Eat Your Greens

While the south’s reputation for butter and lard was well earned, every great southern cook knew how to prepare and preserve vegetables at a high level. 

In the late summer/early fall months, as the vegetable harvest reached its peak and hog slaughter was still around the corner, Appalachian table legs quivered under the weight of seasonal vegetables’ bounty. Indeed, vegetables may have been the only thing eaten at many meals.

The notion that southern food is so meat centered probably evolves out of the fact that meat, especially preserved meats from the smokehouse like bacon and ham, often appears in small quantities in a variety of vegetable preparations. During the height of the vegetable harvest it was likely there wouldn’t be a roast or a platter of fried chicken at the center of the table. But there probably would be a big pot of stewed green beans with bacon or long, slow simmered leafy greens with ham hock.

Kale, chard, turnip, mustard, and collard greens are probably the most known and often cooked greens these days, with collard greens being the ones most closely associated with the cooking of the American south. As with many of our southern favorites, collard greens made their way to the Americas along trade and slave routes from the middle east. Many European settlers had already developed a habit of eating stewed greens before coming here, but as usual it was the skill and knowledge of the enslaved African who cemented them as a staple across most southern regions. 

Collard greens are cheap, prolific, and easy to grow in even the harshest conditions, but most importantly, are packed with much needed vegetable nutrition. Add a little scrap of ham hock for some fat and extra protein, and a pot of greens is a meal unto itself.

So much so, that it’s said that the displaced Africans who cooked for their enslavers would stew the greens extra long, knowing the richest flavor and water soluble nutrients would leach into the broth, which southerners call pot liquor. They would then serve the lifeless greens to their owners and keep the delicious, and much needed nutritious pot liquor for themselves, which, on some occasions, may have been the only nutritious food available to them.

These days, the balance between main ingredient and broth in any braised dish is a testament to the skill of the cook. There’s only going to be so much flavor in the pot, so the better the broth, the more the roast or greens or root vegetables are robbed of their goodness. 

The greens I grew up eating were always long simmered and spiked with preserved pork in some form or another, onions and water. Sometimes garlic and aromatic herbs made it to the party as well.

That pork did very important things for the greens themselves, but more for that steamy, captivating bath of pot liquor. In addition to providing more flavor and complexity, smoked and dried meats are packed with amino acids, which contribute to the umami, or savory goodness, of the pot.

At The Southerner, even though we’re essentially a fried chicken joint, we knew we were going to at some point need to feed our vegetarian friends, and the menu was not exactly geared for that. So we took the opportunities we had to cook without meat where we could find them, and one of those came from collard greens.

Instead of falling on aged ham hocks for flavor, complexity, and depth, we reached into the vegetable world, which is abundant in amino acid rich foods like tomatoes, onion, mushrooms, and garlic. We went heavy handed with the onions and garlic, brought tomato along, which, in addition to their umami contributions, also added some sweetness to help balance the bitterness of the greens, and some body to the broth. Instead of water, we used mushroom broth as the base of our pot liquor to give everything a leg up. And to finish the one two umami punch, we once again reached for our old friend miso. 

For those of you who do not know, miso is a fermented vegetable paste that is common in eastern cooking, most notably, in Japan and China. A cooked vegetable that is high in amino acids, often soybeans, but can also be made from barley, chick peas, split peas, and, well, any vegetable that has a lot of amino acids in it, undergoes a fermentation process brought on by a mold known as koji, which breaks down long chains of amino acids into shorter ones which the human palate recognizes as deeply savory. The fermented vegetables are then salted and left to age until the miso master determines they’re done, and goes off into the world to flavor a variety of traditional foods and sake.

Because miso comes up from the cellar, just as country ham does, it contributes to pot liquor in much the same way. It brings salt, funk, and umami in ways that make meat go unmissed even by the most ardent carnivore.

When I walk through The Southerner’s kitchen at full swing, when it’s full of the smell of  biscuits  browning and crisping, and fried chicken crackling from the fryer, my forever favorite aroma, here or from any other kitchen I know, is the earthy, nurturing warm breeze billowing from a slow simmering pot of collard greens.