Anyone here ever pick "poke salad"?

[kentuck]

In its maturity, it had the wide leaves and dark black berries and could be seen growing just about everywhere in the South. Its stalks somewhat resembled rhubarb. And it was poison.

In the hills of Kentucky, it seemed to grow best up near the mountaintops - where the old tram roads and strip roads were left behind in the 1930-40's.

The best time to pick it was in late March or early April just as the shoots were coming out of the ground. You could snap them off near the ground, much like breaking a celery stick.

The old wives tale was that it had certain qualities or antibodies that would prevent people from getting sick?

However, since it was poison, it had to be boiled before it was fried in a skillet. It looked a little like turnip greens once it was cooked and fried, preferably in scrambled eggs. It was pretty tasty with cornbread and pinto beans.

[Aerows]

2. Yes, you can't just pick it and eat it

you have to boil it otherwise it will make you godawfully ill!

[Pretzel_Warrior]

3. yes. my grandma took us around the farm picking poke weed and lambs quarter which she'd

then boil and cook up with other foods.

Here's what lambs quarter looks like with distinctive silvery tinge to the leaves.



She also used to help us locate sassafras root which she used to make sassafras tea (it was also what was used to make Sasprilla or "ROOT" beer)

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-E8vBziX6doc/TwJOsJeLI5I/AAAAAAAABEA/cLV6n5v_-dc/s1600/sassafras+root.jpg

Besides the fruit trees and gardens, she taught us a lot about finding foods around the farm in Missouri.

[kentuck]

5. I always thought that sassafras might contain a cure for AIDS?

The new shoots would come out every spring and you could snap them off and chew the bark, which contained a huge amount of sassafras sap. As a child, I burned my hand trying to make sassafras tea from boiling the roots. It does have that unique smell and taste of sarsaparilla.

For wild greens, my Grandma would pick and mix dandelions with a little plantain, some speckled dot, and some "crow's feet" and other wild "weeds". I always thought the wild greens tasted better than those grown in a garden.

[d_r]

29. I like sassafras

I like tea from the roots and I like crushing up the leaves to chew. but I've heard that it can damage your liver.

[MattBaggins]

42. Please pick all the lambs quarter you can

horribly allergic to it's pollen.

[a la izquierda]

4. Pokeberries? I've never had it, but they grow at my house here in WV...

and I looked the plant up when I moved from Oklahoma, where I never saw the plant before, to Ohio, where it was everywhere. I remember thinking how pretty the tree was, and then one day, looking out my window, and see a bunch of juvenile male deers right out my living room window, snacking away in the fall.

My dogs seemed interested in the smell of the plant.

[kentuck]

7. The berries were used many moons ago in quill pens...

for their ink quality.

[Lars39]

6. Oh, yes.

You familiar with muscadines?

[kentuck]

10. Can't say that I am?

Are they similar to "dry land fish"? Which are really corel mushrooms. We used to hunt for them in the mountains and they would grow in the shade on the north side of trees, usually covered by leaves from the previous fall.

[Lars39]

14. Nope, they're similar to a grape. Grows wild mostly.

Makes excellent jelly.

[kentuck]

15. I've heard songs about Muscadine wine.

If it grows in the mountains, I'm sure I have tried it.

[Lars39]

16. Lol That, too, although what I used to have would singe eyebrows.

[Chief D]

43. Yes, very familiar with Muscadines (wine and preserves)

Tasty!!!!!

[kentuck]

44. Just like wild grapes.

[kentuck]

46. instead of wild blueberries...

we called them huckleberries.

[Ken Burch]

8. Elvis sang a song about it: "Polk Salad Annie"

[KoKo]

11. Ha! You were so quick. Was just about to post that Elvis YT!

Very Cool!

[Liberal_in_LA]

21. yes he did. forgot about that song

[MannyGoldstein]

27. I favor Sleepy LaBeef's version...

[GReedDiamond]

53. I like this'n...

On edit: "...if there was any left, she'd dry it out and smoke it."

[MannyGoldstein]

54. Very fun!

I think those fellas were stoned!

[GReedDiamond]

56. I think they still are...nt

[Are_grits_groceries]

9. Yes

Among other things.
I have also made sassafras tea. Not my favorite beverage.

[KoKo]

12. My Grandma used to talk about sassafras tea and making it

when she was a kid. She grew up on a farm in Georgia. It was hard to find...so none of us ever got a chance to know what the taste was.

[Aerows]

48. Easier to find further south.

You didn't miss anything. Chicory is better if you must use a substitute for coffee, as all Louisianians will tell you. Sassafras just makes you ... have stomach fluctuations.

