Merry Christmas From Cranberry County

We wish you and yours a happy holiday season.

We drove around Plymouth and Kingston to check some holiday lighting.

Sometimes we stopped the car, sometimes we shot on the fly.

Shooting pics from a moving car provides a trails effect that I don't otherwise get since I stopped taking recreational hallucinogens.

I love Chistmas decorations, but I have to live vicariously through other people. I don't have an outdoor electrical socket, so no lights. I also have Disaster Cat, so I can't have a tree.

I sort of get trickle-down joy from wealthier people who don't have Disaster Cats.

One of the benefits of being unlovable is that it gives the author time on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to take pictures and write captions.

This is too meticulously set up to get that Griswald look.

If everyone lit their houses like this, Rudolph would be redundant.

My snowman didn't survive to Christmas, but he was well-loved in life 

Plymouth Harbor

Merry Christmas!

Cranberry Harvests In Plymouth County

As Thanksgiving draws near, we got down and dirty in the bogs so we could equip you with enough knowledge to dominate cranberry discussion.

Cranberries grow in cooler Northern Hemisphere climates. The Southern Hemisphere also tries. 98% of the world's cranberries are grown the US, Canada and Chile.

Wisconsin has supplanted long-time champ Massachusetts as the leading cranberry grower.

However, I would point out that if your Thanksgiving cranberries aren't from Massachusetts, your table is wiggedy wiggedy whack.

We bear no grudge towards Wisconsin, but Thanksgiving is a Plymouth thing, most Massachusetts cranberries are grown in Plymouth County and this sort of sets Massachusetts atop the cranberry hierarchy.

Ocean Spray, based in Massachusetts, doesn't miss the mark with their commercials. Cranberries are indeed harvested by guys in hip waders, wielding rakes. The big difference between the commercials and reality is that real workers are too busy to stop and talk shop with the cameraman.

Cranberries need all of summer and autumn to grow, and the harvest is usually a race against the killing frost. If the frost beats the harvesting, they have to fly a helicopter about 5 feet over the bogs to keep the water from freezing.

Bogs look like this, but have to be flooded to loosen the berries. More on that below...

Bogs look cool with fog over them.

The lack of ambient lighting sort of dulls the cranberry colors. When judging how bland this picture is, know that it was worse before we edited it.

We were going to do a Fog Bog article, but Facebook spamming is high risk, so it's easier/safer to just have a Fog Bog section of a larger Cranberry article.

750 acres produces literal truckloads of cranberries. They are sent off to an Ocean Spray receiving plant in Carver. 

Cranberries are closely related to the Blueberry and the (I'm your) Huckleberry. The English settlers of Massachusetts originally called them Bearberries, as local bears would fatten on them before hibernating. Cranberry was settled on because the shrubs and berries supposedly resembled a crane to German/Dutch farmers in New England. They called it a Kranberre, and the English translation stuck. This crane thing may be true for people with better cameras.

It takes a truck of equal size enirely filled with sugar to make cranberry sauce. Cranberries are impossibly tart, and they require tons of sweetener. You'd need about a box truck worth of vodka to make a Paul Bunyan-sized Cape Codder.

Native 'Mericans had the first crack at cranberries, which they used for pemmican and dye. They called them sasemineash. The first English reference of them dates back to 1550. The first cranberry sauce recipe dates back to a 1663 Pilgrim cookbook. A 1672 book described them as "excellent against the Scurvy."

Revolutionary War vet Henry Hall of Dennis, Massachusetts started a bog in 1816, and he was shipping them commercially as far as Europe by the 1820s.

In 2017, the world harvested 625,181 tons of cranberries. The US produced 379,745 of those tons. Canada and Chile split most of the remainder about equally between them. Wisconsin produces 65% of the US total, while tiny Massachusetts produces 23%.

95% of cranberries are used to make either sauce or juice. Cranberry sauce is part of the traditional English Christmas dinner, as well as Christmas and Thanksgiving in the US of A.

