Stewing Cranberries with Groucho & Woolsey

So last night I’m watching an old Wheeler & Woolsey¹ comedy from 1931 and came across a surprising line of dialog. Robert Woolsey’s character is describing the lost loves of his past. Of one he states: “But that gal could cook. She proved to me that when cranberries are stewed they make better applesauce than prunes any day.”

An amusing, but odd line. But it jumped out at me because it’s extremely similar to a line from a Marx Brothers movie, released the previous year. In Animal Crackers, Groucho and a secondary character (Chandler) have a long scene of typically quick dialog. During a portion of the banter on art, Groucho says, “Well, art is art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west, and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce, they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.”

This is a little surprising, isn’t it? The lines are far too similar to be just a coincidental repetition. But if you’re going to steal a line from the Marx Brothers, why that one?

Curious as to whether there is some joke I’m missing (I always assumed the Groucho line was just Marxian surrealism), I plugged “cranberries stewed prunes” into Google. The first link that comes up is actually a result from books.google.com which presents a scanned book from 1856 called “A Complete Manual for Ladies, Housekeepers and Cooks” written by William Vollmer.

This is not at all helpful for understanding the jokes, but is a remarkable discovery all the same. I had no idea that those three items came equipped with user’s guides! Who knew that all my woman troubles might be solved with a simple RTFM? The next time I entertain a young lady, I will follow this book’s example: pre-heat her in a moderately warmed oven, gently stir her in a light chicken broth and cover her in a thin layer of lard. I feel certain that she will appreciate my kitchen abilities and 19th century manners and charm.

But this brings us no closer to understanding the similarity between the two lines of dialog, and frankly Google just isn’t helping. A broad search on the relevant terms just brings up a lot of recipes. And a more narrowly focused search simply pulls up the Animal Crackers dialog from collections of movie and Marx Brothers quotes.

I suspect there may have been a radio commercial jingle or a product tagline that they’re both parodying. If so, it’s probably lost to time now. I also suspect that until I figure out for sure what the hell is going on, it’s going to nag and nag at me until my mind collapses in some kind of Lovecraftian mental overload.

(I’m also hoping someone who knows something about food will reply and tell me that I’m missing something completely obvious — that cranberries and applesauce are inherently something and that prunes and rhubarb are inherently something else. Help me out here, people!)

This article was originally posted November 20, 2010 and I am no closer to figuring out what these two different movies are parodying.

¹ Unless you dive into the one-dollar DVD bin at Wal*Mart with the frequency I do or watch more TCM than is healthy, you probably haven’t heard of Wheeler & Woolsey. They were a popular comedy pairing from the 1930s although for one reason or another haven’t really stood the test of time like a Laurel & Hardy or an Abbott & Costello have.