Posted on Leave a comment

Greens by Leni Sorensen

Roots: Greens

By Leni Sorensen

Greens belong to all of us.  We who eat our collard, mustard, and turnip greens because we love them. We who might only get to eat them when we go home to visit the folks, or at the annual Homecoming, or when a neighbor brings us a bunch, or during Kwanzaa. However we eat them, we are those folks who do so in total wallowing enjoyment with little thought of diet or nutrition. We’re the folks who laugh about them stinking up our house as we go back for another helping. 

We praise greens in their greasy greenness, and we debate the best ways to prepare them, contrasting one style against another. We don’t discuss them as detailed recipes. Instead, we talk of technique and preferences: how to deal with the stalks, or whether to cook the meat first or not, or if we use  hot pepper flakes as a primary ingredient, or splash red pepper sauce on the finished dish. Folks can get especially het up over whether to use vinegar or not. Lowery’s Seasoning Salt? Rich with pork hock? Or meatless? 

A great greasy mouthfeel, that is the key to “the people’s” collards. Without that sensation you might as well eat, well, I’m not sure what, because all greens are made totally scrumptious by butter or meat or a cream sauce. I think those who cook without fats find their greens lacking that juicy, drippy satisfying full-flavor dish. Far better than greens in a restaurant are greens made at home. That way you get to have seconds and thirds and you get to ladle up the pot likker to sop your cornbread or biscuits. 

In my neck of the woods, the Central Virginia Piedmont, collards are the default green. Everybody knows what I am talking about when they hear just that one word. Black or white, young or old, out here in my rural neighborhood, folks who like greens eat them without much comment. No need to talk about something that’s just daily life. 

Recently, greens have been hijacked, turned into a trend by food culture crunchy granola types. Kale as miracle food? I gotta say I’m thrilled to finally see that phenomenon disappear in the culinary rear view. To my ear, just hearing ‘kale chips’ sounds like a punchline to a bad joke. Who the hell actually eats kale chips? Who actually eats them as a regular part of their diet? To me good food is not a “diet.” Good food is a rich and fabulous part of life. Greens are good food and being good for you is a side bonus. They are not medicine.  

Pots of beautifully cooked collards have long been woven into the cultural fabric of the South, as well as the region’s justice movements. In the 20th century, one famous participant of the Civil Rights Movement described them as integral to the “sacramental meal” activists shared at Paschal’s, a black owned restaurant in Atlanta in the early 1960s. Alongside black restaurateurs, Southern black farmer activists bought land and grew crops, including collards. Fanny Lou Hamer’s Pig Bank, and later her Freedom Farm in Sunflower County, Mississippi, the North Bolivar Farm Cooperative in Bolivar County, and groups such as The Federation of Southern Cooperatives joined forces from Arkansas to the Mississippi Delta to ensure poor local families (black and white, tenants and sharecroppers) had adequate nutrition and even the ability to participate in the agricultural market place. Greens played a pivotal role. 

My childhood was spent in Los Angeles and San Diego in the 1940s and 50s, when both cities felt more like small towns and were full of immigrants from the South. My stepdad arrived in Los Angeles at age 23 from Algiers, Louisiana. Along with the ambition of a young black man determined to succeed in a new place, he brought his experience as a cook. His mother had died when Daddy Robert was in the third grade and he left school to care for his four younger siblings while his father worked away from home driving the mule-drawn mail wagon between parishes for the local post office. Robert was a man who rarely looked back. How he learned to cook and who he learned from were never part of the story, but cook he could and did — simple straightforward, stick to your ribs Southern food. Red beans and rice and cornbread were staples at our house. Fricasseed meat and gravy when times were good, and greens most all the time, especially in so lush a place as California. He was the family cook in a way my mother did not want to be. 

Daddy Robert could be found almost any Friday cruising the various church plate dinners offered curbside from card tables. Central Avenue and Watts were the black districts in Los Angeles, just as Logan Heights was in San Diego. Thousands of black immigrants from the South brought their church food traditions into these emerging cities. From the African Methodist Episcopal Church to Holy Rollers to tiny storefront congregations with long complex names but only fifteen members, each competed  for Friday evening church-plate dinner revenue. Daddy would pile me in the car and off we would go. The ladies of each congregation prepared  their specialties. In my memory, the big vats of hot oil for the fish fry and the smoky wood burning grills for pork barbecue were handled by men. 

