Happy New Year, Collard Nation

You can always cook them outdoors

In the early days of her pregnancy with me, my mother would come home from her secretarial job every afternoon to the smell of collards cooking in my grandmother’s kitchen. It was a story she told and retold all her life--how she never suffered from morning sickness, but from a collard-induced afternoon nausea that grabbed her that winter and demolished whatever slight affection she might have had for collards before my incubation. 

Photos by Donna Campbell

There’s really no way around it. Cooking collards smell—strong and sulfurous. To some, they are downright stinky. Back then, Mom and Dad were living with his parents, and my grandfather Bomer was a dedicated grower of greens--turnip, mustard, and spinach--but his favorite was collards. My grandmother cooked them every day that he harvested them from the patch down near the pond.

Collards are generally the last leafy greens to grow well in winter here. They are a signature dish for New Year’s Day in the South, the leaves representing the promising accumulation of greenbacks or bucks for coming year. It’s a nice myth, but collards must cook on high for a long time to be vulnerable to human teeth. You might as well be trying to soften shoe leather in a pot of boiling broth.  

Collards are thick as corn husk--sturdy, fibrous, and containing good doses of calcium, iron, magnesium, and phosphorus. They also come with lutein, an antioxidant that counteracts age-related eye degeneration. Other antioxidants in the leaves work against stress and inflammation in the human body. However, because collards are high in Vitamin K, they can also interact negatively with blood thinners and can cause kidney stones in those so prone.

Though you may find them nearly year-round in the grocery nowadays, collards are mostly a seasonal heritage food in these parts because they grow stubbornly well in the poorest of sandy soils in the Coastal Plain of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. You can plant them even earlier in our mountains and have collards ready to cook by Thanksgiving. 

Hand-painted signs thus pop up along rural routes all across the region this time of year, offering collards for sale at farmstands that are otherwise empty except for bags of pecans harvested from lowland groves. Pecans have a mythic link to the stink, too. My mother told me about the pecan solution for collards, and Bill Smith, the longtime chef at Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill, confirmed it. In his book, Seasoned in the South (Algonquin Books, 2006), Bill explains that his elders told him how the smell of cooking collards could be suppressed. All the preparer must do is add four pecans to the pot of greens. Another remedy suggests that you can cover the top of the collards with slices of white bread. “None of this works,” Bill confessed.

Collards growing in the field are unmistakable--much bigger and darker green than their relative, the cabbage. If I had to guess, I’d imagine that collards got their name from the way in which the leaves grow like collars around the neck of the plant. The lapping leaves often have a lovely curl. However, the name collard apparently doesn’t even register in England anymore. The massive and detailed Oxford Companion to Food simply lists the name with the parenthetical (See kale). Then, under a long discussion of the finer points of kale, the word collard never appears.

Thankfully, the Etymology Online Dictionary goes a bit farther to tell us that collards are “a variety of kale with fleshy leaves along the stem.” The name itself, the EOD continues, is “a Southern corruption of the Middle English word colewort, a name given to cabbage and later to kale greens.” The first element is related to the cole in coleslaw and the second element, “wort,” goes back to the German wurz meaning root or plant, as in St. John’s wort.

Holed up in my cabin in the Blue Ridge this fall, I went on a tear cooking turnip greens, which I love more than collards. The recipe I adapted (leaving out most of the greasy meat called for) comes from the Loveless Café in Nashville, TN, a great meat-and-three diner on the far side of that city. I urge you to check it out.

The addition of honey in the Loveless recipe is unusual and successful, even with collards. To boot, once this summer, in the absence of any apple cider vinegar in the pantry, I added moonshine pickle juice to my greens which really made them sing! A heavy shake of red pepper flakes over the steaming pot is also my preference, though you may prefer to let individual diners make that choice once the greens are served. Bill Smith says it takes two hours minimum for collards to cook. For my greens, I go longer, starting with a strong mixture of the called-for ingredients and then adding water as they cook down over several hours, the length being determined by the volume of greens. Periodically watering down the pot likker as it is called, keeps the nutrients intact but can deepen the hearty broth. 

Loveless Café suggests that no salt be added, allowing individual diners to adjust according to their tastes. The salt pork or bacon in their recipe generally supplies plenty of salt, an ingredient that unfortunately mitigates against the healthy properties of the greens, so go easy. Bill Smith’s recipe is similar to the Loveless Café’s but contains no vinegar or honey. Instead, he adds a ham bone. I say, experiment!

In her new book, This Will Make It Taste Good, North Carolina chef Vivian Howard shares a recipe from writer, documentary producer, and author Von Diaz, who wrote Coconuts & Collards: Recipes and Stories from Puerto Rico to the Deep South. Braising the collards in coconut milk a la Von, Vivian’s adaptation of the dish also leans heavily on her flavor enhancing Citrus Shrine—a concoction made in advance that involves brining the pulp and rind of citrus fruits.  It is definitely a recipe I’ll try once the traditional New Year’s collards are behind us.

On New Year’s Eve, Donna Campbell started a pot of organic collards distributed by an outfit called Happy Dirt in Durham. At first the base of salt pork and onions sizzled fetchingly, but I could tell the minute the greens hit the pot. They boiled for a while, and I adjusted to the climate change. Of course, I’m not pregnant, and greens prepared this way get even better overnight. The smell reminded me of my mother’s storytelling gifts.