Red and Green
By Allison Collins
Holiday Bark
4
THE DAILY STAR e Holiday Guide 2020
T
his recipe takes a holiday staple – cranberries – out of the can or sauce bowl and off the tree, pairing the dried berries with festive green pistachios and dark chocolate. Red and Green Holiday Bark is simple to make and uses few ingredients, but looks elegant enough to give as a gift. And, while fresh cranberries are known for their tart flavor (early Native American names for the fruit translate to “bitter” or “sour berries,” according to a 2013 National Geographic article), the sweeter dried berries complement the rich bitterness of good dark chocolate. According to a 2016 Martha Stewart Living article, Americans eat roughly 400 million pounds of cranberries annually, “20% of which are consumed during the week of Thanksgiving.” Beyond being bright, shiny and crimson-skinned, cranberries’ connection to the holiday season makes historical sense. The antioxidant-rich berries are available through the cooler months and, unlike most fruits, keep well. Native to North America, the cranberry variety associated with contemporary traditions grows abundantly throughout New England and the Pacific Northwest. That, and they’ve long been versatile. “Native Americans ate cranberries as fresh fruit, dried the fruit and formed them into cakes to store and made tea out of the leaves,” the National Geographic piece notes. “The Inuktitut of eastern Canada used the cranberry leaves as a tobacco substitute. Cree boiled the fruit and used it to dye porcupine quills for clothing and jewelry. Chippewa used cranberries as bait to trap the snowshoe hare.” The berries, the article continues, are also “thought to help prevent heart disease” and were used by Native Americans as “blood purifiers, a laxative and … for treating fever, stomach cramps and childbirth-related injuries.” “The Wampanoag tribe used cranberries for a variety of things, including dye, medicine and food,” the Martha Stewart Living piece echoes. Though early colonists were slow to avail themselves of the berries’ many uses, they did make note of them. The National Geographic piece states: “Colonists (called them) craneberries, for the way the flower, produced in June before the fruit grows, resembles the head and bill of a sandbill; fenberries, for the fens—an antiquated word for bogs—where cranberries grow; and bearberries, for the bears that were, apparently, often seen snacking on them.” Though it’s debatable whether or not cranberries featured on the mythic ThanksBreak cooled bark into random, jagged chunks. giving table of 1621, this cranberry-studded bark will look lovely on your holiday table this year.
