The Nature of Eureka

By
Steven Foster
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398
Cranberries and their juice have long been regarded as folk treatments for urinary infections. In early American medicine, the crushed berries were applied to tumors and poulticed on wounds. The berries were recognized as a treatment for scurvy (vitamin C deficiency) and dysentery. Contrary to popular belief, Cranberry does not serve as a urinary antiseptic by acidifying the urine. Recent studies show that Cranberry contains compounds that prevent the adhesion of bacteria to linings of the bladder and gut, therefore preventing infection.

Cranberries

We celebrate what is ambiguously the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving. It was held in the autumn of 1621 among the 57 survivors of the 102 people who boarded the Mayflower in Plymouth, England, on September 6, 1620, and the Wampanoag people who saved them from starvation. Thanksgiving was held occasionally in following years, until 1863 when Abraham Lincoln, declared the last Thursday of November as a new national holiday—Thanksgiving. Time for cranberries.

In my early days of botanical pursuits in Maine, I recall the excitement of recognizing a fruiting wild cranberry (Vaccinium macrocarpon). I plucked the fruit from its trailing, wire-like, reddish woody vine, half-the thickness of a shoestring, then bit into the sour, puckering, barely edible flesh. What would possess humans to think of this as edible?

The answer is relative abundance even during winter, great keeping qualities, and vitamin C. There are few fruits to be found in the deep autumn of New England. The persistent fruits grow a scrawny vine grow in the worst acidic, sandy soils, at the edge of sphagnum bogs, where there is little remotely edible vegetation.

Sasemineash or “sour berry” is the Wampanoag name of the fruits recorded by Roger Williams in A Key into the Language of America, published in 1643, the first English dictionary of an Eastern Woodland People’s language. Williams described it as a “sharp cooling fruit, growing in fresh waters all the winter, excellent in conserve against fevers.” (Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, is the umpteenth great-grandfather of Eureka residents David Pettit and Faith Shah).

The fruit has excellent shelf life. Only partially dried, and wiped clean of moisture, a 100-lb. barrel could easily be shipped to London where cranberries were sold “fresh as when first gathered,” fetching $8 a bushel. They were wild harvested until cranberry cultivation began in the early 1800s thanks to Captain Henry Hall of Barnstable, Massachusetts. By the 1850s, commercial cultivation expanded.

“The berries are very acid, slightly astringent, and sub-acerb[ic] in their crude or uncooked state,” wrote William P.C Barton in his 1821 Flora of North America, “…much as they are in demand, and greatly as they are esteemed, they are still entitled to a more extensive use as a salubrious dietetic article.

Just add sugar.