I remember the white paper plate with a white napkin underneath. The slice of white bread on top piled with ribs or fried chicken or fish, a generous square of cornbread, green beans or sliced tomatoes, baked beans or coleslaw. On every menu there were always greens. One often had a choice on those greens: turnip and mustard cooked together, or collards. For an additional cost you could get a separate small plate with a slice of cake or sweet potato pie for dessert. Daddy usually bought us one slice of cake to share as he was very particular, indeed persnickety and opinionated, about sweet potato pie. But that’s another tale for another time. 

When I was nine, we moved from the city to a pretty rural seaside area of San Diego County.  The move encouraged me to cook.

I started with Daddy Roberts’ basic menu of daily items. Greens were an important part of my learning. Daddy had the rule of three as I came to call it; dry beans must be picked over three times and any greens washed in three waters. The stem was cut out of each leaf as it was stacked one upon the next. To him stems in the greens were sign of a careless cook. Maybe artless is a better description, someone who just didn’t care that much. In one of his few remarks about the Louisiana of his childhood, he spoke disparagingly of those white people he called “po buckra” who were too lazy to grow greens or who thought greens were only food for blacks. He had respect for anyone (black or white) who ate greens in the same way he admired anyone who made good barbecue. As if in retrospective support of Daddy Robert’s disparaging opinion, a 1974 article about the “Cajun” minority in Washington County, Alabama, quotes a local as saying, “Have you noticed that none of the [Cajun people’s] houses have gardens around them? . . . A colored person will have a little garden with a few collards, if nothing else.”

When the stack of destemmed collard leaves was high enough, he taught me to make a tight roll lengthwise and cut the greens into about one inch wide ribbons always starting from top to bottom. Meanwhile, a ham hock and a cut-up onion were heating up in the big pan with water to cover. The collards would be added and pushed down to fit under the lid. We’d lower the heat and let them cook till they are done. To me, done is a smell as much as a particular texture because I find each crop of greens is a bit different even when grown in the same garden. 

Collards, Brassica oleracea, were known and mentioned in the first century AD in Roman records. By this date, there were already heading, non-heading, and edible-stem varieties.
Jump forward two millennia and the universal success of Brassica can be seen in the glossy pages of almost any seed catalog. I chose my list from one quite popular nationally distributed gardening catalog used by home gardeners and farm level producers because it is detailed enough to list the Latin names. Mustard Green (Brassica juncea); four varieties of green leaved mustards, and five varieties of the red leaf. There are three varieties of Turnip (Brassica rapa), a dual purpose vegetable that has both edible roots and greens. The Asian Greens (Brassica japonica, b. chineses, b. perviridis) including the Pac and Bok Choi’s number nineteen varieties. I would love to grow every one of the seven varieties of Kale (Brassica oleracea) offered. With sixteen varieties of Cabbage (Brassica oleracea var. capitate), there is surely a perfect type for any gardener. Chinese Cabbage (often just called Napa Cabbage at the market) is brassica rap ver. pekinensis, and you could choose between five varieties. And I’m not including in this long list the Broccoli, Kohlrabi, Cauliflower, and Brussels Sprouts that are all members of this magnificent brassica family.  

While this particular catalog only offers three varieties of collard, across the South there are growers, collectors and swappers of heirloom landrace collards from Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and North Carolina keeping old and distinct types alive and growing. Some have flat leaves, and some have curly leaves. Some have red veins and stems, while some have yellowish leaves. The annual collard festival in Ayden, North Carolina brings together enthusiasts to eat and share traditional lore of this most popular and historic green. 

Looking back to the fourteenth century, scholars of collards (a phrase that falls trippingly off one’s lips) have come to the conclusion that the British Colewort was the original antecedent of the common collard grown in the United States. One record from 1354 lists the purchase of twenty pounds of Colewort seed, enough to plant two acres, indicating the Colewort’s popularity. It was a plant that could endure cold and drought and was tolerant of poor soils. A scholar of medieval gardens says the closest plant to the early brassica oleracea still in existence is the Southern Collard despite undergoing many changes as it became more and more domesticated through the centuries. British colonists brought the seed, imported the seed, and saved the seed.  In  doing so, they initiated the diffusion of the many types of collards being grown today. 

Because African American foodways have been so closely connected to collards, the question has long been debated about a potential African origin for the collard. Recent botanical research in African societies where collards are being eaten today indicates that the rich inheritance of Africans and greens comes more from the several hundreds of traditional greens usually of the amaranth family that have been part of the African diet for millennia. However, in the seventeenth century, when the enslaved laborers in British North America and the Caribbean encountered the colewort/collard family, they were well prepared to add them to an already fulsome culinary repertory. 

