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Food and Drink

The mighty cranberry
glendabyline

If there’s a berry that says “merry” this time of year it’s the tart and sassy cranberry.

For Canadians, this rich red berry is so tied to the Thanksgiving-through-Christmas holiday loop that I vote for the cranberry as all-round jolly holiday berry, definitely outstripping the holly berry which, in the gastronomical department, only delights wild birds.

Even their colour cycle — white when unripe and red when ripe —

makes cranberries ideal holiday berries.

Another reason to trumpet the cranberry: the Lower Fraser Valley and Vancouver Island make B.C. the number one producer of cranberries in Canada. Combined, the two regions grow about 840,000 barrels annually (one barrel weighs 100 pounds). Now that’s a lot of cranberry sauce.

However, worldwide the U.S. rules, with more than 80 per cent of cranberries coming from there, primarily Massachusetts and Wisconsin. Still, Canada ranks a respectable second, with Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec helping B.C. account for about 14 per cent of world production. The rest of commercial cranberry production comes from countries in Borat’s corner of the world: Latvia, Belarus, Azerbaijan and the Ukraine.

This pretty much aligns with cranberries’ original habitat. Commercial crops grown in North America are all variants of Vaccinium macrocarpon , a member of the heath family native to acidic bogs and peaty wetlands in the northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canada. It’s also cousin to other low, evergreen creeping shrubs like the lingonberry and small cranberry ( V. oxycoccus ). The latter is the European cranberry, found in the likes of Latvia or Belarus with its stronger, grassier flavour.

Cranberries have been eaten by aboriginal people for ages. In fact, we newcomers to North America supposedly had our first taste when starving colonists in Massachusetts were given some by generous locals. After that they incorporated cranberries into Thanksgiving dinners and long threaded strings for the Christmas tree. (If you have a minute and a bag of fresh cranberries, get a big needle and some thread and try it — they’re a treat to make, mainly because the ripe, fresh berries are so beautiful to handle.)

In North America and Europe, cranberries have been wild-harvested for centuries. A gaggle of long-skirted women on their knees are featured in Eastman Johnson’s 1880s painting, “The Cranberry Harvest on the Island of Nantucket.” That was before people figured out how to manage wild stands to increase yields. Eventually, this evolved into building ditches and dykes for water control, and amazing artificial bogs used in some places today.

B.C.’s south coast is so suited to growing cranberries because water is a big deal in production. Every acre of cranberry bog needs 3-10 acres of support land in the form of reservoirs and wetlands to store or transport water. Bogs are sometimes flooded in winter to prevent the cranberries from freezing or spoiling.

The berries are harvested either dry or wet. Dry harvesting “combs” the low bushes to remove the berries. Wet harvesting, which is most common, involves flooding bogs with several inches of water and beating the berries from the plants with water reels. The cranberries float to the surface, where they can be corralled onto a conveyor belt and lifted into bins bound for processing plants.

One of the bonuses about cranberries is that they can be stored — fresh — for a couple of months in the fridge. This is partly due to their high acidity level — only lemons and limes are more acidic. Cranberries also contain exceptionally high levels of what are known as phenolic compounds. These are present in a lot of plants, but they hit the roof in cranberries and help keep them fresh.

Some of these phenolic compounds are antimicrobials, likely useful in protecting the plants in their damp habitat. But they can also be good for us. Some have been proven to be to be effective antioxidants. One, benzoic acid, is a common, natural preservative.

And, yes, cranberry juice can help keep your bladder healthy. Elements related to the berry’s pigment — called proanthocyanidins or PACs — prevent bacteria from adhering to various tissues in our bodies, and so help prevent urinary tract infections.

A recent University of Massachusetts study also showed that PACs inhibited the growth of lung tumors and colon and leukemia cells in a laboratory setting.

So lucky for us we have many great cranberry sources in B.C. Two of my favourites are Bremner’s Pure Cranberry Juice, which you may have sampled at the Slow Food Cycle in Pemberton this summer, and Triple Jim’s Organic Cranberry Juice. Both are local B.C. products and both are made from nothing, and I mean nothing, but cranberry juice — no sugar, no water, no wimpy grape juice is added. They both pack a wallop that makes Ocean Spray products taste like kids’ stuff.

The prices may seem higher than those for other juices, but in the long run, they aren’t. Bremner’s and Triple Jim’s are so concentrated you’re either satisfied with just a small portion, or you can dilute them as you like. Either way, you’re getting a lot of pure, liquid B.C. goodness that’s as healthy as it is tasty.

The other cranberry classic, of course, is sauce. The first commercial cranberry sauce was made early in the 1900s when a large producer decided to process his damaged berries into a cooked and canned puree. It was a natural fit, since the high pectin content in cranberries means they thicken quickly with just a bit of cooking.

But once you taste homemade cranberry sauce you’ll toss the canned stuff forever. Here’s a super-easy recipe from Canadian Living : Mix 3 cups of fresh cranberries with 1.5 cups sugar (I use less), and 2 teaspoons of grated lemon rind (make sure you only grate the yellow rind, not the white stuff underneath — it’s bitter). Microwave on high for about 7 or 8 minutes, until the cranberries pop, stirring once. Cool and serve. The lemon zest gives this sauce a wonderful zing. Bonus: you can store it in a covered jar in the fridge for weeks and use it to turbo-charge all sorts of meat dishes, including good old meatloaf.

If you’re into experiments, try macerating a cup of berries with about two tablespoons of sugar or honey (or more to taste), two teaspoons (or more) of orange-flavoured liqueur and a bit of orange rind. Cook or microwave it all just a bit and use the result in your favourite pancake recipe (drained) or spoon it over porridge liquid and all. Your winter meals just got a little brighter and healthier, and you supported our local cranberry growers at the same time.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who always has a bag of fresh cranberries in her fridge, even in July.