DOTD For Tuesday, October 14, 2025

A Holiday Drink - But Not THAT Holiday

Today’s DOTD - Drink Of The Day - is a Cranberry Rosemary Cocktail, inspired by a holiday that most people living in the U.S. today have no knowledge of. Today is Cranberry Day, a day celebrated on the second Tuesday of October every year by the Aquinnah Wampanoag, from the area we now call Martha’s Vineyard.

The Wampanoag are the wise & kind tribe that took pity on the stupid Europeans who had come to North America in 1620, & didn’t yet know how to find or grow food. The generosity of the Wampanoag was also strategic, as their tribe had been weakened by disease brought by previous Europeans, and their rivals, the Narragansett, were looking to take their land. So the Wampanoag helped the European immigrants, and signed one of the first peace treaties with a Native tribe, the Pilgrim-Wampanoag peace treaty. Their initial kindness inspired many of the myths & stories of Thanksgiving that many in the U.S. know today.

SSPL via Getty Images

While we may be celebrating them today - and we should - for the Wampanoag, today is all about the cranberry.

Cranberries are native to North America and have been a staple food and medicine for indigenous peoples here for thousands of years. The Wampanoag and Lenni-Lenape tribes call the cranberry “”Ibimi,” which translates as translates as “bitter” or “sour berries.” These tribes, along with other tribes from the Northeast & Great Lakes regions like the Ojibwe, Algonquin, Iroquois, & Cree. all the way to the Pacific Ocean in the west, utilized the cranberry for a wide range of purposes, including food in both fresh & dried form, as well as in medicinal treatments, and in making dyes for cloth.

One of the more intriguing ways Native Americans prepared cranberries was in a mixture called pemmican—sort of like a modern-day energy bar. They would pound cranberries into a mixture of equal parts ground dried deer meat and fat tallow, then store the mixture in animal skin pouches. “The fat preserves it, as does the acidity in the fruit, which lowers the pH and helps resist bacteria,” says food historian Ken Albala, of University of the Pacific. The pemmican would last for months and could be eaten on long journeys as a reliable source of protein and fat, essential for traders on long travels

Unsurprisingly, the dim-witted European settlers mostly ignored the Native Americans’ wide range of uses for the cranberry. In fact, they mostly adapted the fruit to fit the recipes and uses they knew from the Old World. After the 1620s, when Europeans brought over their honeybees to North America, cranberries took off in popularity, as the colonists added honey to cranberries in various ways.

While we’re nowhere near as wise as the Wampanoag, we’re also going to add a bit more than just honey for today’s DOTD, the Cranberry Rosemary Cocktail.

Ingredients

Here’s what you’re going to need for this drink: