Unreleased Tracks: Melancholy Cranberry

The last of my 3 unreleased pieces for The Daily; this one's kind of elegiac. It's about cranberry sauce.

On the night of November 27, 1864, as the chill of winter crept over Union and Confederate troops in southeastern Virginia, Heyward Glover Emmell, a 22-year old from New Jersey, ate well for once.  Emmell, serving in the Union ambulance corps, was sitting in his tent, “wishing that I was home to eat a good dinner, when Brother George came in with a fine turkey, cranberry sauce, celery &.”  The meal was familiar, but the components immediately recognizable today as Thanksgiving necessities – turkey, stuffing, and the all-important cranberry relish – would not have seemed as archetypal to Emmell and his brothers-in-arms, delighted though they were. America’s definitive national meal was still in formation. Public goodwill, one woman’s campaign to nationalize a New England tradition, and the practicalities of wartime came together on the bloody fields outside Petersburg to set the menu and assure the inclusion of the sweet cranberry sauce that Americans ignore 364 days a year but cannot do without on one.

The cranberry carries a rich history in the cuisine of both Native Americans and later Pilgrim settlers. However, while it may have been eaten in various forms at harvest festivals in the early 1600s, cranberry sauce was probably not part of these meals: cranberry sauce requires sugar (heaps of it) and in Colonial times sugar was a scarce, expensive commodity. By the mid-17^th century, traveler’s accounts of New England begin to mention a distinctive, sweet sauce made of boiled cranberries. But there was no inextricable connection between this dressing and the meal served to Hewyard Emmell, in part because there was no universal definition of the meal itself.

Until Sara Josepha Hale came along, that is. Hale was no particular friend to the cranberry, but she was a great lover of capital-T Thanksgiving, and it was largely through her efforts that a loose tradition became a national institution into which these tart, red berries could be incorporated. A poet, novelist, and editor of the hugely influential lifestyle magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, Hale conducted an indefatigable, decades-long campaign to turn New England’s secularized feast of “thanksgiving” into a formal national holiday. She also clearly articulated its blueprint in her successful novel Northwood: or, Life North and South. Hale describes a “true Yankee Thanksgiving” in detail, complete with stuffed Turkey and pumpkin pie. She makes no mention of cranberry sauce, however – despite having already singled it out as a favorite of her protagonist’s.

The popular story that brings Hale’s mission and cranberry sauce together is this: General Ulysses S. Grant considered Thanksgiving so important and the cranberry sauce so integral to it that he ordered the provision of said sauce with the meal to all of his enlisted men. Whatever Grant’s feelings, a slightly messier narrative seems more probable.

The Union army was six months into a bloody campaign to take over Richmond by knocking out supply lines running through Petersburg and the rest of the region and it had become bogged down in stalemated trench warfare that would ultimately last through the cold winter of 1864-1865. The conflict was grinding and brutal; “We remained under a terrible fire all night and at the present moment 3 P.M. we are in line for another charge I think,” Alex Patten, a young soldier in the 109th New York wrote in his diary, “I walked over the field of yesterday and found our boys and had them buried. There is but three of us in Co. today. 66 men is the entire strength of the Regt. I cannot write no more.” Mounting casualties became a source of public lament in the north, and citizens banded together to support the beleaguered troops by sending seasonal care packages, resulting in 120,000 turkey and chicken dinners being distributed to the wet and cold soldiers. The inclusion of cranberry sauce in these meals may have been practical: a seasonally appropriate relish, cranberries are a robust foodstuff high in benzoic acid, a natural preservative, and more importantly were known for their nutritional properties, particularly their value in staving off scurvy. To the extent that Grant and other military brass were concerned with the bill of fare, these functional arguments obviate the need for any sentimental attachment to a relish.

This 1864 thanksgiving, however, was the one that could create just such an attachment. Weeks before it, Sarah Hale finally won out: on October 20^th, Abraham Lincoln did “hereby appoint and set apart the last Thursday in November next as a day which I desire to be observed by all my fellow-citizens, wherever they may be then, as a day of thanksgiving…” While Lincoln only mandated a one-off, by November 1865 the North had won the war and a desire to commemorate the Union victory and affirm national unity contributed to increasing observance of the Thanksgiving tradition, now with a new set of associations sprung from the meal enjoyed by young soldiers fighting in that gruesome, pivotal, final campaign in Virginia.

The sauce, in short, was in.

All of which was probably irrelevant to Heyward Emmell as he ate his turkey and cranberry sauce, mashing the sweet of the berry with the salt of the meat. The men knew they weren’t going home soon. “The weather is getting very much like winter; we keep a fire in our little air-tight stove all night when we can get enough wood… Here comes another fellow with a log, we are all right for tonight,” Emmell wrote. He made it home to Morristown, but over half-a-million Americans he fought with and against did not. On that night, however, each army in its way observed the holiday that would become hardwired into the American calendar: as the Union soldiers enjoyed their unexpected repast, the Confederate fighters, entrenched yards away, held fire out of respect. 150 years later the meal is an essential part of the American experience, the sweet cranberry relish now indispensable to families coming together – many still with an empty chair at the table, a loved one much further afield than Virginia, but all still sharing in a meal to give thanks, in Lincoln’s words, for “the inestimable blessings of peace, union, and harmony throughout the land… assign[ed] as a dwelling-place for ourselves and for our posterity throughout all generations.”