Blacks, whites and greens

Greens (kale or chard) are also an Italian thing. My family consumes several bunches of kale each week eating beans and greens--basically braised kale with cannellini beans, olive oil, garlic and onions.>

Beans, rice, salt pork, jerked beef, innard, and collard greens are very much a rural Brazilian thing, too, and feijoada, a super bean-based feast, is a national dish that is traditionally followed on Saturdays by a nap in a hammock.

It's not that different from slave food in the US, minus the corn dishes.

My in-laws, Oklahomans mostly, did not seem to include vegetables (except fried okra) in their philosophy.

Then there are Jewish vegetables, cooked to a fare-the-well.

The common theme: "Eat, baby, eat." They're all too fat for our motorized life, and their blood pressure is too high.>

My family is from the east coast, and off the boat from Italy. We eat greens. Any greens. Cooked down and then fried with olive oil and garlic. My mom tells me that when they family first came here they frequently gathered dandelions and used those as their greens. We also dump all those greens in any type of beans we make.>

My grandparents were from Oklahoma and grew and ate greens. They did so with a pride that spoke of resistance. They were fully aware that it marked them as poor white "trash" back home but also knew it marked them as them and that they were anything but trash.

Myself, I hated them as a kid but love them now. I was actually reintroduced to them by Chinese friends here in CA that eat them with just about every meal.>

I'm white and all my family loves greens except for me. I'll eat cooked cabbage. Otherwise, I want my greens in raw, salad form. Cooked greens really are universally eaten here in the South by both races, with the exception of me, of course. LOL>

Oh, Rod knows me, but the rest of you may not: My grandparents were white, as am I.>

White, middle class, lifelong Alabama resident: I thought everybody, black or white, ate turnip and collard greens, although I guess they were not exactly at the top of the desirability heap. They were just sort of an everyday food. I suppose there might have been some kind of class or status thing involving whether or not that was pretty much *all* you had to eat. My grandfather, known as "the Judge," had them for lunch with cornbread pretty much every day (this was back in the '60s and he was pretty old then).

Actually I never cared much for them, but then I basically don't care much for vegetables, period.

Raise your hand if you ever picked cotton (with your hands). That happened to come up once in conversation with a black woman at work and her reaction was pretty much like the exchange Rod describes. I'm not sure she ever believed me. But I did. All the white farm kids did.>

Growing up in the 70s, white middle-class Tennessee: turnip greens often, collard less frequently, kale never.>

Hey Matt Stokes, would you mind posting your vegetarian recipe for cooking greens? Lent's coming up, and I'm going to need it.>

I grew up in west Texas (late 1950s to mid 1960s), and my parents were native Texans from Austin.

We never had greens ... aside from spinach, occasionally, and lettuce salads as a standard.

The comfort food I grew up with was Texs-Mex: nachos, tacos, chili, chili rellenos, chile con queso. Party food was BBQ steak and twice-baked potatoes.

Lee>

My white, middle-class, Californian mother cooked us greens of all types, as well as cornbread and hamhocks, etc. We loved 'em. My white ex-mother-in-law from Illinois used to cook up bacon and green beans just about every night.>

You nailed it, Ron. My father, born in the Missouri Bootheel and raised in eastern Oklahoma, always served up greens that way. And we're white. It's a regional foodway, not a racial one.>

My parents were white folks from Boston and Idaho, and we grew up eating spinach, chard, kale, beet greens, and Lambs' Quarters (the best of the lot). In stir fries, if my Mom was cooking; either boiled or raw, if my Dad was in charge. But we never did them up with bacon grease or salt pork, as I've had them in Southern eateries.

I still go out to the park and get a mess of Lambs' Quarters every summer, and share them with a friend whose Wisconsin grandmother used to cook them.>

I think it varies between families in the South. I grew up on a beef cattle/cotton farm in rural West Texas in the 1970's/1980's. One grandmother made turnip or collard greens at almost every meal, and the other one never made them. My mom made them a few times a year, but not often. Mostly I find them now at a couple of good Southern restaurants in the Dallas area. I haven't made them myself in probably 10 years.

Maclin - I've also picked cotton by hand many times, but only what the cotton stripper couldn't get - a lot easier than clearing a whole field I'm sure.>

Oh, and yeah. If its a dish from the South, Rod, there's gonna likely be either Crisco or bacon grease involved. *grin*>

Outside of the South, Southern food and dialect is generally considered a Black thing. I suspect this has to do with the mass migration of Black people from the rural South to cities in the North and in the West. They carried Southern culture with them, but the Yankees perceived it as Black.

When I lived in Inglewood, CA (a Black region of Los Angeles), there were fried chicken joints all over the place, and the grocery store across the street had a great selection of grits, melons, and various kinds of greens.

But I recall one of the first times I went shopping, had a big bunch of mustard greens in my basket and an older black man looked at me funny. "You eat greens?"

