Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [115]
But that isn’t how they harvest at Cranberry Hill. Which is, of course, one reason that I’m there: Twain never ate a wet-harvested cranberry. Neither have you, at least in the literal sense of cooking or eating whole berries; cranberries have to be thoroughly dry to be packed and shipped, which wet harvesting obviously doesn’t permit. Berries scooped up during wet harvest—over 90 percent of the crop—are all destined for quick processing into sauce, chutney, and of course into juice. But in 1879, when Twain wrote “cranberry sauce” on his menu, canned sauce was still nine years away from being invented in Maine; all his cranberry sauce came from berries picked with fingers or scoops.
The other (and, it turns out, related) reason for my visit is that Cranberry Hill is entirely organic. Kristine and Robert aren’t altogether happy about the fact that their fruit is dry-harvested, then sold fresh and direct to the customer—wet harvesting is easier, more economical, and recovers a higher percentage of the berries. But the major distribution chains (especially the giant Ocean Spray and Northland cooperatives) are set up to handle conventionally grown fruit: typically, conventional growers turn to middleman handlers to process the crop, which is then sold through the co-ops. A handler who processes conventional berries has to clean off all his equipment before working with organic fruit—an impossibly slow process, given how fast wet-harvested berries will rot. So, though there’s undoubtedly demand for organic sauce and juice, the distribution chain just isn’t there. Growing organic means that the Keeses have to sell the berries themselves, as whole fruit, and selling whole fruit means dry harvesting.
Even if the Keeses didn’t dry-harvest, I’d be curious about how they’ve managed to succeed. Cranberry cultivation has become incredibly productive; in 2002 the Wisconsin growers averaged over two hundred hundred-pound barrels per acre of bog, as opposed to fifteen per acre a century before. But it’s also, historically, been hugely dependent on chemical pesticides and herbicides (they are, after all, growing in bogs). I’m not always reflexively opposed to the use of conventional farming methods, and I take the views of conventional growers—several of whom outright rejected the notion of abandoning herbicides—seriously. Still, cranberries often grow on land sensitive enough that it reverts into protected wetland if left fallow for even five years; this seems like a case where you’d want to limit chemicals as much as possible. What, I wonder, stops people from making the transition to organic? And what’s at stake when they try?
When cranberry farming began in the 1820s, the bogs of south-eastern Massachusetts were valued mostly for their iron. Bog iron is formed by bacteria that cause the natural iron in water to settle out; decades of dredging for the deposits (used, among other things, to make cannonballs) left the area with hundreds of shallow, irregular quadrangles cut into the marshes. When the market for cranberries began expanding in the 1830s, a sea captain who had a regular crew and some extra capital was in a perfect position to buy bog land on the cheap; many of the first cranberry growers were sailors. The connection was so strong that after the Civil War, when the advent of railroads and steel-hulled steamers left captains of the old wooden schooners casting about for new careers, cranberries “may have provided the economic salvation” of heavily nautical Cape Cod. Some older bogs are still divided into one-sixty-fourth ownership shares, mirroring the division of nineteenth-century ships.
Robert and Kristine fit comfortably into the tradition. When they bought the property in 1988, Robert worked as a scalloper; cranberry farming was a hobby that let the couple maintain the bogs on their beautiful Plymouth land. Just a few years later, the Massachusetts scallop fishery collapsed—scallops scarce, fishing grounds closed—which seemed to put an end to the Keeses’ cranberrying