Talking Southern – Greens and Peas

      A longtime Southern tradition is eating greens and peas on New Year’s Day.   While your compiler doubts that bad luck will befall us if we fail to do so, very few of us are willing to chance not dining on such marvelous viands each January 1.

     The greens are usually either turnips or collards.   Your compiler likes both, but will add this bit of intel:  collard leaves are much, MUCH easier to clean and de-stem than turnips; so much easier that he always goes for collards now, and never turnip greens, when shopping the week after Christmas. 

     There are two traditional ways to cook collard (or turnip) greens.  Both involve the greens themselves, water, and side meat or a ham hock.  One such method is on the stovetop in a large covered pot.   One does not want to “drown” his or her greens or cook them for too long – that makes them slick and quite frankly unfit to eat.   Rather, one starts out with just enough water in the pot to keep the leaves from burning up – maybe an inch in the bottom of the pot at a time – and then keep adding a little water as the old water cooks away, till raw greens cook down and are tender but not slick.   This takes time and attention, which is why your compiler loves it when his wife volunteers to cook the greens.

     She uses the second method – pressure cooking, which she grew up using but which your compiler did not, for very good reason.  You see, there was once an unsophisticated old woman in Brooks named Cloteel, who looked up to your compiler’s grandmother, called her “Twinsie,” occasionally sought her advice or aid, and once nearly came a cropper, as the Brits say, with a pressure cooker.  

     In the early 1960s, Cloteel’s husband, in a rare burst of matrimonial thoughtfulness, gave her one of the new cooking vessels. She promptly threw in a hunk of side meat, washed and stemmed her greens, and put it on the stove to boil.  The thing got to whistling and rattling as pressure cookers of the day were wont to do, and Cloteel couldn’t figure out why something so brand-spanking new was making so much racket.  So she put a toothpick into the steam valve’s hole. 

    Fortunately, Cloteel was across her kitchen when the thing blew, and blessedly, the force of the blast went vertically rather than laterally.  Even so, Cloteel’s hair and clothing were covered with wilted collards.  

     No one else was home, the house had no phone, so Cloteel walked two miles, all the way through downtown Brooks, to get to her Twinsie.   Your compiler’s mother answered the door, and was confronted with an old woman with soggy collard greens in her hair, all over her house dress, and hanging like Spanish moss from her glasses legs.  She called for her mother-in-law, who loaded Twinsie into her silver 1960 Chevrolet Bel Air and headed to the Sams Clinic in Fayetteville, where it was determined that Cloteel’s burns were mostly superficial.   But no one in your compiler’s family of origin ever used a pressure cooker after that day. 

     Enough on greens – whether hanging from eyeglasses or not – so now on to peas.   Blackeyes are the legume of choice for a Southerner’s New Year’s feast, for a reason your pinto-preferring compiler has never quite understood.   But soaked dried blackeyes cooked with side meat, either on the stovetop or in a slow cooker, are a fine accompaniment to the greens, cornbread (never with any sugar in it), and meat (usually a pork roast in your compiler’s tribe) always served on New Year’s.

     Some say greens and peas represent dollars and cents, which should flow to us if we eat properly on the first day of the year.  Others say marauding Yankee soldiers and their horses in 1864 didn’t know what to do with the collards and dried peas they found on Southern farmsteads, so greens and peas were about all that was left to eat after the foraging invaders passed through.  

     But regardless of the reason, and regardless of your tradition, your compiler wishes each reader all the best in the New Year.  May the nation’s Semiquincentennial prove our best year yet!