Historical Notes about Cranberries

It is understood that there is a species of cranberry native to the North American continent and that Indigenous people here undoubtedly had their own ways of knowing the plant, but that is not my story to tell. If someone finds a great article about that send me an e-mail so I can link it here.

Some people find this surprising, but varieties of cranberries were known to Europeans when they arrived in North America. Vaccinium oxycoccus (northern cranberry) and Vaccinium microcarpus (small cranberry) are both native species in Britain. The English called them fen berries, moor-berries, or marsh whortles The Welsh called them llygaeron and Ceiros-y-waun. Clan Grant in Scotland wore Mùileag as their heraldic emblem into the 19^th century.[1] In Ireland, you also saw it referred to as monog (peat berry).[2]

They certainly weren’t unique to the UK though, V. oxycoccus grew all over the Northern hemisphere, including Sweden, Russia, and Canada. The name cranberry seems to have gotten its start in Sweden where it was called tran-bœr (crane-berry) which the Germans translated as krahn-beere, and the English pronounced cranberry. In Germany they were also called moos-beere because they grow best in sphagnum peat moss.

Whatever people chose to call the berries, they have been used in Europe for millennia. V. oxycoccus was one of the ingredients of a Nordic grog (fermented mead, beer, and fruit) buried with a young woman who died sometime between 1500 and 1300 BCE in Egtved, Denmark.[3] This use seemed to persist because in 1902 botanist Frederick Hulme wrote that “on the continent they are by Fermentation made into a kind of a wine” meant to be “an acidulous cooling beverage for the hot weather.”[4]

Northern cranberry particularly thrived in the lowland raised bogs of Scotland. The fruits have been harvested for centuries from bogs near Carsegowan Moss, Loch Ardinning and Largiebaan at the southern end of the Kintyre peninsula. In 1777, Lightfoot wrote:

“On the borders of Cumberland, they made so considerable an article of commerce that at the season when they are ripe, not less than 20 or 30 pounds worth are sold by the poor people each market day for five or six weeks.”[5]

Lightfoot wrote that in the UK they were mostly being sold for making cranberry tarts. Sir William Hooker whose botanical books rarely mentioned foodstuffs or medicinals mentioned that this species makes “the best of tarts.”[6]

For a people so conditioned by English physicians like Timothy Bright and Nicholas Culpeper, to believe that English plants were best for English bodies, there’s no doubt colonizers were quite glad to see the familiar-looking cranberries that grew in North America.

Even in Canada, Indigenous people were more likely to use V. oxycoccus rather than Vaccinium macrocarpon, which is the variety we are most familiar with these days. It has a really limited growing range.

What’s ironic given all the fuss about cranberry being a new world plant, is that in England they didn’t even really like American cranberries. When demand for the berries became too great for local gatherers to fulfill, the English began importing cranberries from Russia and Sweden. English botanists were saying as late as 1844 that they believed the Russian cranberries to be of superior quality to the American species.[8] Frederick Hulme, professor of botany at King’s College, refused to call the American species a “true” cranberry. An American publication written a decade later confirms this saying:

“On many of the vast steppes of Russia wild cranberries abound, and even amid the wastes of Siberia it is occasionally to be met with. Indeed, the Russian cranberries proved for a long time to be no inconsiderable exports of that country, and even until the breaking out of the Eastern War, there were to be seen…quaint looking earthen jars which contained cranberries for the use of the lords and ladies of London.”[9]

In 1672, John Josselyn reported “The.English ufe them much, boyling them with Sugar for Sauce to eat with their Meat.” [7] In 1771, Peter Kalm a Swedish visitor to the Philadelphia markets spoke of cranberries sold there saying, “the American ones are bigger, but in most things so like the Swedish ones, that many people would take them to be mere varieties.”

Cranberries as Medicine

As l switch gears here to talk about medicinal uses, I should point out that the Latin word oxycoccus translates to “acid berry” and the physicians used them the way they did many sour, acidic fruits.

The earliest documentation I have found of the use of cranberries medicinally is in an Irish monastic manuscript on wound care.  The earliest extant version we have of that manuscript has been dated to 1352 CE.  They used the seeds in a drink given to people with inflamed wounds. [10]. 

In 1554, The Dutch physician Dodoens wrote that the bushes grew in “low, moyste places” of Holland and that like other tart berries marrish whortle “quenche thirste, and are good against hoate feuers or agues, and against all euil inflammation or heate of blood, and the inwarde partes.”[11]

In 1597, Master Barber Surgeon John Gerard spoke of gathering the wild berries he called marrish whortes or fenne-berries near Cheshire and Staffordshire. He wrote of their properties:

 “They take away the heate of the burning agues, and also the drought, they quench the furious heate of choler, they stay vomiting, restore an appetite to meat which was lost by reason of cholerick and corrupt humors, and are good against the pestilent diseases. The juice of these also is boyled till it be thicke, with sugar added that it may be kept, which is good for all things that the berries, yea a nd far better.” [12]

Here we see the reasoning behind the fact people were serving cranberry sauces with turkey and making cranberry jelly.

Interestingly you don’t see much mention of a specific use for urinary tract infection, just general usefulness against inflammation and hot symptoms. ^[15] In 1863, botanist John Balfour wrote that the leaves of the plant were “sometimes used to adulterate uva ursi.”[16] Scientific analysis of the leaves has revealed that they contain the same chemical (arbutin) as uva ursi and pear skins. Arbutin, which is not found in the berries, is hydrolyzed to hydroquinone in the urinary tract.

It’s possible the whole plant effect might have contributed to a more specific usefulness in the days when people were a bit less fussy about some leaves getting mixed into their berries.  It is far more likely that modern herbal clinicians are confused about the uses of berries and leaves.

There you have a very brief history of the Western European use of cranberries which will surprise a lot of people. As an American I grew up using the indigenous species in a very western European way. My family recipe for cranberry tart is probably one of the oldest ancestral recipes I have.