Barbara Ludman
LIFESTYLE
Like most beautiful things, berries often promise more than they deliver. In its natural state, a raspberry is an illusion, a wisp of a taste somewhere just past the edge of the senses. Blueberries look bluer than they taste; mulberries aren’t worth the trouble of keeping the juice off your shirt; and to get anything at all out of currants, you need a large heap of them.
Cranberries are different. These are serious berries. They look big, red, and in-your-face – and they taste exactly the same. Even smokers can taste cranberries.
People who have been drinking vodka and cranberry cocktails at fine and trendy eateries in Cape Town and Johannesburg must know we’re in the middle of a cranberry explosion. Suddenly you can buy cranberry juice at your local supermarket (well, at my local supermarket, anyway). You can’t buy dried cranberries. If you could, raisins would go out of business.
But you can find frozen cranberries at imaginative speciality shops, like Thrupps in Johannesburg. They’re distributed by the good people at Hillcrest Berry Orchards in Stellenbosch who grow, sometimes freeze and distribute year-round all the currants, blackberries, strawberries, mixed berries, and so on that people make into fabulous pies and puddings or chuck into a bowl with whipped cream.
Cranberries in all their forms are imported. Hillcrest says they can’t be grown here; they require real bog conditions, something we seem to have plenty of at the moment, although presumably the newly formed wetlands aren’t permanent.
The sandy bogs and marshes in the United States and Canada, where cranberries are cultivated, have been there for centuries, a refuge for rare species, like the bald eagle, the American national bird. Growers in this $1,5-billion industry make a point of their contribution to conservation; the ratio is four to 10 acres of wildlife preserve for every acre of cranberry bog.
In the US, cranberry juice is not only PC and patriotic but ubiquitious; you can even buy it at football games, along with beer and Coke. Its popularity is partly due to its sharp, adult taste, in a country where children grow up on sugar-frosted corn flakes.
Another draw is its salutary effect on health. The condensed tannins or proanthocyanidins in cranberries -and, oddly enough, in blueberries -prevent E coli and other dangerous bacteria from attaching to your bladder, kidney and urinary tract. It’s a bit of folk wisdom backed up by trials a few years ago at Rutgers University and Harvard Medical School. What it means to people with a tendency towards cystitis is a life worth living – drinking one large glass of cranberry juice a day is supposed to do a power of good, although more in the way of prevention than as a cure.
It’s good for you even if you haven’t got cystitis. Ocean Spray, a co-operative that represents most of the cranberry growers, claims when British seamen were getting their vitamin C from limes, their American counterparts were travelling with cranberries. They probably learned about cranberries – as they learned so many other things – from native Americans, whose version of biltong, called pemmican, was made by pounding fat, nuts and cranberries into dried buffalo, venison, rabbit or squirrel meat – or so says Dale Carson, who ought to know, being a member of the Abenaki nation and an expert on native American cuisine.
If you want to know if a fresh cranberry is really fresh, drop it; it will bounce. It won’t work with frozen cranberries, needless to say, nor can you string them up to decorate your Christmas tree – but there are other uses for them. In the past two months alone, I’ve made two kinds of muffins, a glorious cake and a cranberry lemon sorbet that would bring tears to your eyes. And that’s just the beginning – there are cranberry brownies, cranberry coffee cake, cranberry chutney.
You could probably do as well with any frozen berries, even blueberries. But I don’t know, somehow vodka and blueberry juice cocktail hasn’t got quite the right ring.