A story in The Vineyard Gazette about this year’s cranberry harvest reminded me that it is time to get out to the bogs near me. I often forget about cranberries until it’s too late. By the time I pull on my boots, they may have been picked over or a hard freeze has come and caused them to burst.
Cranberries have been celebrated for centuries on the Vineyard by the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah). In recent decades, Cranberry Day has been formalized as the second Tuesday of October. Families spread out over the bogs to gather the red berries, then come together as dusk falls to share food and memories.
Cranberries are a bigger deal on Martha’s Vineyard; I am not sure that in the quarter-century I’ve been at The Star we have had even a single story about how our local crop turned out.
Native Americans treated cranberries as an important winter staple. Pounded into a thick paste and dried in sheets or as small cakes, they could keep for months. An account by an early European visitor to the region described native people stewing meat spiced with cranberries in clay pots over open fires. In a distant way, the wiggling blobs of canned cranberry sauce on America’s Thanksgiving tables hearken back to this tradition, I suppose.
Industry figures say that at least 75 million cans of jellied cranberry are sold each year in the United States, most around the holidays. I don’t need many cranberries myself; a half-gallon will do to give my sister for relish to accompany a turkey, and a few to freeze to be baked into muffins or scones. I have an idea to make cranberry-apple preserves this year, if I get enough. If that turns out well, and even if it doesn’t, I’ll report back.