NEVER Pour Out Your Collard Green Water Again — DO THIS INSTEAD

You poured it down the sink. Everybody does, and nobody ever told you different. That dark liquid in the bottom of the pot is not the water the collard greens cooked in. It is the greens. Everything water-soluble in that leaf spent 2 hours coming out of it and going into that liquid. The salt and the smoke came off the meat and went the same way. The joint gave up its collagen and the collagen turned to gelatin, which is why real pot likker coats the back of a spoon and plain greens water runs right off it. You did not rinse a pot. You emptied the better half of it into a sewer. In this one: which of the 3 greens does which job, and why collards, turnip and mustard never go in at the same minute. Why you wait for the frost, and the thing the plant does in the cold that has nothing to do with being generous. The hour the meat spends alone in that water before a single leaf arrives, which is the piece that changes the whole pot. 3 waters and why you lift the greens out instead of pouring them off. What is actually in pot liquor, including the part that does not flatter it. How the leaf tells you it is done when the clock cannot. And why the vinegar belongs in the bowl at the table and never in the pot. And the 8th piece. It is not a cooking step at all. It happens after the pot comes off the stove and before anybody eats, it costs nothing, and in February of 1931 it put a sitting governor and the next President of the United States into a newspaper fight that ran 3 weeks and pulled in more than 600 letters. Southern style collard greens have been cooked this way for longer than anybody has been writing it down. The liquid was never the byproduct. Keep the liquid. Crumble the bread. 👇 Dunk or crumble? And then tell me the rest: what did your people do with a pot of greens that they never wrote down anywhere, whose kitchen was it, what county did she cook in, and what did she call that liquid? I read every one. 🔔 New here? Subscribe for Southern food history told the way it deserves to be told. #CollardGreens #SoulFood #SouthernFood #PotLikker #PotLiquor #Collards #SouthernCooking #SouthernFoodHistory #FoodHistory #BlackFoodHistory #Cornbread #HamHock #SouthernRecipes #PutSomeSouthInYourMouth