[Aerows]

47. Poke salad

isn't my favorite food, either.

You can drink sassafras tea and eat poke salad, but no need to be that desperate. You could eat wild mint leaves first.

Or pretend you are on the North Korean diet and eat bugs, grass and lizards. That's ultra-trendy in the labor camps, I hear.

[X_Digger]

13. All the time, growing up.

There were patches of it beside the old logging road up the holler from where we lived.

The berries make for great dye. (We use to pelt each other with them so much we'd end up looking like something out of willy wonka.)

We'd snap leaves off and bring them home to cook.

Skillet fried with the tops of green onions, oil, and vinegar- yum!

[hootinholler]

17. Yes, but we used to just eat the shoots.

Put them in salads. I never noticed Ill effects.

[kentuck]

18. There's a million old stories and recipes from the mountains.

You may have seen those wild grapevines growing up the trees, the poplar trees especially, and we would swing on them like Tarzan when we were kids. The old tale was that when you cut the grape vine, gather the sap and it would make your hair grow healthier and shinier than anything from a store.

[dem in texas]

19. Cooking Poke Salad

Yes, I lived in Western Kentucky once and one spring, my elderly neighbor showed me all the "poke salat" coming up along my fence. She said I need to pick and cook it. She told to drop it in boiling water and cook about five minutes, then drain and let water run off, then make another pot of fresh water and add the drained poke leaves. Then add some pork or bacon drippings, let it cook long and slow and flavor it with a few tablespoons of dark molasses. I tried it and it was very tasty.

When I lived near Fairbanks, Alaska many years ago, I had an elderly neighbor who knew all about the plants growing in the northern woods. She took me out and showed me the plants that were edible, their names and how you would prepare. I tried a lot of them, all were good.

Needless to say, I like to know about wild plants and how they can be used. I have grown lamb quarters in my garden. Around here in Texas, I have picked several of the greens that grow wild. You have to be careful though because they may be in an area where weed killer was sprayed.

[rock]

20. Yes, I have

I'm a Kentuckian by birth and raising.

[spanone]

22. love poke salet

have it regularly here in da south

http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/966130/#b

[William769]

23. Ever been to the poke salad festival in Harlan County?

Not the salad I was thinking of when I first attended.

Does go well with wild onions though.

[kentuck]

30. No, but I've been to the Wild Mountain Laurel Festival in Pineville...

Just up the road from you.

[William769]

36. Chained rock (Pine Mountain). Oh the memories.

[kentuck]

49. A beautiful spot.

One of my favorites.

[Tanuki]

37. Ever been to the Ramp Festival in Richwood, WV?

Ramps....now THAT is an Appalachian delicacy for you!
http://www.richwooders.com/ramp/ramps.htm

[GeorgeGist]

24. The berries make a substance which activates B lymphocytes.

B lymphocytes produce antibodies.

The old wives were onto something.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

25. yes, I have.

[Chuuku Davis]

26. YES

We eat all we can find each spring

[doc03]

28. My grandma used to have poke and other types of greens,

they were good but I never picked them or even know what they look like.

[d_r]

31. by the bagful

here's the way I understand it. I always heard that it was poison if you didn't cook it. What I understand now is that it is OK if it is less than 1.5 feet tall and the leaves are less than six inches long. Young and tender. Springtime only. I have always heard that the berries are poison and I believe they are but birds eat them but I would never eat them. Honestly I like turnip and mustard greens a lot better than polk, but that's just imho.

[LWolf]

32. Not in Kentucky, but yes.

My Grandmother-In-Law took me out to pick and make "poke salad" 35 years ago.

She also taught me how to do laundry, including my infant's diapers, on a washboard; to fry okra and squash; to make syrups and jellies and can the harvest from her garden; to make milk gravy; to grow everything in that garden, to keep chickens, and to be depression-era frugal.

[TheKentuckian]

33. My grandmother would pick it and I would help her. She cooked it with the greens.

I don't remember her frying it but I could have missed that, I guess. I thought she just boiled it like greens and turnips (usually with some bit of country ham).

I had no idea of any medicinal qualities but probably that is why it got into the diet but I just thought it was something country folks ate, it grew on the fence line and the neighbor lady, Mrs. Francis was all about her poke too.

I don't recall the taste or more couldn't differentiate it between the kale, collards, turnip greens, turnips, and the ham.
Turnips I remember so the poke must have been more greens tasting.

[Arkansas Granny]

34. Yes, I used to pick it for my grandmother, but I don't eat it.

Where I was raised it was called pokeweed. I never heard it called poke salad until I moved to Arkansas. I've tried it, but I don't like it. I like other greens, but not pokeweed.

