Berry Thankful

In 1946, Helene Stratman-Thomas visited Black River Falls, Wisconsin, where she recorded a handful of songs sung by Mrs. Frances Perry. Amongst these is a Wisconsin folk song titled “Cranberry Song.” According to Stratman-Thomas’ notes, “this song was composed by Barney Reynolds at Mather (heart of the cranberry country).”

Wisconsin is currently the largest cranberry producer in the United States, followed closely by Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Oregon. The tart berry’s importance to New Jersey is well documented in the both the Center’s Pinelands Folklife Project, as well as in photographs from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives Collection, housed in the Library’s Prints & Photographs Division.

As we come out of our turkey-and-cranberry-sauce-fueled Thanksgiving lethargy, I felt it was a perfect time to highlight the hard work of the men and women (and, in the 1930s, the children) who wade into the flooded cranberry fields to bring us these delicious and vibrant berries, accompanied by the lyrics to “Cranberry Song.”

You ask me to sing, so I’ll sing you a song
I’ll tell how in the marshes they all get along
Bohemians and Irish and Yankees and Dutch
It’s down in the shanties you’ll find the whole clutch.

Did you ever go to the cranberry bogs?
Some of the houses are hewed out of logs
The walls are of boards, they are sawed out of pine
That grow in this country called Cranberry Mine

It’s now then to Mather their tickets they’ll buy
And to all their people they’ll bid them goodbye
For fun and for frolic their plans are resigned
For three or four weeks in the cranberry clime

The hay is all cut and the wheat is all stacked
Cranberries are ripe so their clothes they will pack
And away to the marshes to rake they will go
And dance to the music of the fiddle and bow

All day in the marshes their rakes they will pull
And feel the most gay when boxes are full
In the evening they’ll dance ‘til they’re all tired out
And wish the cranberries would never play out.

Several lines in the song brought to mind this excerpt from Christine Cartwright’s Pinelands fieldnotes:

“Berry growers tend to have social networks which stretch between townships, often through kinship, since it tends to be a family industry. Quaker families have tended to keep the fertile soils which they claimed as the first inhabitants of the region under English rule, while Methodist and other families took the cranberry bogs and woodland. Italian families, who came as farm labor around the turn of the century, sometimes saved money and bought farmlands, and are now higher up on the social scale; the labouring class is now Puerto Rican, Black, and Cambodian, including labourers who are flown in seasonally from Puerto Rico, and flown home again, because it is cheaper than paying for local labor.”

Even though the song came from Wisconsin and Cartwright was working in another states, we can see the similarities between the experiences of the cranberry harvesters in Mather, Wisconsin and the ones the Center documented in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. 40 years on and in different parts of the United States, and yet harvesters in both locations were traveling in from homes in other places and staying for weeks at a time.

In addition to “Cranberry Song” and collection items from the Pinelands Folklife Project, the Center has a robust subject file related to cranberries, and Wisconsin, Massachusetts and New Jersey are all well represented within it. Among the resources in the subject file are:

A brochure from the Wisconsin State Cranberry Growers Association, which includes photographs of flooded cranberry marshes

and a few cranberry recipes;

A poster “All ‘Bout Cranberries” and a series of cranberry-themed educational activities, produced by the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers’ Association;

and an AFC-produced compilation of cranberry recipes that came from the field survey in the New Jersey Pinelands. (Download an archived pdf of the booklet here!)

The booklet provides a bit of historical context for the importance of cranberries to North American diets:

“Cranberry – a slender, trailing North American shrub, growing in damp ground and bearing tart red berries. Along with blueberries and Concord grapes, cranberries are fruits unique to the North American continent. The use of cranberries as a food staple in the diets of Americans becomes more secure with each generation, but in fact they were established as a popular food long before the arrival of the Pilgrims.

The Wampanoag tribe which inhabited portions of Massachusetts harvested many wild foods, especially berries such as strawberries, blueberries, elderberries, and, in the autumn, the ruby-red wild cranberries. In areas of New Jersey the Lenni-Lenape tribe of Indians called them the “bitter berry” One New Jersey chief, known as Pakimintzen (“cranberry eater”), distributed cranberries at tribal feasts and considered them a symbol of peace.”

Inspired by my Lenape forebears, I decided to distribute cranberries at Thanksgiving by making one of the recipes featured in the Pinelands cranberry booklet. I opted for the cranberry pie recipe, provided by Helen Zimmer.

The ingredient list is relatively short, and I happened to have everything on hand, so I got to chopping, mixing and baking.

One of the things that I have learned over my years of pie-making is that the baking time included on a pie recipe is largely a suggestion. Several things can change how well your pies come together, including your altitude and the relative humidity in your house. Each oven heats a bit different, as well, making baking times a general guide, instead of a hard and fast rule. In my experience, the best metric for telling when a fruit pie is done is to bake it until the juice bubbles up and over the edge of the pie plate, making a mess on the rack below. This is also why I always put a baking liner on the rack below, to catch the drips. Using this method has generally allowed me to avoid that dreaded pie affliction, where the juices run out as soon as you try to lift a slice out.

This is not a completely fool-proof method, as this fool can attest. The cranberry pie did, indeed, bubble over and make a terrible mess all over the liner and the juices all appeared to have congealed. Until, that is, I lifted out the first slice and deep red juice spilled out to fill the empty spot in the pie plate. Thankfully, the pie was still good, it just needed more cornstarch. I have a sneaking suspicion this was largely due to baker error.

The recipe calls for “1 quart cranberries, chopped.” I got one step ahead of myself, however, and started chopping the cranberries before measuring them. This little misstep meant there were more cranberries in the pie than the recipe originally called for, which would have necessitated adding more cornstarch. If you replicate this pie and learn from my mistake (measure out the cranberries first), the amount of cornstarch given should be sufficient to hold everything together.

Even with the soupy first slices, the pie was a resounding success – which the assembled guests seemed a bit surprised about. As they each took their first bites, the dining room filled with exclamations of surprise and appreciation.  Most of them admitted that they were expecting a pie made of only cranberries to be quite bitter. Likewise, the molasses could have been a bit overwhelming, but those two exceptionally strong flavors came together quite well. You still taste both the cranberry and the molasses, but they compliment each other and what you end up with is a sort of fruity caramel flavor. In the end, everyone agreed that the pie recipe was worthy of preservation in an archive.

Further Reading

Check out these posts from the Library’s blogs:

• Railbirds, Cranberries, and Eels: Foods of the New Jersey Pinelands – Stephanie Hall, from Folklife Today
• Cranberry Sauce, with a Side of Social History – guest post, Rachel Gordon from Minerva’s Kaleidoscope: Resources for Kids and Families

View these cranberry related digital collections:

• Photographs of and interviews with cranberry harvesters from the Pinelands Folklife Project (AFC 1991/023)
• Photographs of cranberry bogs from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives Collection

Interested in growing and working with cranberries? Read these digitized publications:

• Cranberry Culture – by Joseph White. 1885
• The Cranberry – published by Bradley Fertilizer Co., circa 1892
• How to Sweeten Cranberries – published by the U.S. Food Administration, Division of home conservation. October 1918

For more on the cranberry’s history, including its use in traditional Indigenous diets, the impact of drought on this year’s harvest, and information about cranberry bog tourism, visit the following websites:

• American Indian Health and Diet Project’s cranberry page
• Travel Wisconsin’s feature, “Four Must-Stops Along the Wisconsin Cranberry Trail”
• An article on the impact of drought conditions on the 2024 Pinelands cranberry harvest, from Burlington County, New Jersey