Though the berries of the poke plant have been used for everything from ink to lipstick (Dolly Parton famously wrote about the latter in her inspirational book Dream More: Celebrate the Dreamer in You), you should never eat them – nor the roots, stalk, seeds or raw leaves of the pokeweed. “Those are things that people can be proud of.” “Most narratives about foods like poke sallet are associated with shame, poverty or desperation – but to me, the story is more about ingenuity and resourcefulness,” Costello said. As subsequent generations became more financially successful than their parents’, the need to forage wild foods dwindled. “It was a food that you ate mostly because you were poor, and that’s not necessarily something that everyone wanted to embrace,” said Mike Costello, chef and farmer at Lost Creek Farm in West Virginia. Pokeweed was a dietary staple throughout Appalachia for generations. To understand why it disappeared from Americans’ tables – and why it’s experiencing a slight renaissance due to the foraging movement – one must delve into the green’s storied history. I asked dozens of people about poke sallet after the tiller incident in my garden, and not a single person under the age of 40 had a clue what I was talking about. If you ask older Southerners, many still remember eating poke sallet, or at least knowing someone who did. Looking at the showy greens lining the fence, I suddenly wondered: do people still eat poke sallet? Now that I had an actual yard, I was determined to grow at least some of my own food. I hadn’t heard the words since I left my sleepy hometown of Sanford, a rural town (at least when I lived there) located smack dab in the middle of North Carolina, 25 years ago.Īfter spending the last decade of that time away as a Colorado-based digital nomad and taking an eight-month sojourn in Mexico, I’d just returned to North Carolina. The cooked, finished greens are called poke sallet and ‘polk salad’, a spelling popularised in Louisiana native Tony Joe White’s 1969 swamp-rock hit Polk Salad Annie. As soon as he said the words – poke salad – a stream of memories flooded my brain: how my mother and aunts would pull the car over on a country road to pick a good patch of poke salad, also called pokeweed the quick and precise way they snapped the leaves from their stalks the smell of my great-grandmother preparing the bounty in her kitchen, finishing the dish with bacon grease scooped from an old Crisco can she kept on the stove.Ī wild green that grows abundantly throughout the United States, pokeweed is especially plentiful in Appalachia, a cultural region that follows the Appalachian Mountains from southern New York State to north-eastern Mississippi, as well as the rest of the American South. My eyes followed his gaze, settling on the tall, leafy stalks of vibrant greens along the fence. ![]() “You’ve got a bunch of poke salad over there,” he said casually, gesturing towards the chain-link fence running the border of my property. Its operator finished the last row, leaned over the clunky equipment and let out a long, deep sigh – the kind that comes from physical labour. I’d been waiting for this moment: for the first time in my adult life, I was planting a proper garden.Īs I marked off the boundaries for the compost heap, a tiller hummed alongside me, simultaneously ripping up chunks of red clay earth on one side and spitting pulverised, marble-sized fragments out the other. ![]() It was Mother’s Day weekend, and late spring teased the three-month inferno that North Carolinians call summer.
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