October 30, 2001

Collards and cornbread comfort food

Through A Glass Darkly, by John Myers, Internet Photojournalist

I was coming out of the bank the other morning and an older gentleman in jeans and a ball cap nodded and said "Howdy" and then added a comment about the weather. "We had a good frost this morning. Them collards will be sweet and ready to eat now."

And without even thinking, I replied, "You don't know where I can get some, do you?"

I'm a bachelor, living alone, and about as likely to cook up a pot of collards for myself as I am to suddenly sprout wings and take flight.

If it doesn't fit in a frying pan, it isn't likely to be cooked at my house. But I nodded and acted like I was really listening while the old fellow told me about a farmer he knows who is selling collards.

I guess I don't have all that much of my father in me. When I was growing up, a familiar sight was seeing Daddy in the kitchen, cooking up a mess of collards or greens with fatback or ham hocks.

My Daddy was a farmer and truck driver, and when he was home, he loved to cook and was very good at it, too. One of his specialties was spaghetti. He'd cook up the sauce on the stove in a big cast-iron Dutch oven, slowly simmering it all day. In his later years, he kept making it hotter and hotter - spicy hot that is - until Mama finally refused to eat it because he made it too hot for her to stand.

But I guess that's where I learned to like hot, spicy foods, even if I didn't pick up Daddy's love for cooking. And I have to also give him credit for slowly but surely teaching me to love collards and greens.

When I was a kid, I wouldn't eat greens - and especially those smelly collards - on a bet, even if I was really hungry. But that didn't stop Daddy from cooking them, even if some or all of his five kids turned up their noses at some of his favorite dishes.

Ever had brains and eggs? That was one of Daddy's favorite breakfast meals, and the name might put some folks off, but it really is good. He also loved scrapple, though I never much cared for that. I took his word for it that I really didn't want to know what was in it.

And he also loved chitlins and tripe. The latter is cow stomach, and of course chitlins are plain old pig guts. I did finally learn to like chitlins, if they're cooked nice and crisp, but I never could develop the stomach to like tripe, if you'll pardon a terrible pun.

And for some strange reason I've never understood, somewhere along about my middle 20s or so, I suddenly developed a love for greens of all types - even the hated spinach of my youth - and also collards, though their smell when cooking still just plain stinks.

By the way, here's a tip for fellow collard lovers. Put a whole pecan, in the shell, in the pot with the collards when you're boiling them. For some unknown reason, the pecan soaks up all the stink.

So you can cook collards in your house without having to take down all the curtains afterward and wash them to get rid of the stink. And you can even eat the pecan after it dries out if you'd like.

And my Daddy made the best fried rabbit and rabbit gravy you ever had the privilege of putting in your mouth. Lord, that makes me hungry, just to think about it. I haven't had any fried rabbit and gravy, with a mess of collards and cornbread, since my Daddy died.

Won't somebody out there with a collard patch invite me to supper? I'll even come by early and bring a pecan with me.