"I love 'em!" (I'm from rural Florida)

"I ain't never heard of a white man eating greens," he replied in disbelief.

(we both pronounced "I" the same way, as ah)

But it wasn't just greens, fried chicken and watermelon. Basic Southern postulates like saying sir and ma'am, lexical features like ain't and y'all, accents such that "I" is pronounced ah, and cultural features like the respect due to elders-- in urban California, these are all perceived as Black cultural attributes.>

My Chicago Polish/German families both cooked greens: Swiss chard and kale, mostly. Cooked with bacon, and then vinegar poured over it in your dish.

With salt pork, and fresh tomatoes sliced over the whole plateful, we called it "hillbilly dinner" - sorry for the non-PC name.>

Substitute olive oil or chicken broth (salt free) for the lard and you lower the cholesterol. I'm from south-eastern Louisiana (Slidell and New Orleans) and the whites who were poor ate greens. Up here, only blacks eat greens.


Clean 'em, de-spine em, thrown some Tony Sachere's or Zatarans in some water with some oregano, basil, cayenne, onion, and ham hock (substitute chicken if you won't eat ham, like half of the folks I know, or substitute sausage if you must for flavor). Boil 'em down. Add hot sauce (McIlhenny's or whatever) to taste.

When I tried to make them for vegetarians, I took out the meat and used oregano, Tony Sachere's Creole Seasonings, basil, parsley, gumbo file', and marjoram, as well as onion and anything else that worked (soy sauce is interesting).

Ham hocks and pork necks are high in cholesterol, and the folks with high blood pressure can't do it.

The classic recipe where I was is water (to cover the 2-5 lbs of collards or mustards), two or three BIG ham hocks or joints or a bag or pork necks, some chicken gizzards, salt, some onions, and whatever else your family wanted (plus hot sauce). It's like gumbo- no one has the same exact recipe.

There's some fancy greens among these readers.>

Well, Rod, don't know the Orthodox Lenten fast rules, but, if it involves no oil AND no meat, could possibly substitute vegetable broth, too.>

I'm from Florida and we've always ate greens and collards. Oh, and I'm white, btw.>

Black Catholic
Good tip on substituting chicken broth for lard. I also cook green beans that way. It doesn't taste quite as good as lard, but I might make it to 40 without a heart attack.

And your classic recipe sounds good!>

tmatt
I'm from West Texas and there it was pinto beans with ham hock (or sometimes bacon). Great on a tortilla or with cornbread, especially on cold days.>

I am married to a black midwestern man who has often expressed amazement that what he thinks of as "black food" is really just southern cooking. I, on the other hand, am amazed at some of the hang-ups he has about race and food. According to him corn bread, watermelon, fried chicken, deviled eggs, spaghetti with American cheese on top and any number of other perfectly normal foods are black food. No matter that I and millions of other white americans have always eaten the same things to him they are "black food" and in some way eating them is tied up with race in America. When he was a kid he went on a field trip to the Desabo Museum of African American history and had a traumatic experience in the stereotype room when he saw all sorts of figurines, pictures and packaging of dumb looking black folks eating watermelon, and chicken and fishing. To this day he can't eat watermelon.
This also reminds me of all the times he would say, "black grandmothers always . . . (insist on feeding you too much, put honey on baby's pacifiers, save odd things, whatever)." What was so funny was that these were almost always the same things my Polish grandmother did.
I think more than anything this whole thing points to the level of segregation in the North. Whites and blacks don't socialize together much and often have no idea how much overlap there is between our ways.>

This white boy who grew up in Dallas has eaten greens (turnip mostly) his whole life (they were hard to find when I lived in California) and loves them. For me, they are almost always cooked with salt pork and are best when served with hot water cornbread. My last meal would include greens, cornbread, watermelon, pork tamales covered in chili con carne, and numerous other items which generally are not found in any 5 star restaurant. I am hungry now.>

I grew up a white boy in Eastern Kentucky, and everyone ate greens. The area I lived in, in fact, was inhabited by nothing but white families (the only black families were on the other side of the county), and I never realized, until I was an adult, that there was a racial association with greens. Also, as with Rod, it wasn't until adulthood that I actually liked eating greens.

The main greens we ate were turnip, mustard and kale. Collards were less common. Also popular was poke (also known as poke sallet, not salad, or pokeweed), gathered growing wild in the edges of yards or in fields.

