Full Transcript for Cranberries

happens. These vines are classified as perennial shrubs, and it actually takes several years for a vine to mature to the point that it bears fruit. If you're used to other kinds of vining plants like squashes, this may be surprising because they have like one season, But these guys are long lived because once a vine does start to bear fruit, it will bear fruit for years. Well cared for vines last more than one hundred years. There are a number of cranberry producers that say that they have vines that are one hundred and fifty years old or more. And then cranberries, once the fruit is ready in the autumn, are harvested in two different ways. They can be picked off the vine dry, but the much more common method uses bog flooding. This has actually led to some confusion as I was doing research. Every time I went to like a cranberry producer's website, they were like, no, cranberries don't grow underwater. So clearly a lot of people think this. Cranberries do not grow in the water. They just do not. So if you thought that, it's because you see the bogs filled with water. And that's because in bog flooding, the night before the harvest, growers pump in big farms about a foot and a half of water into their bogs and let it set overnight. Smaller producers may put less water in, but the air pockets that are inside cranberries cause some of the right berries to just pop right off the vine and float to the surface on their own. But then the next day after they've sat overnight. The farmer takes a machine that's called a beater out into the bog. It has this cylindrical wheel across the front that beats the water and it combs through the vines to pull the remaining berries off. Once all of the berries have been floated, they are then corralled. They're usually like these big straps that go around them to keep them all together, and then they are shoveled onto belts or lifts that carry them upward and then dump them into a truck so that they can be carried to a processing plant. There they will be washed and prepped for the consumer market or food service supply, or they then go to an additional processing center or even within that same center to be canned or used for juice. The wet method is faster and it costs less. It requires about a quarter the number of people, and a whole bog can be harvested in less than a day, and that's why it's the most popular way to harvest them. But because it takes the whole crop of the area at once, it's likely that there are different levels of ripeness across all those berries. With dry harvesting, it is possible to pick individual berries, all of them at their peak of ripeness, although that's obviously not especially efficient. Cranberries are normally harvested from mid September to mid November, so as fresh fruit, they have a small window for consumers. Yeah, they do keep for quite a while, but in in terms of like peak of freshness, it's not that long. But the actual story of cranberries goes back way beyond recorded history. So the movements of glaciers are credited with carving out these sort of perfect areas that have a mix of sand and clay with peat and additional soil and rock debris. And this substrate, along with highly acidic soil and a high water table, creates the perfect environment for cranberry vines to thrive. Cranberry use goes back thousands of years, at least twelve thousand years that we know of. The Wampanog people reportedly started picking them that far back, both to eat and to treat ailments. And these wild cranberries, which the Wampanog called sesamunyish, were ground into a grit style food sometimes other times they were combined with dried meat and fat to make Pemmican, and that deep red color of the berries was also used by these people for dying cloth. So the cranberry is, to be clear, called other things in other areas by different Native American tribes. The Peacock called them a bimi, for example, but they were using them in very similar ways to what we described the Wampanog doing. There are also some cranberry varieties that are native to Europe, especially to around Britain and the Netherlands. So when colonists from Europe moved to North America, they were already familiar with these fruit, although they had not seen them prepared in the same way that the indigenous peoples of North America did. The colonists learned these other prep methods and also started using cranberries for juice. It's often reported that Europeans referred to the berry as a crane berry, because the flowers of the plant have a similar profile to a sandhill crane. From there, that word was eventually shortened to cranberry. Yeah, and I should say that is the story that is given for it, but maybe we don't have that well documented, and there are some arguments that it's a little bit different. In the etymology might be slightly different. The North American varieties of cranberries were already well known to European colonists and visitors to North America by the sixteen seventies. In the book New England's Rarities Discovered in Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents and Plants of that Country, which was published in sixteen seventy two and then republished in the nineteenth century, writer John Jocelyn included an entry on cranberry's which read quote cranberry or bearberry, because bears use much to feed upon them. Is a small trailing plant that grows in the salt marshes that are overgrown with moss. The tender branches, which are reddish, run out in great length, lying flat on the ground, where at distances they take root, overspreading sometimes half a score about twenty acres, sometimes in small patches of about a rude a root is roughly a quarter of an acre or the like. The leaves are like box he's referring to uxis, but greener, thick, and glistening. The blossoms are very like the flowers of our English night shade, after which succeed the berries. Hanging by long small footstalks, no bigger than a hair. At first, they are of a plain yellow color,

