some of the most common varieties remain those carefully dug from wild bogs over a century ago. The Howes found in 1843, Early Blacks in 1852, and McFarlins in 1874 are still three of the most important cranberries and were probably the kinds eaten by Twain’s family.
As Thanksgiving changed from a largely religious occasion to a national feast, cranberries would change as well—one of the most recently wild food crops would become one of the most frequently processed, almost always encountered as canned sauce or as an ingredient in a blend of sweetened juices. But in Twain’s day, widespread processing was still a half century away; cranberries were still less a flavor than a fruit.
TO STUFF AND ROAST A TURKEY, OR FOWL
One pound soft wheat bread, 3 ounces beef suet, 3 eggs, a little sweet thyme, sweet marjoram, pepper and salt, and some add a gill of wine; fill the bird therewith and sew up, hand down to a steady solid fire, basting frequently with salt and water, and roast until a steam emits from the breast, put one third of a pound of butter into the gravy, dust flour over the bird and baste with the gravy; serve up with boiled onions and cramberry-sauce