Mount Laurel Library celebrates Cranberry Month

Cranberries were a hot topic at the Mount Laurel Library earlier this month.

“They’ve been here so long, and the Native Americans used them so extensively; they were a food, they were a medicine, they were on the leaves and were used as a tobacco substitute, they were a dye… They were used so much,” said Edison resident Judith Krall-Russo, a food historian and certified tea specialist.

According to www.uscranberries.com, Native Americans used cranberries as a staple as early as 1550. They ate fresh cranberries, ground or mashed with cornmeal and baked into bread, and they also mixed cranberries with wild game and melted fat to form pemmican, a survival ration for the winter months. Revolutionary War veteran Henry Hall planted the first commercial cranberry beds in Dennis, Massachusetts, in 1816, according to the Cranberry Institute. Today, cranberries are farmed on approximately 58,000 acres across the northern United States, Canada and Chile. Cranberries were known by many names, such as bitter berry, bearberry and marsh apples. They are one of the few fruits indigenous to the United States. Harvest season in New Jersey runs from mid-September through early November, with peak activity occurring throughout October.

“It’s really an important crop and they’re very, very healthy for you,” Krall-Russo said. “Yes, they’re very tart, but you can mix them with different things, and the tartness brings out a brightness, too, of other foods.”

Cranberries have been an important crop for New Jersey since the 19th century. The New Jersey Pinelands is one of the few places where cranberries grow naturally. Cranberries grow on vines which are very close to the ground. They need sandy, acidic soil which has a high-water table. This wet area is called a bog. Since the 1960s, the wet-picking method has been used. First, the bogs are flooded. Then a machine with a large water reel is driven through the bogs. This knocks the berries off the vines, and they float on the water. The floating berries are pushed to one side of the bog where a conveyor belt lifts them to a truck. Next, the berries are taken to the sorting house where they are cleaned and sorted. Finally, they are shipped to a processing plant where they are made into different cranberry products. According to www.nj.gov, cranberry farming began in New Jersey in 1835 in a bog near Burrs’ Mills in Burlington County. Some of New Jersey’s first cranberry farms are still operated by descendants of the original owners.

Krall-Russo is a member of the Culinary Historians of New York, the League of Historical Societies of New Jersey and the Historic Foodways Society of the Delaware Valley, and she is a professional certified tea specialist certified at levels 1, 2, 3 and 4 by the Specialty Tea Institute, the educational division of the Tea Association of the U.S.A., Inc. She presents more than 30 different food and tea history programs daily and expands her knowledge about New Jersey foods by attending seminars and visiting and interviewing local farmers and long-time residents. She educated attendees on New Jersey’s contribution to the cultivation of cranberries at the library on Oct. 7 through her talk, appropriately titled “Discover the New Jersey Cranberry.”

“New Jersey just has this incredible history with foods; blueberries and apples and cranberries, so I just started to research more, and I would go and interview people and talk to them and go to libraries and I just started to learn so much about New Jersey,” Krall-Russo said.

October is officially recognized as Cranberry Month in New Jersey. Cranberries are available in a variety of forms including fresh fruit, juice, sauce and dried. Juices, sauce and dried cranberries are available year-round at your local grocery store. All forms of cranberry products provide similar health benefits such as promoting healthy sleep, reducing inflammation and they can reduce the risk of stomach infection. Cranberries are easy to incorporate into your diet, and they offer a wealth of antioxidants, vitamins and minerals that go along with the dose of fiber. They are also a good source of vitamin C.