For many years I have grown collards, kale, and Asian chois, Swiss chard, and Napa Cabbage in my gardens. Depending on the weather and the rapacity of the bugs, I pick greens everyday once the plants are a respectable size. As taught to me, I harvest the leaves from the bottom because it encourages the plant to keep growing. Collard varieties that have done best for me are Georgia and Vates but there are those lovely heirloom and various hybrid varieties out there. I know what does best for me in my plot. You’ll notice spinach is not on the list. I have never been successful with spinach; it either won’t germinate, or it germinates, leafs out, and immediately goes to seed. I’ll probably continue to waste a packet of spinach seed each year in stubborn insistence on one day getting it right. 

I’ve only grown a respectable stalk of Brussels Sprouts once in my long gardening career. That’s one vegetable that takes some serious attention, at least here in the muggy, buggy upper South. I do grow Swiss Chard because it is my favorite ‘sweet’ green. But in general I believe that when it comes to greens, the bitterer the better. As for mustard and turnip greens, I usually grow separate larger broad sewn patches of them for the hens, and any pig I might be raising. That way I can steal a meal or two through the season or add a few leaves at a time to my pot of collards to add some punch. 

Come the cooler nights of early fall these varied greens take off, growing like crazy as if the summer was just practice. The collard leaves grow as big as a two hands together and the plants begin to look like trees. I usually have to stake them in case of very wet and windy weather. I don’t usually get a first frost until late October but when it hits I build a frame over the bed to cover with row cloth. Covered like this, I harvest greens until the deepest cold of January. 

In the long run, some folks will passionately claim greens for one cultural constituency or another, or argue precise dates of first origins, but that is not my impulse. When I grow my rows of greens I think of myself as part of a tradition that includes those lovingly tilled gardens decorating the landscapes of Europe and Africa and the Americas across the centuries. When I’m cooking greens I always think of Daddy. I am careful to abide by his injunction to cut out those tough ole’ stems. When I am served greens cooked by others I am ever grateful there are so many people who love greens as I do.  

( From Crop Stories No.5)

Posted on Leave a comment

Paneer Wala Sarsoon Ka Saag, or Mustard Greens with Fresh Paneer by Nandita Godbole

Paneer Wala Sarsoon Ka Saag, or Mustard Greens with Fresh Paneer

By  Nandita Godbole | Writer | Roswell, GA

4 cups whole milk

¼ cup white vinegar

2 tablespoons mustard oil or other neutral oil
½ teaspoon cumin seeds
2 small jalapeño peppers, seeded and finely diced
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
3 lbs. mustard greens, stems and coarse ribs discarded

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 pinch dried fenugreek leaves, crushed

salt to taste

For the Paneer:

In a medium pot over high heat bring milk just to a boil (watch closely that milk doesn’t boil over); remove from heat and add vinegar. The milk will curdle immediately. 

Drain curds through cheesecloth, squeezing as much whey from them as you’re able. (Reserve the whey: It can be used to enrich stocks or for other applications.) Collect the milk solids in a shallow pan or into a bowl. Knead them with your palm until smooth, collect into a mass, cover with plastic and set aside.

To make the greens, roughly chop and blanch the leaves. Drain away excess liquid, puree the blanched leaves in a blender until smooth and set aside.

In a large, high-sided pan, heat oil over medium-low. Add the cumin seeds, jalapeños and garlic to the pan and cook, stirring frequently, until fragrant and toasted, about 2 minutes. Add the mustard greens puree to the pan and cook, stirring occasionally, until the puree begins to leave the sides of the pan a little. Add lemon juice and fenugreek leaves; season to taste with salt. Crumble paneer into pieces and add to pan.

Serve hot, with your favorite cornbread, and a knob of sweet butter.

