Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [114]
Celebrated or challenged, Thanksgiving and the (largely invented) story of its origins were finally totally ingrained in the American consciousness. At least partially as a result, cranberries changed from being an occasionally foraged fruit into one of the major crops of both Massachusetts and New Jersey. More than a traditional New England food, cranberries were local to Plymouth itself—by 1915, Plymouth County produced 61 percent of the state’s crop, which was often sold with images of Native Americans on the label. The berries were set on the holiday table as reflexively as salt and pepper, harvested as systematically as maize.
Still, like any agriculture, cranberry cultivation can be contentious. And for a good reason: debates about how best to grow cranberries are really about how best to treat the land.
CHICKEN PIE FOR THANKSGIVING
Two chickens, three pints of cream, one pound of butter, flour enough to make a stiff crust. Cut the chicken at the joints, and cook in boiling salted water till tender.
Crust.—Three pints of cream, one heaping teaspoonful of salt, and flour to mix it hard enough to roll out easily.
Line a deep earthen dish having flaring sides with a thin layer of paste. . . . Fill the centre with the parboiled chicken. Take out some of the larger bones. Season the chicken liquor with salt and pepper, and pour it over the chicken; use enough to nearly cover. Cut the remaining quarter of butter into pieces the size of a chestnut, and put them over the meat. Roll the remainder of the crust to fit the top. Make a curving cut in the crust and turn it back, that the steam may escape. Bake three hours in a brick oven. If baked in a stove oven, put on only two rims of crust and bake two hours.—Miss A. M. Towne
—MARY JOHNSON LINCOLN, Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book, 1884
When I arrive at Cranberry Hill Farm in Plymouth, Kristine Keese greets me in a soft Polish accent: “I’m afraid you’ve arrived at a small crisis.” Just last night someone vandalized equipment and set a fire beside the bogs she farms with her husband, Robert. On top of being the kind of thing that makes you despair at humanity—vandalizing an organic cranberry bog?—this strikes me as severely ill considered. Robert’s eyes are friendly above his crazed, salt-and-pepper beard; still, you can sense how quickly they might go cold and flat. Between tasks he smokes the stub of a foul-smelling cigar that leaves him in a permanent fog; he has anchors tattooed on his shoulders. There are scorpions on his fists. If I were breaking the windows out of an excavator, stealing the gas can, and spilling the gas beside a cranberry bog and setting it afire, Robert ranks high on the list of people I wouldn’t want to see coming down the forested dirt road.
The cranberry wet harvest, when workers flood the bogs and use water-reel harvesters to flail berries from the vines, is one of the most beautiful harvests in the world. On a cloudless New England October day, the floating cranberries—swept by floating booms into a dense mat—make a study in color, standing out against the blue water as clearly as a clutch of eggs on sunlit grass. In aerial shots they seem solid enough to tiptoe across. What’s more, protecting a cranberry bog’s watershed requires three or four acres of forest for every one cultivated; at harvest time the pines are stubbornly green, the elms and maples orange and yellow and a vibrant