Cranberries

Every year as the calendar approaches November, plastic bags full of bright red berries begin to appear on grocer's shelves. Equally true, is that once December draws to a close, these red berries will once again disappear. While some fresh fruits, like apples, enjoy year round popularity others, like cranberries, seem to be associated mainly with a season or holiday. Cranberries' ties to Thanksgiving date back to the its beginnings when they were served alongside the wild turkey. American Indians introduced the earliest settlers to this small, hard, smooth-skinned, shiny red, round to oval-shaped wild berry that is also known by so many names. The Indians used the cranberry as both a food and a medicine. Sailors as well as settlers traveling westward used cranberries, full of Vitamin C, as a way to ward off scurvy. On long sea voyages, to keep the cranberries fresh, the sailors would store the berries in barrels full of water. Besides the Concord grape and blueberry, the cranberry is one of three fruits that are native to America. It is the fruit of a small shrub with trailing vines from genus Vaccinium that likes cold climates. It grows best in poor acid soil in flooded areas called bogs or on moors or mountainsides. Although grown throughout the world, Northern Europe and North America are best known for the cranberry. In North America, cultivated cranberries are grown mainly in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Washington and Oregon but can be found growing wild in bogs from Nova Scotia to North Carolina and westward to Michigan over to the west coasts of Oregon and Washington. Cultivating cranberries started in the early 1800s and it took many years of trial and error to discover the best techniques. Once painstakingly harvested by hand, machine methods were eventually developed to enable more cranberries to be grown with less effort. Processing of the berries involved finding an efficient method for separating the good cranberries from the bad. As good cranberries bounce and bad ones don't, a mechanical system was devised for sorting that incorporated this unusual characteristic. Before 1960 most cranberries were sold either fresh or canned (whole berry or jellied). It wasn't until the 1960s that the demand for cranberries started to exceed supply. This is when Ocean Spray introduced Cranberry Juice Cocktail. Its instant success led to other fruit combinations being developed like Cran-Raspberry. So popular are these drinks that most grown today are processed for fruit drinks. The cranberry's sour flavor means it's never eaten raw. Sugar is needed to temper its flavor.