(From Crop Stories No.5)

Posted on Leave a comment

Beet Greens Tart by Melissa Rebholz

Beet Greens Tart

By Melissa Rebholz

Serves 6-8

2 cups all-purpose flour, plus extra for rolling pastry

1 teaspoon kosher salt

12 tablespoons cold, unsalted butter, cubed

1/3 cup cold water

1 egg white

6 ounces fresh cheese, such as ricotta, feta or chèvre, divided

two large eggs, plus one yolk

¾ cup heavy cream

3 sprigs fresh thyme, leaves picked

1 bunch beet greens, blanched

salt and pepper to taste

In a large bowl, whisk together flour, sugar and salt.  Work butter into flour with a pastry cutter or by hand. (You read a lot about pea-sized pieces of butter when you’re making pie crust, but don’t worry about breaking the butter down uniformly, and don’t worry if the pieces aren’t pea-shaped. In fact, you’re looking for lots of layers of flattened butter between sheets of flour. That’s what makes crusts flakey.)

Make a well in the center of the flour and add the water to the well. Hold a fork toward the outside edge of the bowl and spin the bowl toward you while dragging the fork. When flour and water are just combined, and dough is beginning to come together (you can check by squeezing a handful of dough to see that it holds together) turn mixture out onto a clean work surface. Press and shape the dough into a flat disk. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for at least an hour. 

Preheat oven to 300.

On a clean, floured surface, roll dough out to 1/8- inch thickness. Place dough in pan, and, instead of pressing into place, lift it up and place it down against the side and bottom. (Stretching the dough will cause it to shrink badly during baking). Trim excess dough with a knife or kitchen shears. With a pastry brush, brush a sheer layer of beaten egg over the entirety of the dough, then prick repeatedly with a fork. Bake for 10-15 minutes (but remove the tart crust from the oven before it takes on any color).

While you are par-baking the crust, prepare the tart’s filling. In a medium bowl, combine half of the cheese, the eggs, the cream and the thyme. Season with salt and pepper and stir well to combine. 

Increase oven temperature to 350. Pour the mixture into the crust, top with blanched beet greens and the remainder of the cheese. Bake until center is just set, about 45 minutes. 

Serve hot or cold– for breakfast, lunch or dinner. 

(from Crop Stories No.5)

Posted on Leave a comment

Winter Green Stem Chow Chow by Greg Collier

Winter Green Stem Chow Chow

By Greg Collier | The Yolk Cafe | Rock Hill, SC

Makes 2 pints

2 cups chopped stems, such as collard, kale, chard, etc.

1 medium sweet onion, finely diced

1 red bell pepper, seeded and finely diced

2 small jalapeño peppers, seeded and finely diced

¼ cup kosher salt

2 cups apple cider vinegar

¼ cup light brown sugar

1 teaspoon celery seed

1 teaspoon dry mustard

1 teaspoon mustard seed

1 teaspoon ground turmeric

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

Place chopped stems and vegetables into a large mixing bowl and toss with salt. Transfer salted vegetables to a non-reactive container, and let stand overnight. Rinse vegetables well in cool water and drain.

Combine vinegar, sugar and spices in a small pot over medium-high heat and simmer 10 minutes. Add vegetables to pot and simmer until tender, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat and pack into jars.

Serve over grits and poached eggs. 

(From Corp Stories No.5)

Posted on Leave a comment

Feral Hogs by Allison Salerno

Feral Hogs

By Allison Salerno, Photography by André Gallant

A barbed wire fence forms the border between Donnie Wakefield’s farm and one of the planet’s most contaminated pieces of land. Here at the  South Carolina-Georgia border, the United States’ 310-square mile nuclear reservation, the Savannah River Site, was built at the behest of President Truman in the 1950s to produce radioactive tritium and plutonium-239 for the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal during the Cold War. 

Wakefield’s battle is quite hot: he’s out to rid his farm of feral hogs. 

Wild swine root through rows crops in at least 45 states, according to a University of Georgia study, munching up plants and profits as they go. But in southern river valleys like the one Wakefield sows in, feral hogs are especially destructive. 

 “My whole life, they’ve always been around,”  says Wakefield, 52. “But we seem to be getting a lot more of these pigs than we have in the past.”  Wakefield is six feet tall and wears cargo pants and an untucked plaid short-sleeved shirt. His hair is gray beneath his wide-brimmed hat; his blue eyes shine through fashionable silver wire-rimmed glasses. One-handing the wheel of his  white Ford F-150, he spits into a bottle of Mountain Dew.

Accompanied by Lily, his “very well-spoiled” six-year-old yellow lab, Wakefield takes his visitors along the puddled dirt roads of his farm to the first field out of the swamp — what he calls a “bait field.” Here’s where he plants rows of corn, hoping to lure the hogs to this field and spare the others.