I think the popularity of greens did originate out of poverty. Greens are cheap, and from planting to harvest they take less than two months to grow; it is thus possible to get three or four crops in a season, if you plant early enough in the spring. A poor family thus saves money by getting more food out of a limited amount of land. Poke is not even cultivated, but in effect harvested as an edible weed; thus it, too, is an ideal food for the poor. On a different note, I think Elvis Presley once sang a song called "Poke Sallet". Anybody else know about that, or poke in general?>

My husband & I are both native Texans,we're white, and we both grew up eating greens cooked with salt pork and munching hot buttered corn bread which had been baked in a cast iron skillet. Ummmmm good!!>

marymargaret
My sister makes some amazing biscuits. She uses a sourdough starter that's been in the family for decades. Ask the cooks you know and you can probably get a good one. She also cooks them in a cast iron dutch oven - similar to the bread recipe discussed here a few weeks back. And Kannbrown65 is right about the fat you add. It makes a big difference.>

Greens (quelites) are also a Mexican-American thing: Verdolagas (purslane) stewed with onions and tomatoes, bledos (wild amaranth) cooked with pinto beans, and petotas (who knows) boiled and stewed with hominy corn are common summer dishes. Substitute spinach, chard, collards, or wild mustard for any of the above and you still have good eats.
p.s to Black Catholic: Good to hear from you. We've got to get together and cook someday!>

I don't know if the local brahmins ate greens in the small Appalachian town I grew up in, but most white families with working class or farm roots sure did during the 1960s and 70s. The only greens my mother refused to serve was poke. My maternal grandfather evidently loved it, but my mother thought poke was disgustingly slimy.

I don't remember her ever cooking creasy greens. Creasies weren't available in a supermarket. Poorer kids would pick semi-wild creasy greens wherever they could find them and try to sell them door-to-door. Mom never bought any. Just being neurotic ... afraid they might have been peed on by a stray dog, I suppose.

I'm sorry she never cooked them. The best greens I ever ate were creasy greens, served at a midwinter pot luck supper held by the Ft. Blackmore Ruritan Club in the mid-1980s. The best texture and flavor you can imagine.

Black people love greens. White people love greens. Let the healing begin!>

Greens are ubiquitous in Middle Georgia, where I grew up. The real question though is where do and where don't people drink iced tea? The single greatest culture shock of my life came at age 18 when I realized that some people drink *water* with meals!>

It seems we all enjoy our greens in Chattanooga, home to the wonderful Moon Pie. I never knew it was a "black thing" either until I met people from other regions. Guess it's like fried chicken and okra, in other regions, it seems only black people will serve them (especially in restaurants) so they think of it as "black food." Southerners of course know that it's just good food.

Nothing like a fresh batch of turnip greens from the garden.>

What an absolutely delightful thread!!

I agree Erica. Rod needs a lot more food posts. That was one of my favorite things about his book, and it made me take a much deeper interest in my families recipes too.>

There's a crude old joke whose punch line is, "Son, I don't think I would have told that one." Maybe I'm about to trigger that reaction by the following confession: I really enjoy great fruitcake. There was a recipe in Southern Living, I believe, back in the 40s, that's been made in my family ever since. Do I have any company out there?>

Midwest covers a lot of territory. In the Chicago suburbs we never even heard the word until the Beverly Hillbillies came on television and then everyone around us asked with one voice, "What are greens?">

Well, switch 'grits' with 'polenta' and the attitude could change. *laugh*

They're essentially the same thing, though don't tell either the Italians OR the Southerners that. Mostly different in execution.>

Anonymous Also
There are also about 100 different ways to fix grits, so if you don't like one you can try another. Try cheese grits, fried grits, or loaded up with butter and honey.>

Well, grits are, on their own, as bland as oatmeal or cream of Wheat, or any other starchy substance without any seasonings. And they can all become gooey, or thick and pasty, if not made correctly.>

Or just didn't like them. I don't like boiled okra, no matter how well prepared. *grin*

Little too slimy for my tastes.>

Mmm, right. Fried okra? Now that I can eat like popcorn.>

My father's mother, from Georgia, cooked greens, and a bunch of other things that I have since found out you can get in "soul food" restaurants and not much of anyplace else up North.>

Don't worry, I wouldn't either. *ick*

But I wouldn't eat what can be considered Midwestern farm fare staples either, like.. scrapple, head cheese (Two words that do NOT belong together), or what you find up here in Minnesota, 'Lutefisk'. (Cod soaked in, of all things, Lye. The texture of a fish.. jello.)>

PS -- Could someone who grew up in the South please explain to me just how much greens constitues a "mess"? ;-)>

I didn't realize lye was a marinade.

Remind me to never try that. :-)>

I still remember walking into the grocery and seeing for the first time fresh brains, pig snouts, and beef tongue at the meat counter.

Then also having friends of mine extolling the virtues of brains and milk gravy, or brains fried in bacon grease, then served with scrambled eggs...

****THUD****

But re Kannbrown65's post, I had heard of lutefisk, but didn't know about the lye thing. I'd always heard of it rubbed with ashes, though.>

Yep. Ashes=Lye. 'Lut' comes from the Swedish word for lye. It was to preserve it. Looking up the method of creating it (which is pretty weird), it goes..

