Estate Living November 2016 Digital Issue | Page 69

into a vortex, and are sucked up into a rudimentary sorter from which they are sprayed onto the
back of a truck. And, yes, the entire lake is a deep, dark red.
Cranberries need cold winters and hot summers, and there’s nowhere in South Africa that they
grow, so until I’d arrived at the farm, my sole experience of them had been in the form of juice
or dried or frozen berries. And I’d always whinged about the fact that most dried cranberries are
so heavily sweetened that it’s hard to figure out what they actually taste like. The explanation
I’d been given is that they are so incredibly sour that it’s impossible to eat one unsweetened.
the cranberry lake with our guide was to fish out a few berries that had escaped the booms and
were floating along the shoreline. Keeping a few for myself, I handed a couple to my friends,
Steve and Lisa. The guide laughed and said, “Oh good. Now we get to see the cranberry face.”
I popped a berry in my mouth and munched. Yes, it was a bit sour, but really not remotely
inedible. I think the bit that gets most people is probably the slightly astringent aftertaste. But,
honestly, I loved them and so did my friends, so we munched on them pretty much throughout
the tour – much to the surprise of the guide.
We ended up at a lovely cranberry farm stall, where we bought about half a kilo of fresh
cranberries, sipped cranberry juice (sweetened, of course) and munched on cranberry macaroons
and chocolate-coated cranberries. When we got back to Boston, we made cranberry pumpkin
muffins – very traditional for that time of year in the US. We did the usual: trawled the web till
we found a recipe – one with gluten-free flour.
Well, the flavour was awesome, but gluten-free flour produces an object that is closer to a
cultural weapon than a muffin. So I’ve modified the recipe slightly. And, of course, we don’t get
fresh cranberries here, so you can use frozen ones − or dried. But try to find the ones sweetened
with pineapple juice, because they’re not as sickly sweet.
Jen Stern

69
EAT, DRINK, TRAVEL

Well, that’s a challenge I couldn’t refuse. So one of the first things I did as we strolled around