The land, which he co-owns with gunsmith Jay Jarrett, is squishy underfoot, and the air is thick with gnats. It’s only 9 a.m. and the temperatures have risen into the 80s. Cirrus clouds feather the sky. The corn is high and has already tasseled, ready for Wakefield to collect from the air-conditioned cab of his Casc International Harvester combine. But not all of it. Some is damaged beyond rescue.

He drives along a swath of corn and finds a large flattened patch. The black soil is upturned, the cobs gnawed and discarded in the dirt. Feral hogs recently felled this section of Wakefield’s farm. He’s frustrated by the loss, but almost more so by the marauders’ inefficiency.

 “It would be better if they ate the whole cob,” said Wakefield, whose word choice is frugal and precise. The hogs enjoy nestling into cotton in search of respite from the humid summer air. But they really love to chew on corn. “They take a bite or two and move on to something else.” 

It might be due to boredom: wild hogs have nosed through the South for centuries, long before farmers like Wakefield showed up. When Hernando De Soto arrived near present day Tampa in 1539, he brought with him 620 people, 220 horses, and a big herd of black Iberian hogs. Their feral progeny now number in the millions, spreading disease and parasites and causing damage to land throughout the South, from crops to golf courses. These tusked omnivores (the tusks are actually teeth) cause such ecological and economical damage that their eradication is now the focus of a gathering each year in Oklahoma City: the International Wild Pig Conference. 

One early evening, Wakefield and his business partner, Jay Jarrett, 41, spied a sounder, the wild animal’s sow-led social unit, wallowing in a mud puddle near one of their corn fields. “Jay come across the railroad track,” he says and points. “Right there where that mud puddle is, right there, there was eight or nine of them drinking out of that mud puddle right there.

 “ And he jumped out of the truck and killed one, and the rest of them run back into the corn. As usual, I’m fumbling, trying to get a shotgun out, and they were gone before it was over with.”

Wakefield

Wakefield’s been farming—and dealing with the hog menace—his whole life.  He went to the public schools in Aiken, South Carolina, and grew up working on a 1,000-acre farm owned by his grandfather and uncle, closer to town. He and Jarrett, 41, became business partners about 15 years ago. Wakefield and Jarrett are among the biggest property owners in Aiken County.  Cowden Plantation, as the entire 10,000-acre plot is called, also hosts a hunting and game preserve amid the cypress trees in the swampier land along the river that forms a natural boundary between Georgia and South Carolina. 

Most days Wakefield drives onto the farm early in the morning and works until sundown. He and Jay, along with Larry Rowe, 54, work at the farm full-time, hiring some local folks at harvest. Finding part-time help is tough, Wakefield says, because people have had more lucrative options at the Savannah River Site. The U.S. Department of Energy facility employs thousands of local residents. Wakefield says even custodial jobs go for $50,000 a year, plus benefits.

“We have a help situation,” Wakefield says. “A lack of workers and this is a lot of hard work.”
That effort includes battling with the ferals sounders, who eat up 10 to 15 percent of Wakefield’s time. The season determines the strategy. In winter, with no corn available for the hogs to forage, he lures them with five-gallon buckets of corn in two remote-control traps. The state-of-the-art equipment, which cost $5,000,  comes with wireless digital cameras that texts him images via an app in real time each time hogs go for the corn. Wakefield then decides whether to click a button and close the traps.  

The technology is tricky to work effectively, says Shari Rodriguez, an assistant professor of Human Dimensions of Wildlife at Clemson University. That’s because wild hogs are super smart. 

Say a farmer gets an alert on his phone in the middle of the night. A text message with photos shows several hogs have made their way into the trap. The farmer clicks the button, the door closes, but two hogs in the sounder are still free. “If you shut that door, you’ve just educated the two outside the trap to never go into a trap,”  Rodriguez says. 

During farm season, Wakefield’s feral hog catching strategy is simple: Before dawn, “get out of bed, grab your .22 rifle and shoot ‘em,” Wakefield says. On a good night, he kills 35 to 40. The battle is time-consuming. “Sometimes you get lucky and you aren’t there 30 minutes. Sometimes, it takes hours.” 

Farmers across South Carolina are engaged in similar pursuit. A 2016 report by Rodriguez estimates $44 million in damage to crops, livestock and timber across the state. She surveyed 2,500 farmers and rural members of the S.C. Farm Bureau to better understand their perceptions of wild hogs and the cost of damage. 

