Posted on November 27th 2013
Cranberries and Cold Rain
By Alex Linder
[ The following is from a forum thread posting. ]
Ok...this is a test. It is only a test. Remain seated, standing, piked, as you wish. No actual guinea pigs, Northern Portugese, moderators, silverfish or coelacanths will be harmed in the making of this post. I will not tell you what the test is about. It's just a small private thing of interest to me. The less unintelligent among you can figure out what I'm after.
This thread is for your stories about Thanksgiving. Or your hopes, plans and dreams for this weekend. Horror stories or great stories, or stories of supreme indifference. What an odd term. Of all the odd couplings in language, you'd never think someone would hook up 'supreme' with 'indifference.' It doesn't even make sense when you think about it. (Lofty works better, to my glorious ear.) So don't. Just tell me your Thanksgiving story, if you have one.
Someone constructed a brilliant post at one of the Gawkers, it was an attack on vile food more or less related to this holiday. Most of its pick I heartily second, most notably green bean casserole and this horrid orange-potato mash topped with marshmallow dung. The devil would boot the latter out of hell for unnecessary roughness, as our football pals say. Trying to turn vegetables into dessert: what could be more christian-midwestern than that? I don't know, maybe it's a Southern thing too or actually or originally, but in any case it's up here for good.
Jezebel has its usual tell-us-your-Thanksgiving-horror-story thread, which always devolves into hate-your-relatives bitchfest. I posted this, since they're looking for negs:
CatFiveHimmicaneU
One time...long ago...it was Thanksgiving in Maryland, and everywhere else too. It was raining, raining hard. My dad and I drove about 40 miles to a Denny's. We had sad racetrack turkey slices with mashedish potatoes and congealed greenish gravy. It was a sad, rainy Thanksgiving.
The truth is, although it was superficially miserable, and god only knows why we did an 80-mile roundtripper, I guess out of some sense of dull supposed-to, as whites seem to do most things these days, I somewhat enjoyed the lugubriousness of it all. That cold November rain, though, that can be the most depressing thing on earth. November is the month of death. December is the month of "Gentlemen, start your engines!," what with the solstice. I love the very last days of December, when you just get a little change in the sun. Like it starts trying again. When it finally turns over. All downhill from there. But late November is as woegegone-dreggy as it gets.
Ok, now for some stomachwarming stuff.
I always liked cranberries. As Fortuna would have it, life afforded me the rare opportunity, some years back, to stay a few days in Massachusetts, with some people with a little land. On their land they had an actual cranberry bog. I spent some time communing with the tiny orbs, really getting to know them. Getting a feel for what they've been through as a people. Their successes, their travails, their complaints about working conditions. Generally I found them a happyish lot. No one living in Massachusetts under feet of water can be completely happy as, say, a mite on a liquor vine in Napa, California, but all things considered, their chowder wasn't going unclammed. Anyway, this amateur cultural fruitologist would say that cranberries are a weird northern vegetable that grow in a sort of lagoon. Precisely the type of thing you wouldn't step in if it were in La. or Fla. for fear of alligators. They are a kind of underwater berry, creepy in the "Last Dance with Mary Jane" video sense. But boy do they taste great when combined with lots of the poison called refined sugar, altho I, for one, never noticed it behaving any more politely than brown sugar. One of my treasured memories from early VNN is having the chance to credit the great thinker, the white rural genius, who came up with a better machine for harvesting cranberries. Some farmer guy, as I recall. [Ah, here it is.] I love the idea of some white guy just mulling this over for years, and finally hitting on the right solution, which apparently is a means of shaking the underwater bushes so that the berries float to the top, where they are sucked into the metallical maw of BIG CRANBERRY, as Drew Magary would call it.
But now...my story here was, like a child looking at things adult, I always thought there was some sort of magical culinary power required to create cranberries-the-dish. I truly thought it was like some master chef preparation requiring actual gifts and esoteric knowledge. Sometimes it's more fun to let things remain magical, rather than science them open and find the same old squashed squirrel. Nevertheless, if you want cranberries, and no one's going to bring them to you, and they're not going to magically appear, you have to make them. So I looked up a recipe. Turns out I was completely wrong. Cranberries are as easy to make as instant coffee. I was a little sad yet thrilled at the same time. Kind of like having sex for the first time. Homer Simpson wasn't kidding when he said that bit about food preparation. When you're a kid, cranberries appear once a year, magically, and ravish you. Just as suddenly they whisk away again, disappearing who knows where for another twelvemonth. Something is gained and lost when we transition from child to adult, from magic to knowledge. The lighter and finer yields to the deeper and stabler, I guess. It's still sadsome though. Cranberries are sweet with pain, like all good things and great changes in life. Birth, death, knife fights.
C-berries require: 1 cup of orange juice. 1 cup of white sugar. Heat up the orange juice in a pan, stir in the sugar. Then add 12 oz or 16 oz of cranberries. Heat them up till they pop. Watch or they'll burn over the side! When they start popping, which doesn't take long, turn off the heat. Pour the pan into a bowl. Let them set. In the spirit of our Puritan ancestors, let them sit in the bowl, cool their round heels, and Think About What They've Done. The confining bowl will serve as the Correctional Institute for Hot Berries. There's a reason they're in between the color of whore's lipstick and deep embarrassment. All cranberries should be fried in orange juice daily, to twist the old joke: if you don't know why, THEY DO. Cranberries do remind me of the lips of a beautiful woman, discreet and whorish at the same time, like all the best ones are. Their color is second only in beauty to peacock's-neck blue, I would judge it.
That is the it and the all of making delicious cranberries, one of the tartest and tastiest dishes on planets earth and Mars. One of the most beautifully colored too, as, in the words of a successful restaurant owner, "We eat with our eyes, not just our mouth."
If you walk into a Hy-Vee you can pay around $4 for a name-brand bag of, say, Dole cranberries. Whereas, if you go into economical German-thoroughthunk Aldi, you can pay, as I did the other day, 79c for a 12oz bag! Now THAT is a great price.
I hope you have something good to eat, watch, read, talk to and sleep on this Thanksgiving. As for me, I'm going to eat cranberries till I puke, do some shadowboxing, then eat some more.
Here's an exciting holiday song to lift your spirits. It's by the Divinyls, and its very jittery, which is how I feel when a jag's coming on, when the muse is blowing fecund.