afterwards red and as big as a cherry. Some are perfectly round, others oval, all of them hollow, of a sour astringent taste. They are ripe in August and September. And his account also mentions that cranberries are good for scurvy and for curing fevers, and he mentioned something that sounds a lot like the cranberry sauce lots of people make today, noting that the indigenous people of the area quote use them much, boiling them with sugar for sauce to eat with their meat, and it is a delicate sauce, especially for roasted mutton. Some make tarts with them, as with gooseberries. Coming up, we're going to talk about an English naturalist and his experience with cranberries, but first we'll have a sponsor brain. So, as we said, this episode is largely about the life of the cranberry in the US, but it did also have developments in Europe. In seventeen sixty nine, English naturalist Sir Joseph Banks made a note in his travel diary, which was published posthumously as Journal of the right Honorable Sir Joseph Banks Bart KBPRS during Captain Cook's first voyage in HMS Endeavor in seventeen sixty eight seventy one to Terra del Fuego. That is a misspelling the Odahiti, New Zealand, Australia, the Dutch East Indies, et cetera. And he writes of them, quote, here are also great plenty of cranberries, both white and red arbutus rigida. The specific location that he saw these berries is actually a little unclear, because he references in this particular piece of writing that they are just outside of Cape Saint Vincent, that's in Portugal. But this chapter of his diary covers the time that the group was traveling from Rio de Genero to Tierra del Fuego. So it seems like he gets a little bit loosey goosey with the names of other places and bodies of water, because there are places in his journal where he qualifies things by saying he thinks the name he mentions is the correct one. So I believe he saw these cranberries in South America, not off the coast of Europe. In any case, these berries made an impression because over the next couple of decades, Banks actually had some cranberry seeds brought to Britain so that he could grow them himself, and while these were cultivated there, they were not ever intended for sale. This is because he was a botanist and naturalist, but it also might have been a little bit because while you can grow cranberries from seed, it is not the preferred method. It's very difficult to ensure their outcome because they have to be pollinated by local bees and their pollen is too heavy to be carried by the wind. And it is also unrealistic for someone to manually pollinate an entire vines worth of berries. So because bees are doing the work and it's local bees, this means it is very easy for cross pollination to happen, and that means it can lead to very different berries then the seed plant may have produced. So if you have a great cranberry vine and you're like, I'm going to take the seeds from this, don't count on having the same berries

at the end of that process. Propagating through cuttings from established vines is usually the preferred method. Yeah, there are some plants that people manually pollinate today, but like not with the number of flowers you would need to pollinate as like a not at scale. Right, you could do that at your house for fun, but even then getting enough that you could make anything worthwhile might be some effort. Yeah. Even as Banks was on his voyage with cook cranberries were already popular enough in England to occasionally appear in cookbooks. In seventeen sixty nine, The Experienced English Housekeeper was written by Elizabeth Raffld, and she included information about putting up cranberries for later use. Sometimes this is described as preserving them, but you'll see there wasn't really anything in the way of preserving the berries other than just storing them properly. Quote, get your cranberries when they are quite dry, put them into dry clear bottles, cork them up close, and set them in a cool, dry place. These are generally used as a garnish, and cranberries are mentioned in other cookbooks of the era, also for that purpose. North American cookbooks also included cranberry recipes in the late eighteenth century, mostly for cranberry tarts. Yeah, their tarts were also being made in England in the nineteenth century. Queen Victoria became quite fond of cranberry tarts. Apparently about a decade after Sir Joseph Banks was working on growing cranberry in the eighteen teens, in the US, North America got