Ocean Spray, which controls about 65% of the market,  fights against a holiday-only bias regarding cranberries. They have relentlessly developed new recipes and marketing strategies to get people to consume them regularly. A 1959 herbicide scare collapsed the market, forcing companies to try to market them year-round.

This effort brought us cranberry juice and cranapple juice. Cranapple was invented by Ed Gelsthorpe (a remarkable guy who has his fingerprints on the first roll-on deodorant, snack-pack pudding, frozen yogurt and the Manwich). Ocean Spray also developed the Cape Codder and the Cosmopolitan.

A.D. Makepeace, who were nice enough to let me shoot pictures of their operations, is the largest producer of cranberries in the world. They may be the largest property owners in Wareham, Carver and Middleboro, but I have no documentation to back that up. They, along with other local growers, were original members of the Ocean Spray cooperative in 1930.

Beatles fans familiar with the Paul Is Dead conspiracy theory point to the song Strawberry Fields Forever as proof. The end of the song has John Lennilon saying something along the lines of "I buried Paul." Lennon claims he was saying "cranberry sauce." Keeping it musical, cranberries are what the singer(s) of the Waitresses forgot to buy in their song Christmas Wrapping. They go out to the A&P to get some, meet a guy and the song ends happily.

Once the bogs are flooded, a thresher like this one is used to loosen the berries. They are then fed to a truck after being raked up by those Ocean Spray commercial guys.

The European Union is the largest importer of American cranberries, followed by China, Canada, Mexico and South Korea. China, who imported $36 million in cranberry products, is zooming up the list. I am not aware if the Trump/China trade war hurt cranberry growers or made them eligible for the series of farmer bailouts that the trade war produced.

Mann Farms of Buzzards Bay also let me roam around.

Cranberry prices peaked at $65 a barrel in 1996, before plummeting to $18 a barrel in 2001. Production outpaced demand.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Take Plymouth National For Thanksgiving

I am not aware of a holiday more tied to a small town than Thanksgiving is to Plymouth. Only Bethlehem rivals it. Without Plymouth, the whole script is gone.

So why shouldn't Plymouth's Thanksgiving celebrations be televised nationally?

This question is more pressing when you consider that the two things most heavily associated with Thanksgiving beyond the giving-thanks dinners are parades and football.

Plymouth has both of those. They just get nothing beyond local exposure.

How can (and should) we change that?

One obstacle involves the parade and the football game being held on different days. Another is that people have dinners to prepare, travel to or both.

Why take on those difficulties? Let's imagine a best case scenario.

Thanksgiving day starts with a parade, televised nationally. It is routed so that it goes directly past Plymouth Rock and directly to Plymouth North High School. The parade itself will finish with a lap around the football field.

From there, Plymouth North and Plymouth South will play their Thanksgiving game. This game, like the parade, will also be televised nationally.

This brings prestige onto Plymouth. It brings tourists to Plymouth. While switching to this format may have costs, the event will eventually be a yearly cash cow. The broadcast would essentially be a Plymouth infomercial.

ESPN could televise both. There are several ESPNs who could handle this. They could show the parade on delay during halftime of the football game if time is an issue.

The parade could also be televised by a different network if ESPN wishes to stick to sports.

Plymouth's parade would be more Americana than the one in New friggin' York. The New York parade is merely a marketing plan by Macy's. The department store runs that parade to their store, to sort of kick off Christmas shopping season.

Ours, while also seeking a dollar, would be more true to the spirit of the actual Thanksgiving holiday... and remember, no city or town has a greater claim to Thanksgiving than Plymouth.

Plymouth's parade will be more small-time than Macy's. Plymouth will have no Led Zeppelin I sized Snoopy blimps. Mariah Carey or Katy Perry won't be singing at Plymouth Rock (although it couldn't hurt to ask them). We'd have to make up for this with small town charm.

The smaller parade will also be easier to televise, fitting rather snugly into a football halftime slot.

ESPN gets handed a ready-made tradition to broadcast, so America that apple pie would be reduced to a bit part. They could up the Americana with brief vignettes featuring Plymouth Rock, Plimoth Plantation, the Mayflower II and the Wampanoag people.

