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Greens
Wash, and pick carefully, throw into a pot of boiling water with salt. Boil without covering until tender, then press through a colander all the water you can; place on a dish and cut each way, seasoning with pepper, salt, and a very liberal amount of butter. Greens are nice boiled with ham. Turnip tops, spinach, mustard, cabbage sprouts, beet tops, dandelions, etc., are used for greens.
A generic method for boiled greens that covers everything from spinach to dandelion. The only real technique here is the uncovered pot and the hard draining.
- Leave the lid offThis is the hinge of the recipe. An open pot lets volatile acids escape rather than condensing back onto the leaves, which keeps the green colour from turning olive-brown. It also means the water boils away faster, so keep an eye on the level.
- Boiling time by leafThe original says only "until tender." Spinach and beet tops need two to four minutes; mustard, turnip tops and dandelion five to fifteen depending on age; cabbage sprouts about eight. Older, tougher leaves genuinely do want the longer end.
- Press out the waterDraining thoroughly is not optional. Push the greens against a colander with the back of a spoon, or gather them in a clean towel and wring. Wet greens will not take up the butter and will flood the dish.
- "Cut each way"Set the drained mass on the serving plate and run a knife through it in both directions, which chops the leaves into short lengths without turning them to purée. A quick chop on the board does the same thing.
- Boiled with hamA common method is to simmer a ham hock or a piece of smoked ham in the water first, then cook the greens in that liquor. Taste before adding salt, as cured pork will supply plenty.
- Washing"Wash, and pick carefully" is doing real work with field greens and dandelions. Two or three changes of cold water in a large bowl, lifting the leaves out rather than pouring off, gets the grit that settles to the bottom.
- QuantityGreens collapse dramatically. Reckon on 1 lb of raw leaves for two servings, more if they are mostly stem, with 2 to 3 tablespoons of butter for that amount.
- DandelionUse young leaves gathered before the plant flowers, and only from ground you know has not been sprayed or treated. Older leaves are aggressively bitter and are usually blanched in one change of water.
"Greens" in a turn-of-the-century American cookbook is less a dish than a category, and the list at the end of this entry is the point of it: turnip tops, mustard, beet tops and dandelions are all things a household either grew, gleaned as a by-product of a root crop, or picked from the yard. Eating the tops of turnips and beets was ordinary thrift, and the spring gathering of wild greens after a winter of preserved food was long treated as a tonic as much as a meal. The note that greens are nice boiled with ham reflects the same economy from the other direction, with a hock or a scrap of cured pork flavouring a large pot of cheap leaves; the practice is strongest in Southern and Appalachian cooking, where the resulting broth, the pot liquor, was drunk or sopped up rather than thrown out. Boiling uncovered, as prescribed here, is one of those small procedural directions the entry passes on without explanation.