“Feral hogs represent a really significant threat to native wildlife,” Rodriguez says, “because essentially the full grown boar or sow has no natural predator.” Mountain lions could be their predators, but they’re  extinct east of the Mississippi, she said. 

Rodriguez

Other factors feeding into the continued population increase, Rodriguez says, are the hogs’ low mortality and high birth rates.  Charles Ruth, who works for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, says that in the wild, females have litters about twice a year, bearing 5 or 6 shoats at a time. “They clearly have extraordinary reproductive potential,” he says.

Still, humans are mostly responsible for their rising population over the past two decades. Rodriguez says people have been trapping and transporting hogs outside their preferred freshwater habitats to other locations in order to hunt them. This practice prompted phone calls to Clemson wildlife researchers from rental van company employees, asking for help identifying the wiry animal hair left behind in their vans. 

South Carolina law prohibits the release of hogs in the wild as well as the removal of live hogs from forests without a permit, Ruth said, but hunters have easily evaded law enforcement by hiding them in windowless vans. 

The appeal of this particular catch-and-release practice is that while hunters have limited, state-proscribed seasons to hunt turkey, bears and deer, South Carolina permits feral hog hunting year round on private land. 

“It sounds like a good idea to have something to do,” Ruth says, but not when it introduces hogs to your property. 

Feral hogs were controllable when their geographic range was limited to riparian habitats. Now, 150,000 wild hogs are estimated to wander across every county in the state.

Rodriguez says even she has killed feral hogs “opportunistically” while deer hunting. But other hunters who set out to kill feral hogs for sport generally just pose for a photo with the carcasses and often don’t bother to bury them, leaving them to decompose or be consumed by scavengers. 

Feral hogs don’t usually make it to dinner tables. “They carry a plethora of diseases. The disease list goes on and on and some can be caught by humans” if the meat is not cooked thoroughly, she says.

The proximity of Cowden Plantation to the Savannah River explains why Wakefield struggles so with feral hogs, which start tearing up soil as soon as seeds are in the ground.

“A lot of times, you can smell them before you see them,” says Chris Boyce,  a 32-year-old graduate student at the University of Georgia. “When the wind shifts, it’s like the smell of a wet dog mixed with a barn-y manure smell. They are prodigious poopers.” 

Boyce walked Wakefield’s corn and peanut fields for hours this summer and last as part of a graduate project with the  Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, a research unit of the University of Georgia based at the nuclear site. 

“Once in a while, I’ll be working along the edge of a field and I will hear something rustle,” Boyce says. “Three or four pigs come bounding out and into the woods. They don’t look like farm pigs. They’re covered in fur from head to toe and it’s very thick wiry fur. And they have tusks.”

The project is funded by the United States Department of Agriculture to examine the economic impact of feral hogs. Boyce explains that not many researchers have seen this impact with their own eyes. This “ground truthing” work confirms academic damage estimates. 

The research goal is to figure out just when in the growing season the hogs do the most damage, so that federal and state agencies can target their eradication resources. 

“If you ask the farmers, the damage comes right after planting and then when the crops are maturing,” Boyce said. He walked the Cowden fields at planting time and one month later, physically tallying crop damage. His work was enhanced by a drone that surveyed Wakefield’s property and took aerial shots of the damage. 

South Carolina does not have a dedicated hog person in its Department of Natural Resources. Because the animals are physically so large, the point person is Ruth, who coordinates the Big Game program. Adult females can grow to 200 pounds and males to 225 pounds. Boyce said he’s seen a male hog that was 400 pounds. “They’re kind of like big game” Ruth acknowledges.

While Wakefield and his crew spend their days planting and harvesting, Ruth says a typical day for a feral hog includes “hiding, feeding  … and making baby pigs.” Feral hogs are what’s known as “opportunistic omnivores. They will eat just about anything they can get their mouths on, if it’s got calories in it,” he said. Their preferred diet is acorns and persimmons and berries, but row crops are too tempting when they’re available, and it’s the rooting behavior that destroys them. 

Rodriguez calls the animals “ecological zombies,” because “zombies will eat anything. And hogs will eat anything…They will make a living doing anything.”

Wakefield appreciates all these efforts to document and contain the hog population, but he knows there’s only so much the researchers can do to contain the beasts. 

“They are a nuisance and that’s being kind,” he says. “They’ve been here since I’ve been here and they’ll be here when I leave.”