Plymouth gets exposure, revenue and town spirit.  They stake an incontrovertible claim to a holiday that they already should own.

Remember... without Plymouth, the Thanksgiving we know and love would be wildly different, if it even existed at all. When you think of Thanksgiving, you think of Plymouth. The rest of the world needs to recognize.

Someone should already be working on this.

Who Invented The Thanksgiving Sandwich?

Cape Cod's Claim To The Day After Thanksgiving Sandwich

I wrote about our local wild turkey population recently. I then spent considerable time and effort trying to find out who invented the Gobbler.

The Gobbler, as you most likely know, is a regional name for a Turkey/Cranberry/Stuffing sandwich. Depending on where you're getting one, it may have a variety of ingredients. It may also have a variety of names, such as the Mayflower Sandwich, the Thanksgiving Sandwich, the Day After Thanksgiving Sandwich, the John Alden, the Myles Standish, the Squanto, the Samoset, the Turkey Bomb, the TCS, the Black Friday Special, the Pilgrim Sandwich, the November Surprise, the Governor Bradford and God knows what others.

It is one of America's most popular sandwiches, and on the day after Thanksgiving, it is THE most popular sandwich. While the Fluffernutter is the Boston's signature sandwich, the Gobbler is probably the signature sandwich of Plymouth County. I'd actually use Bourne as the cutoff point from which the lobster roll asserts her sandwich authority over the lands across the Canal.

With the advent of modern appliances, the immediate post-Edison version of the Gobbler was probably invented on the East Coast by whoever got hungry first before the plates were washed. Just like the Earl of Sandwich centuries before, this god-among-us figured out that thick bread makes for a pretty good plate. Before someone invented the fridge, leftover turkey most likely went into a slow-simmering soup.

We "know" that the Earl of Sandwich invented the sandwich in the 18th Century so he could eat while he gambled, and never-you-mind better historical claims by Europeans and their trencher/open-faced sandwiches, the ancient Jews and their matze Passover culinary explorations, or the Aztecs and their corn tortillas (often filled with turkey to make history's first turkey sandwich, but the Aztecs were nowhere near the cranberries needed for the Gobbler). None of their stories involve needing a hand free to gamble, so I'm going with Earl. If you are patient, we'll tie the Gobbler back to him.

Turkeys, native to America, were introduced to Europe in the 1500s through Turkish markets via the Spanish. Stuffed turkey was popular in Europe by the 1600s, and bread was most likely on those same tables. Those are 3 of the 4 main ingredients in the Gobbler, but the cranberry sauce was a century away.

In spite of the fact that turkey-at-Plimoth was common knowledge, it didn't become the Thanksgiving anchorman in America until about 1800. If you need an English visual, remember that the Cratchit family from A Christmas Carol (1843) was going to eat a goose before Scrooge intervened with a holiday turkey and some Obamacare. Turkey was a popular holiday meal in America long before Abe Lincoln nationalized the holiday, and long before even that in Europe.

I struck out on finding the actual inventor of the Gobbler, and had difficulty even finding speculation on the matter. There were no claims made on it. Since my research yielded nothing, I am forced to rely on my own creativity and logic.

The Pilgrims look like a good bet, as they had turkey, stuffing (stuffing dates back to the Romans, at least), and- most importantly- access to cranberries. Not only access, but they also were essentially getting the first (white people) crack at them. 

They were slow to catch on, as the nation/world's first large cranberry cultivation system was established by American Revolution vet Captain Henry Hall in Dennis in 1816, but we were shipping them to Europe by 1820.

The Pilgrims were neither wealthy nor frivolous, and sugar is needed in large amounts to make cranberry sauce as we know it. 

The Ps might have used lightly sugared cranberries, as straight cranberry is too tart to eat enjoyably- even for someone who considered some nice salted mutton to be good eatin'. Such a thing as sugared berries would have almost certainly been a dessert.