[cordelia]

35. Oh, yes! Many times.

With my grandmother in NE Georgia.

But it could only be picked in earliest spring when it first "came in". After that it was poisonous, or so she told us.

And she warned us against eating the berries.

Good stuff, especially with hot sauce and cornbread. I didn't really appreciate it at the time.

[kentuck]

38. I never ate the berries or the leaves...

only the young sprouts of spring. We were told that it was poisonous if not cooked properly.

[MineralMan]

39. Even in Minnesota you can find canned poke salad.

Last edited Fri Dec 27, 2013, 01:30 PM - Edit history (1)

Look carefully in the canned vegetable aisle. Just heat and eat.

[Maw Kettle]

40. Many times when I was a kid.

I grew up in Oklahoma, and when I was a kid, my mom and grandmas would take us kids out to pick poke greens. You have to boil them for a while and then pour that water off because otherwise you will get oxalic acid poisoning. We ate them like cooked like regular turnip greens or mustard greens, cooked with some kind of side meat. We also ate them scrambled with eggs and wild onions. Also, I saw someone else talking about sassafras. I lived in Louisiana for a good while in my 20s and early 30s. My cousins down there go out in the woods and gather the sassafras leaves, dry them, and grind them up to make file powder for file gumbo. That is truly a remarkable tree. My grandmothers were young mothers and housewives during the Depression, and they knew about every type of edible wild plant that grew in Northeastern Oklahoma.

[kentuck]

41. Blackberries were great for canning...

The best blackberry picking I ever saw was over by the Clinch River in Tennessee. I remember going there one time and we picked water buckets of berries and poured them into a wash tub. We must have gotten a hundred quarts of blackberries and untold blackberry pies, blackberry dumplings, and blackberry jam. It was a day's adventure.

[dem in texas]

50. yes, I have too.

When I lived in Kentucky near the Tennessee state line, we'd pick wild blackberries. What a horrible task, it was usually around the end of June or first of July. The weather was hot and sticky, the blackberries were on the fence rows deep in the bushes, the mosquitoes were waiting to suck your blood and you had to be on the lookout for snakes. But, that said, there is nothing better in the world than wild black cobbler or jam, so I would gladly go through the torture to pick them again.

One other interesting thing, a late spring snow or cold spell was called "Blackberry Winter" up in that area because it was when the blackberry bushes were blooming.

Here in Texas, I planted blackberry bushes in my garden and the berries got big and juicy, but we'd always have a hot, dry wind blow for a few while they ripening and dry them up. Plus the blackberry plants put out runner roots and tried to take over my garden. I finally dug them all out and now I buy frozen blackberries to make cobbler.

[Laffy Kat]

55. I grew up in Memphis. My mother also used to call a late cold spell blackberry winter.

We ate turnip greens with ham hocks and had a muscadine vine in our back yard. We had a sassafras tree in the woods behind our house but there were too many copperheads along the way to risk it. I remember poke weed and our mother saying it was "beneath us" to eat it. She wouldn't fix collard greens for the same reason. Guess it was a class thing with her. My sister prepared collard greens for me last year when I visited because for whatever reason she couldn't find turnip greens. Anyway, I didn't like them very much, although it may have been the way she cooked them. I remember a picked bunch of greens were called a "mess".

[Go Vols]

52. I have a place here

where I can ride my 4X4 thru and pick blackberries from both sides and never get off the bike.

[Maw Kettle]

59. We used to pick a lot of blackberries, too.

I live in rural Southwest Missouri now and there are a lot of blackberry vines, but I never seem to get to them before the birds do! Blackberry juice is really good for stomach problems. It will stop diarrhea pretty quickly. A Cherokee friend told my mom about it when I was a kid growing up in Oklahoma, so Momma always put up a lot of blackberry juice for the winter. She had 6 kids and one of us was always bringing home a stomach "bug" from school.

[WinkyDink]

45. My name ain't Annie.

[Go Vols]

51. Yes

All my youth.Picked some last spring,I still don't care for it @ 50+.

[OnionPatch]

57. Yep. My mom used to cook it for us.

To this day she'll stop the car if she sees a nice, leafy one growing along the road. She's in Ohio, so just a bit north of you.

We also ate dandelion greens in our salads and morel mushrooms in everything, come spring.

[cbdo2007]

58. Haven't had poke salad, but I do have to rid my yard of poke weed every year or else my dog

will eat it and get sick. I can tell when she's eaten it and I missed some, so then I have to go back out and find it and destroy it again.