The Cranberry: Hard Work and Holiday Sauce (review)

Having grown up on the plains of Nebraska from the 1950s to the 1970s when the world—or at least the nation—started becoming my oyster, my main association with cranberries was that of a somewhat gelatinous substance served at Thanksgiving, bearing the ribbed indentations of the can it came from. Cole and Gifford's The Cranberry: Hard Work and Holiday Sauce paints a much more interesting picture than I just did. Cole and Gifford take the reader through the entire history of the tart red berries in New England, as well as the people who cultivated them. The book is a blend of oral history and conventional historical research, brought together to make a full account of the cranberry, beginning with the earliest wild harvests, and through the modern age of harvesting and processing with machines. Along the way, Cole and Gifford illuminate the nineteenth-century boom in cranberry production, kicked off by Captain Henry Hall of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, who was originally ridiculed for the silly notion that one could make money developing techniques to cultivate what could already be picked in the wild. But Hall had the last laugh. By 1890, cranberry fever reigned and entrepreneur Abel Denison Makepeace had built enough cranberry bogs to become "The Cranberry King."

One of the major strengths of the book is Cole and Gifford's ability to give the reader a sense of the way in which cranberry cultivation and production was a way of life, woven through the seasons, and consisting of both hard work with bent back and sore knees and celebratory harvests. They explain the cultural systems that governed how the work was done and who did it. They celebrate the sense of place that was entwined in the cranberry vines and imbedded in the bogs. Some of the bogs carry individual histories and characteristics: they carried the names of their original owners as testament to their provenance.

Among the most interesting stories told in, The Cranberry is the story of the cranberry bogs' impact on immigration. The cranberry bogs attracted immigrant labor from the Cape Verde Islands. The workers were called "Bravas," after the name of one of the islands in the archipelago. Originally recruited as mariners for the whaling trade, the Bravas worked a packet trade between New Bedford and the Islands, alternately working in the cranberry harvest and returning home to visit their native island. Cole and Gifford follow the Cape Verdeans from their original work as mariners to their work in the cranberry bogs and nicely illustrate one of New England's lesser-known connections with these islands off the coast of Africa.

Cole and Gifford devote a chapter to the story of one particular Cape Verdean, Tony Jesus, who boarded a schooner in 1902 at Brava and sailed to New Bedford to work in the cranberry bogs. It is here, and in the following chapter that relates the story of Finnish immigrants in the cranberry bogs, that Cole and Gifford rely most heavily on oral history to fill in the gaps left in the written record. These are the stories that speak most authoritatively of the hard work in the bogs. But Cole and Gifford use oral history throughout the book, interviewing not only the workers but also the owners and managers of the bogs.

In addition to following the development of the bogs, Cole and Gifford follow the development of the cranberry industry from the individual growers' labels to the United Cape Cod Cranberry Company and the co-ops to the American Cranberry Exchange to the now-familiar Ocean Spray brand. Cole and Gifford point out one of the more unique aspects of the cranberry industry—its resistance to mechanization. Long after other agricultural industries had developed machinery to plant, cultivate, and harvest, many of these jobs were being done with rather simple wooden hand tools, scooping up the cranberries and carrying them from the bogs by hand, the exception being...