its first cultivated cranberry bed versus wildly growing. This is credited to Captain Henry Hall. Hall had land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in the town of Dennis, and one day he noticed that he had wild cranberry vines growing there. That winter of eighteen twelve, in anticipation of particularly brutal low temperatures that had been predicted, Hall cut down a lot of trees from his land that had been growing in between his natural cranberry bog and the shoreline. Without the natural windbreak of those trees. Over the winter, sand from the shore got blown all over his cranberry bog, and Hall's initial assessment was that this had probably ruined his cranberries. But then the vines came back a few months later and they were more vigorous than ever, and these renewed vines were also naturally more resistant to pests. Hall came to the conclusion that the addition of the extra sand had actually been good for the plants, and ongoing experiments proved that out. He was starting to cultivate cranberries with the intent that they could bring in money, something that had not really been done before, and soon other people in Dennis started doing the same, as cape Cod has exceptionally good conditions for the crop. As the strongest and most productive plants were selected by Hall and others for transplanting to controlled bogs, and they continued to be tended and harvested. The prosperous plants started to set the standard for North American cranberry vines. The

Vaccinium macrocarbon, a native North American variety, has become the most common and the one that's normally grown as a crop. The cranberry industry grew quickly and there was an interesting cycle to its cultivation in New England coastal areas. So we mentioned earlier that other people hundreds of years prior to this were noting that these were good for scurvy. It became common knowledge that cranberry's, which are rich and vitamin C, were very good for long voyages because they stored very easily and they could prevent scurvy. So as sailors retired from their maritime work, some of them went into the cranberry business to sell berries to the next generation of sailors, and these new commercial bogs were often financed the same way ships were, so people could purchase an interest in them, so the entrepreneur behind them could pay to get it up and running. This was how some ships worked in the Golden Age. Another aspect of cranberry industry that's also tied to the ocean started during this time shipments of cranberries being sent to Europe for sale. As Christmas trees became more and more common in the United States and Europe, it makes sense that cranberries became part of the decor for them. Cranberries could keep for weeks or sometimes even months, and they had this shiny red exterior, so that made them a natural match for the holiday season. So did the timing of the cranberry harvest. Yeah. I read one source that stated that this started in the eighteen forties, but I couldn't find any definitive information about that. It's not the kind of thing that probably got written down a lot like today we start using cranberries on our trees. I think it just happened, and maybe in somebody's journals or letters or something like the children strong cranberries to decorate the tree today. Yeah, I think the definitive part is them going this is a novel idea which I never found. Cranberry scoops, which are box like structures that had times on one side so a person could scoop through a bunch of cranberry greenery and come up with just berries in the box, were invented starting in the mid nineteenth century, and around this same time there were experiments with water harvesting, but those did not go well, and water harvesting was actually abandoned until the nineteen sixties. Over the years when dry harvesting was the only method, many different types of cranberry scoops were patented, a lot of them with various improvements on previous versions, and one man who held several patents was William T. Makepiece and remember that name because it is going to come up again. In eighteen fifty nine, a book with a somewhat confusing title situation was published about cranberry's by author B. Eastwood. The confusion lies in the fact that this book has two title pages and they have different titles, so it's sometimes cataloged by one name and sometimes by the other. The first is the Cranberry and its Culture, and the second is complete Manual for the cultivation

