Massachusetts Cranberry Culture: A History from Bog to Table
147
Massachusetts Cranberry Culture: A History from Bog to Table
147eBook
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Overview
New Englanders know that cranberries are not for holidays alone. For centuries, this tart fruit—a staple in the Yankee diet since before it was domesticated—has reigned over the cranberry heartland of Barnstable and Plymouth Counties, Massachusetts. Dozens of recipes that utilize the “humble fruit” have risen up over the years, the most popular being cranberry sauce, which one imaginative New Englander paired with lobster. The popularity of the berry exploded in the 1840s, and despite occasional setbacks such as the great pesticide scare of 1959, demand continues to rise to this day. Authors Robert S. Cox and Jacob Walker trace the evolution of cranberry culture in the Bay State, exploring the delectable history of this quintessential New England industry.
Includes photos!
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781614236764 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arcadia Publishing SC |
| Publication date: | 01/23/2019 |
| Series: | American Palate |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 147 |
| Sales rank: | 409,497 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Deep Time and Low-Hanging Fruit
William Denton believed that the history of the world could be read in a grain of sand. Literally. Starting with the everyday observation that light reflects off objects onto other objects, Denton theorized that the world could act like a giant all-seeing camera and the Earth's surface like a great sheet of photographic film. As events transpired, he argued, light was cast all around, reflecting and refracting, exposing the landscape wherever it came into contact. All that was required, he reasoned, was a suitable method for developing that film — along with patience, suffering patience — to enable us to witness firsthand every act, every scene and the life of every being that has ever been. Every grain of sand would become a perfect snapshot of the past, the images burned not just on the surface but deep within, "only waiting for a suitable application to reveal themselves to the inquiring gaze." How did humans evolve, one might ask, and what killed off the dinosaurs? Pick up a rock, Denton said; develop the image, and the results would be there to be seen as clear as day. How did a trilobite swim or glaciers flow or nations first emerge? The facts were written in stone and held there "with astonishing tenacity" for all time.
And here was Denton's singular contribution to geological science. Part longhaired poet and serial self-publisher, part radical reformer and Spiritualist, Denton refused to be shackled by the conventions of ordinary chemistry when seeking a method for developing these rocky pictures. Clairvoyance would light the way. With his wife, Elizabeth, and sister, Annie Cridge (both Spiritualist mediums), Denton spent months communing with the natural world, psychically connecting with rocks and stones to reveal a grand history of volcanic eruptions, seismic tremors and upheavals in the lives of countless plants and animals. While other scientists labored to reconstruct the past through painstaking analysis of imperfect remains, Denton witnessed it all firsthand with photographic precision. He had discovered memory made perfect.
Let us admit it up front: the man was eccentric. Few geologists then or now accepted Denton's discoveries at face value, and fewer still adopted his methods. By few, I mean none. Yet as eccentric as he was, Denton got one thing right. Here in New England, in the heartland of cranberry culture and Denton's adopted home, the landscape is self- remembering. The gentle hills of New England, as the saying goes, have fond memories of once being mountains, mountains that were thrust up to Himalayan heights 400 million years ago when North America collided with Africa and Europe. The hills still recall the sublime violence of those events in layer upon layer of twisted rock folded up like ribbon candy, and they commemorate the orogenic consequences in miles-thick sediments shed from the highlands onto mudflats and vast plains where dinosaurs roamed and the flowering plants first evolved and where humans came in colors. The long, straight valley of the Connecticut River is a memorial too, the northernmost of the rift valleys that once gashed the continent from Virginia to Vermont. An aulacogen, geologists call it, where the crust thinned as the continents pulled apart 200 million years ago and where the new continents almost, but never quite, split in two. All it takes is a suitable method to read the land, as Denton might have said, and patience, steady patience.
