When I abandoned the Southern tradition of cooking collard greens with a
ham hock or "streak of lean" (bacon), I found that a big dose of tamari
added for the last 10 minutes of simmering was completely satisfying.
We strip the leaves from the stems and chop the collards coarsely before
simmering them about 40 minutes. (The old way was to simmer them for
hours.) Rarely I add Bakon (smoked yeast).
I always put my serving of collards in a bowl along with some of the pot
liquor, usually add a dollop of mild chow-chow (a sweet cabbage-based
"pickle relish") or a few drops of pepper sauce (vinegar infused with hot
peppers), and serve with corn bread. Last night I added a half-cup of
frozen corn and a couple of minced jalepeno peppers to the corn bread
batter instead of pepper sauce to the collards. Yum. Left-over pot liquor
will be a hot beverage at break time for the next few days.
Incidentally, garlic was *never* used in Southern cooking until recent
decades--in the old cook books it doesn't even appear in the salad dressing
recipes.
Looking forward to New Year's Day, when collards are a "must" on the menu,
Bette
>I think this may have been covered in the last few weeks, but I can't
>find the recipes in the archives:
>Could someone please send me some simple recipes for cooking collard
>greens? I have a huge bunch of them, and I need to use as much as a can
>before they spoil.
>You might want to respond privately, if this repeats something that
>everyone else has already been through.
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