(From Crop Stories No.6)

Posted on Leave a comment

Pozole Rojo de Puerco by Maricela Vega

Recipe: Pozole Rojo de Puerco

Maricela Vega / Chicomecóatl / Atlanta, Georgia

Pozole is slow food. It’s a leading up to process that is suited perfectly for the kitchen fiend just like my grandmother was and I am. Ma Diega was always awake by 4 a.m. to cook. While she waited for one ingredient, she would hop to another part of the dish. By 6 p.m., the entire patió would fill a smokey, savory smell. Most times no announcement was made when food was ready because, all twenty members of the family would come walking up to the kitchen from the smells.

She prepared pozole for me the minute she knew I would be coming to the village, as its my favorite dish of all time. The ingredients were also always available: we always had maize and chile peppers on hand from our harvest; my aunt Angelina raised livestock so she would select the pork the morning of the big feast. A pig would be sacrificed to welcome us back home since in those days sacrificing an animal was done only for special occasions.

Most summers aunts, uncles, cousins and all tried to meet at my grandmother’s house in Guanajuato for two weeks. Those who returned had left to help build a better life for themselves and family; some were lucky to have left at the time visas and citizenships were being granted without too much hassle in the late 80s and 90s. There were others who couldn’t make it, and would hear about our stories upon our return. We purposely drove so we could bring back a carload of goods for undocumented family members and for nostalgic meals.

“Pozole para la nina,” she would say.

8 dried guajillo peppers, stemmed and seeded

2 teaspoons whole allspice berries 

5 whole cloves

2 teaspoons cumin seeds

1 teaspoon mixed peppercorns

2 teaspoons annatto seed 

10 cloves garlic, crushed

2 tablespoons lard

2 pounds pork shoulder

8 cups prepared hominy, either canned or fresh*

3 tablespoons red wine vinegar

Preheat oven to 300°F.

Heat chiles in a large Dutch oven over medium-high heat, and cook, turning once, until toasted, about 5 minutes; transfer to a blender, cover with 8 cups boiling water, and let sit for 20 minutes. 

While the chiles are soaking, add the spices to the Dutch oven and toast until fragrant. Add the spices to the blender along with the garlic, blend until smooth and set sauce aside.

Heat the lard in a large, heavy-bottomed pot or Dutch oven over medium high heat. While the pot is heating, season the pork generously with salt. Sear the pork on all sides until deeply browned, 3-5 minutes per side. Add the sauce to the pot, cover, and braise in the oven until tender, 3-4 hours.

Stir in the hominy and vinegar, salt to taste, and let sit for 30 minutes before serving. 

Serve with cilantro, oregano, lime, onions, tortilla, and cabbage if desired.

You can find canned hominy in almost every grocery store, but if you can find a source for whole, dried hominy corn, it’s worth the effort to nixtamalize your own.

(From Crop Stories No.6)

Posted on Leave a comment

Country Ham and Watermelon Salad by Mike Moore

Recipe: Ham and Watermelon Salad

By: Mike Moore / Blind Pig Supper Club + Aux Bar / Asheville, North Carolina

Nothing beats a great salad, especially when temps are high, and it’s just too hot to cook. One of my favorite kitchen activities is to clean out the fridge, tossing whatever ingredients we can dig out into a satisfying salad for dinner. Fortunately, we always have cheese, pickles and an assortment of cured porky meats in our fridge, all of which come in handy for this tasty summer treat. 

For the dressing:

¼ cup red wine vinegar

1 tablespoon brown mustard

1 tablespoon honey

½ cup olive oil 

For the salad:

6 ounces country ham, diced

5 cups mixed greens, arugula, or kale 

2 cups fresh herbs (mixture of cilantro, basil, parsley)

2 sweet potatoes, diced and roasted 

1 ½ cups diced fresh watermelon

½ cup diced watermelon pickles

¼ medium red onion, thinly sliced

4 ounces chèvre, crumbled

kosher salt

freshly ground black pepper

For the dressing, whisk together the vinegar, mustard and honey, then slowly whisk in the oil. 

In a large skillet over low heat, cook the ham until brown and crispy. Add a little water to the pan while cooking to pull some of the salt out.

Combine the greens, herbs, sweet potatoes, watermelon, watermelon pickles and onions in a large bowl, season with salt and pepper, and then toss with the vinaigrette. Garnish with the chèvre and the ham. 

