Hello, everyone! It’s the week of Thanksgiving for us in the United States, so we’ve decided to do a variety of things here, and mostly for the fun of it, just as on your Thanksgiving table you’ll likely find a variety also, turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy and corn or asparagus or some other green vegetable and cranberry sauce — there’s our Word of the Week. And more, of course!
When I was a boy, we usually had Thanksgiving supper at home, but after that we went to Nonna’s house, where a conversation like this was typical:
NONNA. “Tony, have a piece of blueberry pie!”
TONY. “Sure, thanks!”
NONNA. “Tony, you want a piece of apple pie?”
TONY. “You bet! Thanks!”
NONNA. “Tony, how about a piece of lemon pie?”
TONY. “That’s great! Thanks!”
NONNA. “Tony, here’s a piece of pumpkin pie.”
TONY (feeling tight round the middle). “Um, Nonna, I’m full.”
NONNA. “What’s the matter? You don’t like my pumpkin pie?!”
See, even I wasn’t quite a bottomless pit, though you’d need floodlights and binoculars to find that bottom!
One thing I loved for Thanksgiving dinner was cranberry sauce when I was a kid. And I still do, but ever since we’ve been going to live in Nova Scotia for the summer, I’ve gotten used to Debra’s and Jessica’s homemade jellies and sauces made from the wild cranberries I gather up there, and their relations the wild lingonberries, which the natives call foxberries. They are delicious, and you can freeze them and keep them forever. I’ve found, too, that neither one of them is susceptible to mold. They don’t go bad even if you leave them on the stalk over the winter. I’ve arrived in Nova Scotia in June and gone to my favorite cranberry field, and found berries that the weather didn’t pop or the animals eat, and they are — right through fall and winter and spring — juicy and delicious, and rich rather than tart or sour. They’re good for you too, of course, as the Pilgrims themselves noted, saying that they helped protect against scurvy and “hoof diseases.” In the far north, beyond the tree line, people have had to get a lot of their nutrients from berries, and sure enough, the Lapps and the Finns would season their meat with lingonberries, and the natives in North America seasoned their pemmican with cranberries, and the Pilgrims themselves harvested the berries for seasonings and jams, so important over the winter.
When we think of cranberries, we think of flooded paddies or bogs, and cranberries do like that peaty soil, but you don’t need to put on galoshes to get cranberries, because they will grow in fields with poor soil, exposed to the elements, along with their cousins the lingonberries, and blueberries, blackberries, and bilberries. And I’ve found lingonberries up there where almost nothing else will grow, except for wild juniper — places that are more like the tundra than like what the Pilgrims found in Plymouth. As for the juniper, it’s like wintergreen in this way: crush the berries between your fingers, and the smell is clean and sharp and fresh. Why the old-timers on our island didn’t flavor their moonshine with juniper, I’ll never know.
Which does bring me to a funny family story. The first time we took the kids to our little cottage in Nova Scotia, it was over the Thanksgiving holidays in 2003, and our next-door neighbors Tony and Helen, old-timers for sure, invited us over for dinner. That’s what people used to do, after all. “But they didn’t know you!” somebody might say. Well, of course they didn’t, and how better to get to know us than to have dinner? Besides, we had drivenup for a very quick visit, and they knew we couldn’t have had any food in the house, because we’d only just bought it. So we had dinner, and that was the first time in my life I ever had moose pie, or moose anything. Tony had shot the moose himself, if I remember. But before we ate, he asked me what I’d like to drink.
“What do you have?” I asked. “Wa-a-l,” said Tony, “we have beer, we have pop, we have coffee, we have shine, we have —” but before he could go on, I said, “Hold on a second — did you say shine?” “Yes,” said Tony. “As in moonshine?” “Yes,” he said, “I made it myself!” “I’ll have some of that,” I said. He brought it out, and it was a clear pale green liquid, which smelled like yeast or wet dough, and sort of tasted like that, if you soaked dough in water and then took the dough out and drank the water instead. He’d have done better to brew that stuff with juniper or cranberries! Which makes me wonder — I see that people have made cranberry liqueur. Anybody here ever tried it?
Here’s a note on the word: it’s actually from Dutch Kraanbeere, meaning crane-berry, which is what the English word was supposed to suggest too. As for crane, that comes from an ancient Indo-European root that was onomatopoetic: it mimics the sound a crane makes. The root gives us Latin grac- in graculus, jackdaw, from which we get English grackle, and those birds sound as clunky as their name does. In the Germanic branch, the root gave us the verb croak, which sounds like what it is, and Old Norse kraka, crow, and our own word crow, too. English heron comes from a different root which is also imitative. Lucky for that wonderful gawky bird that his name has undergone a few elegant sound changes in the last two thousand years! If we had to name him all over again, I’m afraid we’d have to call him a gronk.
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