There ain’t nothing better than a mess o’ ham hocks and collard greens

“There ain’t nothing better than a mess o’ ham hocks and collard greens” True Southerners

Collards are not for stuffed shirts...but many folks lose their heads over them. This member of the wild cabbage family Brassica oleracea is of the cultivar group acephala – Greek for headless, meaning this group does not for the tight ball or head of leaves that many of its cousins do. The species most likely originated in the Mediterranean and because they are so hearty and hard to kill, migrated out ward in all direction from there: into the British Isles by the 4th century B.C., out into Africa and to the New World in North and South America with the slave trade as collards fell out of fashion with nobility, they became fodder for the poor, the enslaved and the animals. But fortunately, much of the best cuisine has arisen from necessity. The lowland Scots have done wondrous things with potherbs and cornmeal cakes to stretch mutton and fowl through lean times; they are the standard side dish with the Portuguese/Brazilian Feijoada, a rich, slow-cooked stew of beans and all things pork; my experience is in the southeastern U.S., where the collards and other greens are transformed by slow simmering in “potlikker”, which was originally a stock, or liquor, from meat bones and scraps boiled down to become soft enough to become edible which created a flavor so rich that anything remotely edible was added to the pot to stretch the meal, especially things that the masters deemed unfit to eat, like weedy tough greens. This slow cooking actually makes the collards more nutritious, unlocking nutrients from the tough cellulose of the plant.
The idiot who invented instant grits also thought of frozen fried chicken, and they ought to lock him up before he tries to freeze-dry collards. Lewis Grizzard

Festivals:
http://www.epa.net/collardgreens/ East Palo Alto Ca. July

http://www.visitportwentworth.com/events-collard-greens.php Monteith, Port Wentworth, Ga. March

http://www.macarnold.com/collard_fest.html Cornbread& Collards Blues Festival Asheville, NC Greenville, Anderson, SC