All the necessary ingredients for the Gobbler were in place in some form at the first Thanksgiving. William Bradford's account put turkey, cranberries, and cornbread on the table. Stuffed turkey was a traditional holiday meal in the Europe they had just left. That almost assuredly puts stuffing (of a cornbread variety) on that table as well.

There were creative minds from a variety of cultures sitting at that table, and remember that some of those minds were quite remarkable. In that context, you'd almost be amazed if someone there didn't invent the Gobbler. It'd be like watching Tesla get transported to 2014 and fail to figure out how to turn on the TV.

While that doesn't solve the mystery, it gives us a basis for more speculation. Since we've narrowed it down to the table the Gobbler most likely was first enjoyed at, we have to- for the sake of everybody who got up on the 4th Friday in November and went straight for the hair of the dog- make an effort to name the genius in 1621 who put two and two together and somehow made something tastier than four.

I'll start by looking at the Wampanoags.

They shouldn't be the less obvious choice. They could make their own forms of bread, they had turkey running around, and probably had about 5,000-30,000 years of experience with cranberries before the Europeans arrived.

You can go to Plimoth Plantation tomorrow and see the Wampanoag historical role-players cooking cranberry cornbread (Nasaump) that looks a lot like squishy-style bird stuffing. They even made a cranberry boiled bread, a cranberry syrup called Sassamanesh, and had numerous turkey recipes. They were working with all of the ingredients for centuries.

Any argument against the Wampanoags inventing some form of the Gobbler pretty much hinges on nobody in 5-30000 years putting some meat, cranberries (cranberries were used when making pemmican, making the Wampanoag Gobbler even that much more likely), and some form of stuffing between two pieces of bread.

The reader will note that we mentioned ancient Native Americans using tortillas. Ideas move through different tribes just like they do with different Europeans, and the idea of wrapping food in bread could have quite possibly diffused from Tortilla Land to the Cranberry-Turkey Land. Once that happens, you just need one Algonquin genius.

You can run the Wampanoag-exclusive Gobbler theory right up to the first Thanksgiving. The Wampanoags introduced cranberries to starving English settlers, and they are almost certainly among the berries (although most likely in food prepared by the Wampanoags) described by Bradford in his account of the first Thanksgiving. 

I'd even pick a Wampanoag (not used to knives and forks and so forth) to be more likely to create a Gobbler when presented with turkey, cranberries, stuffing and bread than some scared and rigid European who was used to European table manners.

I'd even throw in the chance that some Pilgrim woman fashioned some sort of bread-cup and filled it with the Gobbler ingredients for a departing Wampanoag, inventing the Gobbler while concurrently serving America's first take-out meal.

The other option at that table to invent the Gobbler relies more on mysticism and legend... which you'd think would favor the Wampanoags, but they actually have too good of a grasp on Common Sense in this discussion to latch onto the abstract stuff. It favors Bourne.

I can make this simple. Even the most ardent supporter of the Wampanoag Gobbler theory would have to admit that the Great Spirit usually gives you a sign. While Plimoth had the more famous Wampanoag interaction and is the most likely Genesis Spot for a white man's Gobbler, the majority of trade between colonists and natives and the New Netherlands in the time following the feast went down at the Aptucxet Trading Post, in Bourne. There was a great deal of cultural and culinary diffusion going on in Bourne until around or before the Great Colonial Hurricane blew America's First Store flat in 1635.

If Plimoth was the Gobbler's Bethlehem, Bourne may have indeed been the Gobbler's Nazareth. From there, much like Jesus, it took over half the world. The ethnicity of the first Gobbler's creator matters less to me than the chance that someone from Bourne may have invented (or at least first ingested) one of America's greatest sandwiches.

The only problem here is that Bourne wasn't Bourne until 1884, when it broke away from the town it used to belong to, the town named for a British aristocrat, the town that wins the Pilgrims and Bourne the right to call the Gobbler their own, the town that grants my theory the approval of the Great Spirit, and the town that ends this discussion.

The name of that town?

"Sandwich. "