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Sour or Narrow Dock
This is a common weed in our rich ground and pastures. The leaves are long, narrow, and curly, and are supposed to possess an alterative quality, forming an excellent green for hot weather.
Wash the leaves, throw into a kettle of boiling salted water; boil rapidly for fifteen minutes. Drain, chop fine, and serve hot, with Egg Sauce.
A wild-greens dish that survives in Appalachian and Southern cooking but has all but vanished from cookbooks. Most of the work is in gathering and in handling the plant's sourness.
- What the plant isThis is curly dock, Rumex crispus, a relative of sorrel with long wavy-edged leaves and a stout taproot. Pick only young leaves in spring or early summer; once the plant sends up its rusty seed stalk the greens turn bitter and stringy. Positive identification matters — do not gather anything you cannot name with certainty.
- Oxalic acid, and why the water goes down the drainDock is tart because it is high in oxalates, the same compounds that make sorrel and rhubarb stalks sour. Boiling in an open pot and discarding the cooking water, as here, is the traditional handling; some cooks change the water once partway through. Anyone prone to kidney stones or gout should treat dock as an occasional dish rather than a staple.
- "Alterative"A nineteenth-century medical term for something believed to gradually improve the constitution or "purify the blood." It carries no modern meaning, and the claim is period belief rather than fact.
- Fifteen minutesThat suits mature, tough leaves and a large quantity of water. Tender young dock collapses in five to eight minutes; go longer and you get a grey purée. Rapid boiling in plenty of water has the effect of diluting the acid and helps keep the color from going drab.
- "A kettle"Not a tea kettle. In this period a kettle is any large deep pot, and you want a wide one holding at least four quarts so the greens can move freely.
- Egg sauceIn books of this era this generally means either a drawn-butter sauce or a plain white sauce -- butter, flour, water or milk -- with coarsely chopped hard-boiled egg stirred in at the end, seasoned with salt and a little pepper or nutmeg. The richness would blunt the sourness of the dock.
- YieldThe original gives none. Greens lose most of their bulk in the pot: reckon a packed gallon of raw leaves, roughly a pound, for four modest servings.
Curly dock is a Eurasian plant that came to North America with European settlement and spread through disturbed ground, pastures and field edges — which is exactly why the recipe opens by calling it "a common weed in our rich ground." It belongs to the old category of pot herbs gathered rather than grown, eaten alongside poke, lamb's quarters, dandelion and wild mustard in the spring "mess o' greens" tradition still alive in the American South. The recipe's own recommendation of it as "an excellent green for hot weather" reflects the period's dietary reasoning as much as its cooking: light green vegetables with a supposed cooling or "alterative" effect were thought fit for summer, when heavy meat dishes were held to be dangerous. The pairing with egg sauce follows the same logic that puts butter on spinach and cream on sorrel — fat and dairy to blunt a naturally acid green.