The Beautiful Harvest | Cranberry Recipes

The New England landscape is so often portrayed as an austere place, the chilly backdrop to Pilgrim hardship, the model for Ethan Frome’s Starkfield. It’s this unforgiving land, so the story goes, that inspires some of our best Yankee virtues: our self-reliance and industriousness, our tolerance of extreme cold.

But travel down through southeastern Massachusetts in early October, and you’ll see one of nature’s most florid displays: 14,000 acres of shallow bogs turned scarlet in a rising tide of ripe cranberries. It’s a dazzling show of nature’s abundance–our own watery Eden–and one of the prettiest sights you could ever hope to witness on a cloudless day. Long after the harvest is over, the berries brighten our holiday tables in pies, sauces, cakes, and savory treats. Here’s a season defined not by its virtues, but by its pleasures.

Amy Traverso

Amy Traverso is the senior food editor at Yankee and cohost of the public television series Weekends with Yankee, a coproduction with GBH. Previously, she was food editor at Boston magazine and an associate food editor at Sunset magazine. Her work has also been published in The Boston Globe, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure, and she has appeared on Hallmark Home & Family, The Martha Stewart Show, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Amy is the author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, which was a finalist for the Julia Child Award for best first-time author and won an IACP Cookbook Award in the “American” category.

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