of the cranberry with a description of the best varieties. This book was intended to educate interested readers on everything about raising cranberries, but it was not intended for the home gardener, although a home gardener could certainly benefit from the contents. As Eastwood made clear and the introduction, though this book was about business. He wrote, quote, everyone connected with agricultural pursuits in this country must be aware that there exists at present considerable anxiety respecting the best modes of cultivating the cranberry. Having been attracted to this subject, that I paid particular attention to it, with special reference to raising the berry as an article of commerce. The book contains chapters that walk the would be cranberry producer through everything from setting up a bog, to selecting plants, to troubleshooting issues to harvest, and it concludes with an entire chapter about cranberry markets in the United States and how to sell at each one. He even lays out the overhead costs that are associated with cultivation and how to price berries, buy the bushel to make a profit. Yeah, I mean like it has hard numbers in it of like this is what I paid this year to do this, So to me, I have to charge this one like it's so completely di and thorough. The Colombian Exposition of eighteen ninety three, which is something of a recurring character on the podcast at this point, featured an impressive exhibit that was mounted by the Wisconsin State Cranberry Growers Association. The group's members built a miniature cranberry bog there on the expo floor to show visitors to the expo how the berries were grown and harvested. In eighteen ninety nine, the US adopted a standard for cranberry's stating that each barrel was to be one hundred pounds. That really didn't change things a whole lot. Most growers were already loading barrels at one hundred pound mark, but it did codify the practice. All Right, it is just about time to talk about canned cranberry sauce. Right after this sponsor break, we will hear about the man who impacted the cranberry industry probably more than anyone else in history, and how he gets credit for canned cranberry sauce. If you've ever wondered who gets the credit for canned cranberry sauce, that honor, depending on your point of view, goes to Marcus L. Uran. We don't know if that's the correct pronunciation, but other variations sound unsavory. Uh, So we're going with this one in my apologies if that is your last name. Uh but I know that in a situation where we're going to say it a lot, I don't trust myself for sure to not accidentally say it the wrong way. Uh Uran was born in Sullivan, Maine, on October second, eighteen seventy three, and after his early education in the public schools of Sullivan, he attended the University of Maine to get his bachelor's degree and then went on to Boston University Law School. Uran passed the bar and started his law career. But then in nineteen oh six, on what almost seems like a

whim, he decided to ditch his law practice and buy a cranberry bog. That's kind of funny to me, honestly. This was the start of a lifelong dedication to the growing of cranberries and the stewardship of all cranberry production. In the United States. In terms of modern influence, Uron probably has had more impact than anyone on the US cranberry industry, and part of that was because he was very good at organizing and working with other growers. Uron went on to organize the American Cranberry Exchange to market fresh cranberries, the first of many organizations he founded for the crop. But though he got into the cranberry business to sell them as fresh produce, Uran also, as we mentioned, is credited with inventing canned cranberry sauce. Before any listeners turn him into the villain of the piece, please know that that original canned sauce was a lot more like the homemade sauces of today. The story goes that when fresh cranberries are packaged in barrels, the ones on the bottom always sustained some damage from the weight of the berries that are piled on top of them. They end up crushed and unsuitable for sale on the produce aisle. Throwing out those crushed berries bothered Uron. It felt wasteful and like he was losing out on some of the potential sales after all of the effort that growing the cranberries required. Then he had a brainstorm, what if he cooked those berries down and made a sauce that could be canned. So that is what he did. That is the way the story is often relayed. It comes up in his obituaries, and crushed berries might have been part of the inspiration for canned cranberry sauce. But the other thing to consider was the short cranberry season. As we've mentioned, cranberries are usually harvested mid September to mid November, so as a fresh fruit, the window is kind of small for consumers. But Yuran knew that if he could find a way to can them, he could make them a year round business. In nineteen thirty, he founded the National Cranberry Association, which was a co op of growers. The NCAA eventually reorganized as Cranberry Canners. Twenty seven years later, it would change to a different familiar name, Ocean Spray. Uron teamed up with two partners in this move, John C. Makepiece and Elizabeth Lee. To be clear, Uron was not the first person to organize a cranberry co op. The year he bought his first bog nineteen oh six, the Wisconsin Cranberry Sales Company was formed. It also operated as a co op. The Makepiece family was the largest cranberry producer in the country at the time. Remember those patents for scoops, Those were issued to another Makepiece from Barnstable, Massachusetts, where John C. Makepiece was from. So presumably they were related, although Holly struggled to find information that would really pinpoint exactly how they were related. Yeah. I combed through some rabbit hole genealogy situations and I was finally like, okay, but what are the odds that two make Pieces from Barnstable. What We're both involved in