New England remembers itself in herds of drumlins and eskers, kettles and kames that wander its map and in a landscape sculpted from mountainous remains by years of glacial action. We may not be eyewitnesses to the great North American ice sheet like Denton, but we, too, can read evidence in the land to see tongues of ice flowing far out onto the continental shelf, leaving behind the quirks and coves that spell our shore. Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard and Long Island are little more than heaps of debris bulldozed out at the glacial front, the detritus of dirty ice. Buzzard's Bay and the famous flexing arm of Cape Cod are the daughters of a mile-thick sheet of ice carving and plucking and scouring and eroding the rock beneath. The Cape is all hummocks and swales, not peaks and valleys, and everywhere there is sand and marsh and swamp. Since the glaciers at last receded and unburdened New England of their enormous weight, the land has rebounded upward, leaving earthquakes behind to toll in their memory. There are memorials everywhere to our days at the glacial front, from the fossil mastodon that the arch-Puritan Cotton Mather once described as a giant drowned in the Great Flood to the supernumerary rocks that dent our plows and the lonely reptiles and amphibians that call our region home. That New England ekes by with barely fourteen native species of snakes, ten frogs and no lizards at all speaks volumes about how our cold-blooded cousins remember the ice age — a hard and shivering time — and hints at how long it takes to slither back home from the South, where they sought refuge and solace.
Famously, of course, New Englanders have memories as long as the landscape. Twenty years in a New England village is barely an introduction, not enough to forge a native, and the woods surrounding our villages are alive with memorials to natives past. In corners overgrown and abandoned, the past can be traced through odd pathways overcome by new green growth and by the sudden appearance of a plot of straying headstones, carved from slates and marbles that were themselves the product of millions of years of mountain building. Nearly everywhere, fieldstone walls etch spines on the rolling hills — glacial wanderers as much as our snakes. They are reminders that today's thickets of trees were once working fields and pastures separating gentle sheep on the one side from the wild on the other, our modern woods a distant echo of another time, primeval and foreign but so alike. At sea or on shore, in the forest, soil and rocks, New England remembers the story of its past in its mortal remains, each generation past laying claim on the next.
Cranberry Memories
When the Pilgrims first set foot on Cape Cod, even before they saw Plymouth Rock, they may well have stepped on the American cranberry. That they noticed seems doubtful. For all its tasty charms, the cranberry is hardly the sort to attract attention. It is nothing but "a small trayling Plant," a humble vine "that grows in Salt Marshes that are over-grown with Moss," according to the colonial promoter John Josselyn in 1672, neither showy nor self-promoting. "The tender Branches (which are reddish)," Josselyn wrote,
run out in great length, lying flat on the ground, where at distances, they take Root, over-spreading sometimes half a score Acres, sometimes in small patches of about a Rood or the like; the Leaves are like Box, but greener, thick and glistering; the Blossoms are very like the Flowers of our English Night Shade, after which succeed the Berries, hanging by long small foot stalks, no bigger than a hair; at first they are of a pale yellow Colour, afterwards red, and as big as a Cherry; some perfectly round, others Oval, all of them hollow, of a sower astringent taste; they are ripe in August and September.
This is no extrovert. Even the first historian of the American cranberry and one of its greatest promoters, Benjamin Eastwood, called the wild cranberry a "simple, insignificant-looking plant," a "stunted, barren thing" with fruit bearing a flavor that he fumbled to call "austere." Barely rising a few inches above the boggy surface, these "puny progenitors" of today's puny vines got that way through a long history of evolutionary adaptation, and like Denton's stones, they remember every twist and turn.
The biologist Leigh Van Valen once likened the evolutionary process to the chess game played by the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, in which the players are always running just to stay in place. Competitors and the environment are dynamic things, highly so, always convulsing and shifting, always requiring change in response, merely to stay alive. There is no rest in this Red Queen world, no calm and no perfection. All is flux and turmoil. Fluffy bunnies never have steel talons, however much they would help them survive; instead, evolutionary change builds on what a species brings to the table, trading off between competing demands for survival, adjusting, adapting and recycling just enough to survive for another generation. Imperfection becomes the very soul of evolution, though over time, for a time, organisms like the cranberry may hone in on a niche where plant and animal, land and climate, are wondrously attuned, connected to one another at the deepest level of life itself.