Lutefisk is made from air-dried whitefish (normally cod, but ling is also used), prepared with lye, in a sequence of particular treatments. The first treatment is to soak the stockfish in cold water for five to six days (changed daily). The saturated stockfish is then soaked in an unchanged solution of cold water and lye for an additional two days. The fish will swell during this soaking, regaining a size even bigger than the original (undried) fish, but the protein content paradoxically decreases by more than 50 percent, causing its famous jelly-like consistency. When this treatment is finished, the fish (saturated with lye) has a pH value of 11 12, and is therefore caustic. To make the fish edible, a final treatment of yet another four to six days (and nights) of soaking in cold water (also changed daily) is needed. Eventually, the lutefisk is ready to be cooked.

In Finland, the traditional reagent used is birch ash. It contains high amount of potassium carbonate and hydrocarbonate, giving the fish more mellow treatment than sodium hydroxide (lyestone). It is important not to incubate the fish too long in the lye, because saponification of the fish fats may occur, effectively rendering the fish fats into soap. The term for such spoiled fish in Finnish is saippuakala (soap fish).

""Every Advent we entered the purgatory of lutefisk, a repulsive gelatinous fishlike dish that tasted of soap and gave off an odor that would gag a goat. We did this in honor of Norwegian ancestors, much as if survivors of a famine might celebrate their deliverance by feasting on elm bark. I always felt the cold creeps as Advent approached, knowing that this dread delicacy would be put before me and I d be told, "Just have a little." Eating a little was like vomiting a little, just as bad as a lot."

(Lake Woebegon Days)>

Anoymous Also
My grandfather ate calf brains and scrambled eggs for breakfast almost every morning until the day he died. Now he did die of a heart attack, but he was 80 and healthy as an ox until then. I never did pick up a taste for them myself, but they were pretty popular with a lot of West Texas farmers/ranchers like him.>

Someone correct me if need be. The way they told me: Dry corn is soaked in lye water (or wood ashes in water). The kernels swell up and split yielding a puffy, semi-soft kernel called Hominy (I believe the American Indians started it). Once dried, the hominy is ground into a meal called hominy grits, now just grits.

One Monday morning the operating engineer picked me up. He ran the manlift on the north side of the St. Lucie Unit One reactor building during construction. Elzie (?) was from maybe Fort Lauderdale. We stopped in Jensen Beach at a small diner for breakfast. He ordered two eggs sunny side up, bacon, and grits. When served he mashed the eggs and squirted a big shot of catsup and stirred his grits in with the rest. As his guest, I followed suit and have liked that combo every since.

Poke usually grows wild. While young and tender, the leaves are cooked various ways. The older folks'd say, "Eat them greens, boy. They'll clean yore guts out." They were often used as a spring "tonic" correctly known as a purgative, when consumed in too great quantities. At least they did me. I've been told that the older plants are poisonous. Ever hear that?


anonymous wrote:"...The only greens my mother refused to serve was poke. My maternal grandfather evidently loved it, but my mother thought poke was disgustingly slimy.

I don't remember her ever cooking creasy greens. Creasies weren't available in a supermarket. Poorer kids would pick semi-wild creasy greens wherever they could find them and try to sell them door-to-door. Mom never bought any...I'm sorry she never cooked them. The best greens I ever ate were creasy greens, served at a midwinter pot luck supper held by the Ft. Blackmore Ruritan Club in the mid-1980s. The best texture and flavor you can imagine.

ANONYOUS, What are CREASY GREENS? Was that a LOCAL term maybe?

An otherwise great cook I know insists on boiling turnip greens one time and serving them. She loves'em that way but they're way too bitter for my taste. Others have told me, "Pour off the FIRST boil water and boil'em again." Others say, "Tell'er to put a little sugar in when she boils'em." Any comments here?

My dad poured vinegar on greens.

WARNING: It may be a threat to your health & domestic tranquility to try and tell some gals how to cook greens.>

Ooh, the Internet is a wonderful thing.

Did a search on creasy greens. Found a section on 'specialty greens'.

Garden Cress. A peppery salad green that sprouts in 24 hours. Which means, like most greens, its probably easy to plant, grows quick, and cheap and plentiful to fix. And, I'll add, most of them are at least not unhealthy, and the 'dark greens' are actually very healthy. (Things like Iceberg lettuce falls under 'well, at least its not bad for you.)>

I was raised in Danville, VA. My Mom would send me out to pick "creasy greens". I would find most of them in a field that had been cultivated but not planted or had not been used that year for planting. The creasy had small round leaves and taste like turnip greens, but a little hot. When they went to seed the stalk and flowers looked a lot like turnip stalk and flowers. I thought Mom and I were the only people that knew about them. I have never met anyone until I read this blog, that had ever heard of "Creasy Greens".