Food is vital to southern tradition, and collard vegetables play a imperative function within the South’ s culinary traditions. A dinner party to the famished, a present to the powerful, and a convenience to the weary, collards have lengthy been held pricey within the food-loving southern middle. In Collards: A Southern culture from Seed to Table, Edward H. Davis and John T. Morgan supply this emblematic and loved vegetable the full-length survey its attention-grabbing and complicated heritage merits.

 

The booklet starts off with collards’ vague origins. Like an excellent detective tale, the hunt for collards’ domestic state leads the authors either to Europe and West Africa, the place they get to the bottom of a story as unbelievable and intricate as that of southern humans themselves. Crossing again over the Atlantic, the authors traverse miles of yank again roads, from Arkansas to Florida and from Virginia to Louisiana. They vividly recount visits to houses, gardens, grocers, farms, and eating places the place the various kinds of collards are venerated, from the favourite eco-friendly collards to the yellow cabbage collard and infrequent red cultivars.

 

In uncovering the secrets and techniques of becoming collards, the authors find prize-winning patches of the plant, interview “ seed savers,” and supply necessary counsel for kitchen gardeners. in addition they describe how collards made the jump from kitchen backyard staple to hugely valued advertisement crop.

 

Collards captures the tastes, smells, and prize-winning recipes from the South’ s most suitable collards fairs. They locate collards on the houses of farmers, jazz musicians, governors, and metal employees. family members to cabbage and broccoli yet better to either in dietary worth, collard vegetables go beyond human divisions of black and white, wealthy and bad, refined and rustic, and concrete and rural.

 

Food developments may possibly come and cross, yet collards are a convention that southerners go back to time and again. Richly illustrated in colour, Collards demonstrates the abiding centrality of this eco-friendly leafy vegetable to the foodways of the yank South. In it, readers will rediscover an outdated friend.