Known scientifically as Vaccinium macrocarpon, the American cranberry is a member of the large and diverse family of heath plants, the Ericaceae, and a close relative of blueberries and huckleberries, as well as an improbable assortment of bilberries, whortleberries, farkleberries, moorberies, cowberries, foxberries, partridgeberries and dangleberries. In fact, the American cranberry is only one of several plants to earn the name cranberry, all red-fruited members of the genus Vaccinium. In New England alone, one finds the European or small cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccus) growing wild, as well as the lingonberry or mountain cranberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea). European colonists soon discovered that the American cranberry could be found all over Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth Colonies, in the peatlands of Cape Cod, at Gay Head on Martha's Vineyard, in the marshy meadows that track the colonies' river systems and especially in the windswept sandy soils near the shore. Then and now, however, it ranged even more widely. From the Canadian Maritimes and Labrador in the north, the wild American cranberry ranges westward to Wisconsin and Minnesota and all the way down to West Virginia and North Carolina, where it clings to life in small populations at higher (and cooler) elevations, left stranded there, perhaps, when the climate began warming at the end of the last ice age.
The European or small cranberry is more adventurous still, having a higher tolerance for cold than its larger cousin. A true citizen of the world, or least the part of it that encompasses temperate, subarctic and alpine habitats, the European cranberry is known by as many common names in as many cultures and languages as inhabit its vast domain. The mountain cranberry tolerates still colder and drier regions, preferring rocky banks to the wetlands favored by Americans. All three cranberries (and there are others) have been gathered wild for centuries wherever they grew, and all are eaten gladly. The small cranberry may be smaller and less tasty than the American, at least according to some berryphiles, but it could be found on British and European tables long before the Puritans saw our shores, and for just as long the lingonberry has been prized in Russia and Scandinavia for the tart kick it imparts. Rumors that a Swedish retailer has asked for the lingonberry to be reclassified as Vaccinium vitis-ikea appear to be unfounded. At the northern reaches of its distribution, populations of the American cranberry may converge on the southern reaches of the small cranberry, and where the two converge, hybrids follow.
Well attuned to a Spartan life; the American cranberry is just the sort of fruit to make a stingy New Englander proud, making do with little and making little show of it. The plant itself is a long, trailing vine composed of two basic parts: the runners (the vines that hug the ground) and the upright shoots (called, appropriately, uprights; these are covered with dark green glossy foliage and with flowers and berries in season). When left to their own devices, the runners might be as long as six feet and create a dense, seemingly impenetrable mat over the ground, but the uprights scrape the sky at only a few inches. Even at that minimal height, they color the ground to match the time of year. As they enter their dormancy during the late fall and winter, the leaves acquire a ruddy burgundy to match the mood, greening up in the warmth of early spring and the lengthening days. When the blossoms arrive in June, the fields take on shades of whitish pink, with the fruits adding sparks of brilliant reds, yellow-whites and bruise-blacks a few weeks later.
Large, uncultivated stands of cranberry are now relatively rare in New England, but patches can still be found in "dune bogs" on Cape Cod, where the vines nestle in the low areas between coastal sand dunes. Although capable of growing in a wide range of soils, the American cranberry is associated in most people's minds with one particular environment: bogs (or what are commonly called bogs). In the cranberry heartland of Barnstable and Plymouth Counties, Massachusetts, the receding glaciers flushed out a steady stream of organic debris that settled into the countless kettles and dips in the land and in poorly drained pockets underlain by nearly impermeable layers of silt and clay. Stagnant and moldering, the organic matter decayed slowly, devouring oxygen from the water column and eventually forming deposits of peat, often considered the ideal subfloor for a cranberry patch.
