Produce

Collard Greens

Collard greens' naturally tough, fibrous leaves are well suited to long, slow cooking, traditionally simmered for an extended time, often with a smoked ham hock, in Southern US cooking.

They're closely related to kale, both cultivated varieties of the same broader Brassica species, sharing a similarly sturdy leaf structure among leafy greens.

Unlike a more delicate green like spinach, collards hold their structure well through a long simmer without disintegrating, which is exactly why the traditional slow-cooked preparation works so well with them.

Collard greens are grown and eaten across a much wider span of history and geography than their strong Southern US association suggests — the plant is an ancient one, cultivated by Greeks and Romans thousands of years before it became a defining ingredient in African American foodways, brought to the American South initially through the transatlantic slave trade and adapted into the dish now recognized nationally.

"Pot likker," the flavorful cooking liquid left behind after collards are simmered for hours with a smoked ham hock or other pork, is traditionally considered too valuable to pour down the drain — it's spooned over cornbread or saved as a base for another pot of greens, a practice reflecting the same waste-nothing resourcefulness that shaped much of traditional Southern cooking built around a smoked pork bone.

Collards are traditionally part of a New Year's Day meal across the American South, served alongside black-eyed peas and cornbread, where the greens' color is said to symbolize paper money and good fortune for the coming year, a folk tradition with no verified historical origin but one still widely observed.

A quick way to shred a large stack of collard leaves for a faster-cooking preparation is to stack several leaves, roll them tightly like a cigar, and slice across the roll into thin ribbons (a technique called chiffonade), which shortens the cooking time considerably compared to simmering whole or roughly torn leaves for hours.

Collard greens are notably more resistant to frost than many other leafy greens, and some growers and cooks maintain that a light frost actually improves their flavor by converting some of the plant's starches to sugar, similar to the sweetening effect cold weather has on parsnips and Brussels sprouts left in the ground later into the season.

The stem running up the center of each collard leaf is notably tougher than the leafy blade around it and is usually stripped out before cooking, either by folding the leaf in half and slicing along the stem or by simply pulling the blade away from it by hand, a step most cooks find worth the extra minute since the stem otherwise stays fibrous even after a long simmer that fully softens the leaf itself.

Because a full head of collards takes up considerable space raw but cooks down dramatically in volume, a pot that looks impossibly overfilled with just-added raw leaves usually settles down to a much more modest, manageable amount within the first several minutes of cooking, a wilting behavior collards share with other leafy greens like spinach but on a larger scale given how much bigger and sturdier collard leaves start out.