(From Crop Stories No.6)

Posted on Leave a comment

Roasted Pork Loin: by Michael and Shyretha Sheats

Roasted Pork Loin

Michael and Shyretha Sheats /  The Plate Sale /  Athens, Georgia

The significance of pork in my ancestral history and the influence of it in black cooking is why you see pork featured on many of my menus. My favorite way to prepare pork right now Is by roasting it. It’s my perspective on a technique that I learned along the way while cooking in Atlanta. The texture of the pork is consistently tender and I enjoy the slow method of cooking it. Sort of reminds me of cooking barbecue. What sets it off, is aging of the pork. That just takes it there. This recipe considers a loin that has not been aged. If you want to enhance the flavor of the pork and are knowledgeable in doing so, then go for it. 

For the Pork Lion:

Start with a whole bone in pork loin, around twenty pounds. A local farm or butchery can provide you with one. I have them remove the H-bone.

Turn your oven on to 350 degrees. Now you want to score and season your loin. Gather a large vessel, cast iron preferably, to render the fat from the skin. Render until browned, about 20 minutes on low heat. Now remove from pan, and place on a tray with a resting rack. Put into oven for 10 minutes. Once your ten minutes has expired, remove from the oven and let rest for ten minutes. Continue this pattern until the pork reaches an internal temperature of 145 degrees. Once it reaches the temp, pull from oven and let rest before slicing. You can

finish the pork on a grill if you want some smoke on it. This will serve a party. I mean seriously.

(From Crop Stories No.6)

Posted on Leave a comment

Recipe: Liver and Grits By Howard Conyers

Liver and Grits

Howard Conyers / Pitmaster + Scientist / New Orleans, Louisiana

For the liver:

3 tablespoons lard or bacon grease, divided

1 sweet onion, thinly sliced

1 pound hog liver

kosher salt

freshly ground black pepper

¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

For the grits:

2 cups stone-ground grits

4 cups water

4 cups whole milk

2 tablespoons butter

Melt lard in a large skillet over medium heat; add the onions to the skillet, season with salt and pepper, and toss to coat with the fat. Stir frequently until deeply caramelized, about 45 minutes, and then remove to a paper towel to drain.

If the liver is fresh from a hog slaughtering, cut in ¼” to ½” slices, otherwise it is already sliced. Season the liver on both sides with salt and pepper and dust generously with the first quarter cup flour.

Add the rest of the lard to the skillet and let it get back hot. Then lay the liver in the grease and allow to cook for about 1 minute on each side. Fry the liver in batches so it doesn’t crowd the pan. Set the liver to the side and make the gravy.

Return the onions to the skillet and sprinkle with 2 tablespoons flour; cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the flour starts to smell toasted and brown. Add water to the pan, ½ cup or more, depending on how thick you like your gravy, and stir well, scraping the bottom of the skillet. Simmer for a few minutes and if need be, add more water to the gravy to get the consistency you desire.

Make your grits with half water, half milk, and some butter and salt stirred in at the end. Serve the liver and onions over the grits with lots of gravy. 

(from Crop Stories no.6)

Posted on Leave a comment

Pork in Salsa Verde by Hector Gonzalez

Recipe: Pork in salsa Verde

Hector Gonzalez / Project 658 / Charlotte, North Carolina

For this recipe I like to use a piece of pork that is rich and meaty. Try using a good piece of belly or even shoulder. This is a very traditional recipe that can be made to serve over rice and beans, or with a salad, and makes a good stuffing for a burrito.

For the salsa verde:

3 pounds tomatillos, husks removed and rinsed well 

2 white onions, peeled and cut into wedges

1 bunch cilantro, leaves and stems 

4 medium serrano chiles or to taste

5 cloves garlic, peeled

3 pounds pork belly, cut into 2-inch chunks 

2 quarts chicken stock

kosher salt 

Bring a large pot of heavily salted water to a boil over high heat. Cook tomatillos and 1 of the onions until soft, about 15 minutes.

Drain and transfer to a blender along with the garlic and cilantro and 1 tablespoon of salt; blend until smooth and set aside.

In a large heavy-bottomed pot or Dutch oven over medium-high heat, sear the pork in batches until brown, about 5 minutes per batch. Season each batch of pork with salt while browning. After all the pork has been browned, pour off the majority of the rendered fat and save it for another use. 

Add the second onion to the pot and fry it up in the fat that remains.

Add the salsa verde and and 2 quarts of chicken stock to the pot and let cook slowly, covered, until the meat is tender, about 2 hours.

(From Crop Stories No.6)