the cranberry industry at this level and entirely unrelated to one another by any means, Right, right, I'm pretty sure they are connected. Under Uran's leadership, Ocean Spray started testing a variety of different products. Cranberry Juice cocktail, which adds sugar and sometimes other juices to cranberry juice, was introduced by the company in nineteen thirty three, and it, of course continues to be a flagship product today. And as the nineteen thirties came to a close, Uran developed a cranberry syrup to use in cocktails and sodas, and yes, jellied cranberry sauce was introduced by the company. It made its debut in nineteen forty one. Uran's partner in the co op, Elizabeth Lee, was making cranberry sauce for sale well before she teamed up with Uran. In nineteen seventeen, she started selling a homemade sauce called bog Sweet Cranberry Sauce, and it was very popular, so when she joined the co op, she brought an expertise to the table. She's said to have had a significant hand in the development of jellied cranberry sauce. Co Ops that essentially controlled the market at the level that Urans did would normally run up against antitrust laws, but his lawyer was able to identify a loophole in that law that was an exemption for agricultural cooperatives that had been established in nineteen twenty two, so Uran and his partners, who had been his competitors before they all banded together, were protected in this setup. Uron felt very strongly about co ops being the best way for any agricultural product to thrive. He routinely toured and gave talks about it, noting that quote no individual can materially improve his own position independent of others. Marcus Huron believed in cooperation over competition, and he thought that if people could put aside their concerns about trying to succeed in a way that hoarded marketshare, almost any industry, but as especially agriculture, could really thrive. He proselytized that co ops led to greater control for growers, enabling them to essentially dictate the market. When he was in his eighties, Muran was technically retired, but he was still really busy in the cranberry industry as an advisor, a mentor, and an organizational leader, and he was asked why he had dedicated his life to Cranberry's. He said, quote, I felt I could do something for New England. You know, everything in life is what you do for others. In addition to Cranberry's, Muron also offered the leadership to other enterprises that tied back to the Cranberry business. He was the director of the Springfield Bank of Cooperatives, offering loans and financing to co op members. That bank eventually merged with Cobank in the nineteen nineties. He also served as the head of the National Canners Association and the Massachusetts Canners Association, as well as the Boston Chamber of Commerce also so established a scholarship which continues today. The recipient quote must be a child of a cranberry bog owner or a cranberry bog employee residing in Massachusetts who plans to pursue an education beyond the secondary school level. In the late nineteen fifties, government reports were published just a couple weeks before Thanksgiving that deeply hurt the cranberry industry. An investigation had found that some of the weed killer that was sprayed on cranberry crops was carcinogenic. Marcus Huron gave interviews during this scare and noted, quote, the industry won't get over this for years. People are timid about these things, especially when cancer is mentioned. You can't blame the government for being careful. And if there is any danger, we certainly want to know about it. We want to do what is right. But although Uran seemed very understanding of the government's report, he also told reporters that he thought the whole thing had been mishandled. He noted that only fifty thousand barrels out of one point two million were affected. That's still a huge number, but it's only about four percent of the total crop. It seems like identifying the singular source of contamination would have been a more prudent move for the industry in his opinion. And as I said, this report came out right before Thanksgiving, which meant that a lot of farmers were going to have a catastrophic year because the entire industry was going to have to dump their supply for the year and start from scratch for the next year. One of the ways the government tried to mitigate the fallout from the scare was to start a labeling program so customers would know if they were buying berries that had been inspected and cleared. But as Yuran noted, for the nineteen fifty nine crop, it was just too late. Later examination of the case did back up uron position that while the information was important, the way that it had been shared was a little too alarmist, which reminds me of so many things that still happened today. Yes, the amount of cranberries that a person would have to eat to actually experience the negative effects that had scared consumers was more than any reasonable person could actually consume, Like they would have to eat thousands of pounds of cranberries. Listen, I love a cranberry, and I can't imagine eating one thousand pounds of it. So uh. Perhaps because of that nineteen fifty nine scare, US cranberry growers were the first in the agricultural community to stop using the insecticide known as DDT as soon as reports emerged about its potential toxological effects. This was an action that these growers took before any regulation banning DDT existed. Today, only about five percent of the US cranberry crop is sold as fresh fruit. The rest is juices, preserves, and cranberry sauce. By the twenty teens, more than five million gallons of jellied cranberry sauce was being consumed in the US annually. But there is a push to move fresh cranberries into a more prominent position as a food that people can just snack on, as well as something that can be used in recipes without the need for as much sugar. Cranberries are generally