As much as peat bogs make for a cranberry heaven, bogs are hardly for everyone; in fact, they are not for the casual wanderer at all and certainly not for the weak of will. By definition bogs are wet — often very wet — the water table sitting at or very near the surface. The water itself is often depleted of oxygen, low in nutrients and high in a natural acidity — not promising conditions for the well being of most plants or animals. Making matters worse for any plant with aspirations to height, the bog's surface can be soft and unstable, creating a weak and unpredictable base, and of course plants cannot easily move once they have settled in — other than to fall down, that is. It takes a specialist to call a bog home.
The plants that set up in bogs simply have to adapt. Some, like bladderworts, do well thanks to air-filled spaces that buoy them up in the water, while others, like water lilies or pondweeds, have long, thin roots that snake down to the peat beneath. The surfeit of water — murky, slow-moving water, starved of oxygen — can make it difficult for plant roots to breathe, so some sedges handle the challenge by growing roots every year in only the shallow topmost layer of muck, where a little oxygen can be found, while the northern white cedar, speckled alder and various willows grow special roots above the waters' rise. To make up for the poverty of nutrients, pitcher plants and their ilk famously resort to carnivory — a vegan's true revenge — trapping insects and other small, unfortunate animals to extract the nutrients that the water does not provide.
A handful of tree species make their home under boggy conditions, including the red maple, silver maple and northern white cedar, their shallow roots spreading over a wide area in search of a firm foundation. Shallow roots may seem counterproductive, since they mean the trees can easily be blown over, but these species work around the problem by cooperating, growing in dense groves where roots become so entangled that even heavy winds and driving rain will not bring them all down. There is safety in numbers when the winds blow. As many New Englanders can attest, when a red maple does fall, it reveals its true determination to live by sprouting back up again, placing the maple somewhere on the scale between heroically persistent and annoyingly stubborn. Some trees, like the black spruce and tamarack, simply set their sights lower, letting their taller neighbors take the brunt of the wind, but even these species have special adaptations to handle the challenges of the bog. Black spruce, for example, have roots shaped like I-beams, giving them unusual strength for their size.
All over the peatlands, low and unassuming plants and shrubs predominate. An old joke asks: what should you do if you get lost in a peatland? Stand up. Shrubs with homely names and hardy dispositions — like Labrador tea, sheep laurel, bog laurel, bog rosemary, leatherleaf, creeping snowberry and cranberries — all stay low to the ground, away from the worst of the wind, and many have thick and leathery leaves that resist drying out and are tough enough to fend off damaging ice, not to mention damaging herbivores. Their roots and rhizomes may grow so thickly together that they form a dense, spongy mat that may inadvertently prevent moose and deer, and even the occasional human being, from sinking into the wet mess beneath. This unintended consequence is our felicity.
Even at the finest level, cranberries are well adapted to thrive in wet, low-nutrient conditions. The underside of cranberry leaves are covered with a huge number of "stomata," special structures that assist the plant in regulating its most basic life functions by opening or closing pores depending on environmental conditions. In the light of day, stomata open wide to allow for the exchange of carbon dioxide, closing down in darkness to prevent excessive water loss. Cranberries check in with an average of 632 stomata per square millimeter of leaf — exceptionally high, even for a plant that lives under very wet conditions — but the guard cells of these stomata are no paragons of efficiency, adjusting poorly to changes in light, temperature and humidity. Imperfection is the soul of evolution.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Massachusetts Cranberry Culture"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Robert S. Cox and Jacob Walker.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction,
1. Deep Time and Low-Hanging Fruit,
2. Cranberries at the Table,
3. From Vine to Factory,
4. Working Cranberries,
5. Cranberry Work,
6. Fallout,
Epilogue,
Bibliography,
About the Authors,
Customer Reviews
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