Correspondent photo by ERIC STANWAY Forget the canned stuff. Serve Cranberry Orange Relish with your Thanksgiving dinner.
Cranberry Orange Relish
Correspondent photo by ERIC STANWAY Forget the canned stuff. Serve Cranberry Orange Relish with your Thanksgiving dinner.
Cranberries, along with blueberries and Concord grapes, represent one of a triad of indigenous American fruits that are commercially grown to this day.
When European settlers arrived on these shores, they discovered that the Native Americans were making good use of these berries, as food, dye and even a healing agent. The most popular use at that time was as an ingredient in a dish known as Pemmican, basically a stew of cranberries, dried deer meat and melted fat. Additionally, it was used as a salve for arrow wounds and a dye for rugs and blankets.
Although the menu of the famous three-day harvest festival held back in 1621 is lost to us, it’s entirely probable that cranberries figured highly in the festivities. The fruit was gathered as a wild vegetable for nearly 200 years before anybody figured out how to cultivate it. One of the earliest references to wild cranberries is contained in a letter from Burlington, N.J., resident Mahon Stacy, who wrote a letter to his brother in England, dated April 26, 1680:
“We have from the time called May until Michaelmas a great store of very good wild fruits as strawberries, cranberries and hurtleberries. The cranberries, much like cherries for color and bigness, may be kept until fruit comes in again. An excellent sauce is made of them for venison, turkeys and other great fowl and they are better to make tarts than either gooseberries or cherries. We have them brot to our homes by the Indians in great plenty.”
The year 1816 marked a significant change in the cranberry’s fortunes. Capt. Henry Hall, of Dennis, Mass., had been stocking his ships with the fruit for a number of years as a bulwark against scurvy. One day, he took note of the fact that wild cranberries actually grew better when sand blew over them. He promptly began transplanting his vines, fencing them in and spreading sand over them. The result was dramatic; his yield increased many times over almost overnight, and other residents of the town began copying his method. The cranberry industry was born, and thrived throughout the rest of the 19th century.
But it was a long time before cranberries would claim their place at the Thanksgiving table. Despite a proclamation by George Washington in 1789, there really wasn’t any set date for the holiday. Addressing this shortcoming fell to one Sarah Josepha Hale, a magazine editor who spent a good four decades campaigning for a day of Thanksgiving. She wrote endless editorials in Boston Ladies’ Magazine and Godey’s Lady’s Book, pushing for the holiday. Her efforts finally caught the attention of President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, who began to take it seriously. After all, the Civil War wasn’t going that well, and he needed something to buck up the Union’s morale. That year, he proclaimed a national day of Thanksgiving would be observed on the last Thursday in November.
The next year, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant cemented the connection between Thanksgiving and cranberry sauce when he ordered it served to the troops during the siege of Petersburg.
The cranberry growers began canning their goods in 1912, under the auspices of the Cape Cod Cranberry Co. Its product, marketed under the name Ocean Spray Cape Cod Cranberry Sauce, began a conglomerate that thrives to this day.
The following recipe is one I’ve made for a number of years, using wild cranberries foraged from local woods. Most people seem to really like it, although my girlfriend’s son prefers that stuff that comes out of a can with mold lines on it.
Go figure.
CRANBERRY ORANGE RELISH
Makes 12 servings.
1 pound fresh cranberries
½ cup sugar
2-3 tablespoons water
2 tangerines
1 small twig ginger, finely grated
Place cranberries in a large pan with sugar and water. Grate the skin off the tangerines, and add to the mix. Squeeze all of the juice out of the tangerines, pushing them through a sieve. Grate the ginger over the whole mix. Place on a low heat and cover. Cook until all of the cranberries have popped, about half an hour. Remove, and allow to cool. Place in freezer bags and freeze until needed.
Eric Stanway can be reached at Eric.Stanway@yahoo.com or www.Eric Stanway.com.
