Cranberry Sauce and an Unusual Cocktail Recipe

Thanksgiving will be here soon, and most people will be eating turkey with cranberry sauce. This now classic combination was first mentioned in American Cookery, our nation's first cookbook.

Published in Hartford, Connecticut in 1798 the book's full title is: American Cookery, or the art of dressing viands, fish, poultry, and vegetables, and the best modes of making pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, puddings, custards, and preserves, and all kinds of cakes, from the imperial plum to plain cake: Adapted to this country, and all grades of life. That's a mouthful!

Of the author Amelia Simmons nothing is known except she was an orphan. We know this because on the title page of American Cookery etc. it bluntly says "By Amelia Simmons, an American orphan." Prior to Amelia's book, Americans had to make do with cookbooks from England. Her innovation was to write a book with recipes using local ingredients like cornmeal, pumpkins and cranberries.

Some recipes in American Cookery are of interest more for historic purposes than practical. After all, how many of us are making mince pies out of calf's feet or need to dress a turtle?

Similarly, here's a cocktail recipe it's unlikely you'll be trying this holiday season:

To make a fine Syllabub from the Cow.

Sweeten a quart of cyder with double refined sugar, grate nutmeg into it, then milk your cow into your liquor, when you have thus added what quantity of milk you think proper, pour half a pint or more, in proportion to the quantity of syllabub you make, of the sweetest cream you can get all over it.

On the other hand, her recipe for cooking a turkey is one that my carnivorous readers might actually use:

To stuff and roast a Turkey, or Fowl.

One pound soft wheat bread, 3 ounces beef suet, 3 eggs, a little sweet thyme, sweet majoram, pepper and salt, and some add a gill of wine; fill the bird therewith and sew up, hand down to a steady solid fire, basting frequently with salt and water, and roast until a steam emits from the breast, put one third of a pound of butter into the gravy, dust flour over the bird and baste with the gravy; serve up with boiled onions and cramberry-sauce, mangoes, pickles or celery.

And there in the last sentence is the first mention of cranberry cranberry sauce (or cramberry sauce, as she spells it) as a side dish with turkey. It's exciting to know people have been eating this combination for at least two hundred years! I guess the mangoes didn't catch on with the public, though.

You can find the full text of American Cookery online at this great site.

Crazy Cranberry Cures

The Boston Globe ran an article this week about a worldwide cranberry surplus. Farmers are growing more berries than in the past, and prices are dropping! To help increase global demand, the Cranberry Marketing Committee has been touting the alleged anitbacterial and antiaging powers of this tart little berry.

Cranberries are indigenous to New England, and their health benefits been speculated about for centuries. For example, I recently purchased a copy of the Lydia Marie Child's 1828 book, The American Frugal Housewife, which contains home remedies as well as recipes and household tips. Are you suffering from a corn on your foot? Use a cranberry, Mrs. Child says!

A corn may be extracted from the foot by binding on half a raw cranberry, with the cut side of the fruit upon the foot. I have a known a very old and troublesome corn drawn out in this way, in the course of a few nights.

I suppose I can see how this might work. Cranberries are acidic, so maybe the acid helps to dissolve the corn? However, I don't think this next cure would work at all.

The Indians have great belief in the efficacy of poultices of stewed cranberrries, for the the relief of cancers. They apply them fresh and warm every ten or fifteen minutes, night and day. Whether this will effect a cure I know not; I simply know that the Indians strongly recommend it.

OK, not even the Cranberry Marketing Committee would say that's an effective cure for cancer. Part of me wants to laugh at how quaint this cure is, but it also makes me realize how primitive medicine was in the early 19th century. There was no chemo, radiation or surgery available for cancer, so why not apply a poultice of cranberries? It probably couldn't hurt, and there weren't any other effective options.

Although Mrs. Child's medical knowledge seems simple by today's standards, she was quite progressive for her day. Born in Medford, Massachusetts in 1802, she wrote a scandalous novel about a white woman who marries an Indian (Hobomok), was an advocate for women's rights and the abolition of slavery, and published the first monthly American magazine for children. She also wrote the Thanksgiving poem Over the River and Through the Woods, for which she is perhaps most famous.