pretty tart, so they're not the kind of thing that most people want to just pop in their mouth and eat raw, but new strains are being developed to make milder naturally sweeter berries. And this is work that started decades ago, but it does take time to shift the flavor profile of a fruit that has often grown on the same vines year after year for a century or more. One of the other things that's impacting cranberry production is climate change. Cranberries require a very specific climate in addition to a unique substrate mix. The plants need a specific amount of time in cold weather to be dormant in order to flourish again when the weather warms up. And as the globe experience is extremes in weather, the consistency this crop craves and needs is dissipating. Something that's concerning cranberry growers around the world. It's not a secret that the climate in Massachusetts, for example, is warmer than it used to be. Uh yeah, so that's cranberry's We love them. I will talk about the milana behind the scenes. I have a very special listener mail. It's from our listener, Holly Fry. Really, it's from other has come up in some other emails, and I wanted to make sure people knew it relates back to our episode on patterns. Sewing patterns. Uh huh, because at the end of that we didn't know what was happening with the future of commercial sewing patterns, right, and then there was an event and I meant to talk about it sooner, but here we are. I'm a couple months late. So where we left off in that episode, Simplicity Patterns, which at that point had taken ownership over Vogue Patterns, McCalls, and Butterick. The Big four is what they're called in sewing Circles, had been sold to a company that was essentially going to liquidate them. However, there was a very cool development late in the game, which is that in very late October, it was announced that it was going to relaunch as an independent employee led brand Abby Small. This is just in case anybody didn't know Abby Small working with a company called Ruberlman Capital took control of the company. She had been with the company for a very long time, so she knows the industry very very well, and this way they were going to be able to launch. They had this period where they were putting out messaging that was like, hey, please hang tight, we're trying to basically start a small business out of a business that's been around for a long time. Like they had to get everything under their feet, but they did relaunch, so just FYI, they have relaunched in time for holiday season if you want to buy some of the pattern. But I wanted to mention this because for the stitchers in our listening audience, I know there was some consternation. I mentioned that independent brands are great, but I also know that for some people, these are the patterns they have grown up with and they like to work with, and they were going to miss them. So they are back around and they are launched now. So I would say if you want to make sure they stay around, now is a great time to buy a pattern, just to make sure they have that initial surge and that they have support from their community that wants them. Theoretically, I'm super excited actually for it, because I think making this a company that's run by people who know this business and they've worked in it for literal decades. Yeah, is probably the best thing that could have happened. Yeah. That's kind of really my PSA and not a listener mail today, but especially because I don't know about anybody else, but my high productivity sewing time is the holidays because it's a little quieter home. Yeah, work hours or tend to be a little shorter because you have days off and depending on where things land, they're like sometimes extra days in the calendar where you're not working. And what a great time to support the brands that have been around for hundreds of years and are now you know, the flags being carried by people who love those brands, so I want them to succeed. It's very selfish on my part because I want them to stick around. It's my update. I promise we'll do a regular listener mail next time. If you want to write to us to talk about sewing, I'll always talk about sewing. I have. One of my favorite things is that my friends will occasionally text me and be like, can I bug you with a sewing question? And I'm like, why do you think this would bug me? This is a delight for me. Let's talk about sewing. If you want to email us about sewing, about cranberries, listen. I know people have strong feelings. Listen to Friday I have Thoughts or anything else. You can do so at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.