The Tangy Tradition: Why Cranberries Take Center Stage on Thanksgiving (2024)

FAQs

The Tangy Tradition: Why Cranberries Take Center Stage on Thanksgiving? ›

Seasonal availability. One of the reasons cranberries have become synonymous with Thanksgiving is their seasonal availability. Harvested in the fall, cranberries are at their peak during the holidays time.

When someone mentions Thanksgiving dinner, the image that traditionally comes to mind includes turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. As one of the very few commercially grown fruits native to the United States, the cranberry symbolically represents an American harvest on our holiday tables.

Urann started selling his canned cranberry sauce in 1912 under the name Ocean Spray Preserving Company. In 1930, he joined forces with two competitors, independent cranberry growers John Makepeace and Elizabeth Lee, to form a cranberry cooperative. The co-op began offering canned cranberry sauce nationwide in 1941.

According to Wick, the tart fruit became popularly used to create cranberry sauce for turkey and other types of meat in the late 17th century. Within a hundred more years, cranberry sauce became a staple dish in the U.S., with its popularity taking off even more throughout the 19th century.

Turkey is often dry, salty, and bland, which makes it the perfect partner for something sweet and moist. Cranberries are not overly sweet. Their tartness pairs well with the more bland-tasting turkey.

They also used cranberries as a symbol of peace and friendship. Native Americans also used cranberries for dying rugs or blankets, and as medicine for treating wounds and preventing illness. Adapted from Food is Medicine: Dream of Wild Health Healthy Lifeways Cookbook, 2015.

"Colonists never ate anything like pemmican within the tradition they had, which was mostly stuffings and puddings." Food historian Albala agrees: "The Europeans used cranberries the way they would have used similar fruits ... as a sour fruit sauce with wild fowl."

There could simply be no Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie. Cranberries were eaten by Native Americans and used as a potent red dye, but sweetened cranberry relish was almost certainly not on the first Thanksgiving table.

Cranberry Sauce

By fall 1621, the Pilgrims were essentially out of sugar. Translation—no cranberry sauce. Even with sugar, the Pilgrims still wouldn't have used it to sauce cranberries. That's because the tart little berry was new to them.

What's the point of cranberry sauce? ›

Cranberry sauce offers the same Vitamin C nutrients that can mean less colds and flu this winter. A half-cup serving delivers about 4 percent of your daily Vitamin C needs, but every little bit helps! Believe it or not, cranberry sauce can help you look like a million bucks.

Not all the statements about cranberries are true. That first statement that 50% of all cranberries are eaten at Thanksgiving time is false. Americans eat more than 400 million pounds of cranberries every year, and 20 percent, not 50%, is consumed during the week of Thanksgiving. But that's still 80 million pounds.

There is an important difference between cranberry sauce and cranberry relish and that is that cranberry relish is made from raw ingredients blended in a food processor (it's more fresh and tart tasting) and cranberry sauce is cooked and often much sweeter than relish.

Actually, cranberries graced the table of the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving. Cranberries are one of the few fruits (blueberries and Concord grapes are among the others) that are native to North America.

With Thanksgiving coming up in just a few weeks, you likely have started planning the Thanksgiving menu or if you are not responsible for the food, you are planning what you will eat. Besides the obvious turkey, one of the symbols of the holiday is the cranberry.

Each cut of meat has its steadfast sidekick – mint sauce with lamb, apple sauce with pork, horseradish with beef, cranberry with turkey and gravy with, well, anything – but things need not be set in stone.

400 million pounds of cranberries are consumed by Americans each year. Twenty percent of that is during the week of Thanksgiving. That's 80 million pounds! 5,062,500 gallons of jellied cranberry sauce are consumed by Americans every holiday season.

Cranberries were used as a poultice for wounds and when it was mixed with cornmeal it was an excellent cure for blood poisoning. The juice was used as a dye to brighten the colors of their blankets and rugs.

The 10 foods are: apples, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, cranberries, green beans, potato, pumpkin, sweet corn, sweet potato, and, of course, turkey.