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Poke Stalks
In the spring the young shoots of poke are much used as food. They should never be taken over three inches long, and should show only a small tuft of leaves at the top. Older or larger than this they are poisonous. Wash thoroughly in cold water one hour, tie in bundles like asparagus, put into a kettle of boiling water, add a teaspoonful of salt and boil three-quarters of an hour. Put them on buttered toast after draining, heads all one way. Cover with drawn butter and serve.
This is a recipe for a plant that is toxic at every stage, and the safeguards printed here are not sufficient. The specific problems are set out below.
- The plantPoke is Phytolacca americana, pokeweed. It contains phytolaccatoxin and related saponins plus a mitogenic lectin, present in the leaves, stems, berries and above all the root. Symptoms of poisoning are burning in the mouth, protracted vomiting and diarrhoea, and in serious cases low blood pressure and respiratory distress.
- Size is not a reliable testThe recipe rests entirely on the claim that shoots under three inches with a small tuft of leaves are harmless and anything larger is poisonous. Toxin levels do fall as shoots emerge and rise sharply with age and with any pink or purple colouring, but there is no size at which the shoot is toxin-free, and no way for a cook to judge the margin by eye.
- One water is the fatal omissionTraditional poke cookery generally involved parboiling in two or more changes of water, each poured off and discarded, because the toxins are water-soluble. This recipe boils the bundles once, in salted water, and never changes it. Even followed exactly, the shoots come to table having sat in their own extracted saponins.
- Root contaminationPoke shoots are pulled or cut at ground level, and the root, the most toxic part of the plant, is easy to include as a pale stub at the base. Recorded poisonings have involved shoots gathered with root attached, and the root itself mistaken for horseradish or parsnip.
- IdentificationYoung poke shoots resemble several other spring plants, and gathering unfamiliar wild greens on the strength of a nineteenth-century description is its own hazard, separate from the toxicity of poke itself.
- If you want the dishCooked poke sallet is still eaten in parts of the American South, and canned poke was sold commercially into the late twentieth century. Anyone who wants to eat it should work from current guidance on preparation, not from this page.
- Reading the rest of the methodFor historical interest: "drawn butter" is the period term for a butter sauce thickened with a little flour and water, and the instruction to tie in bundles and lay the heads one way on toast is the standard nineteenth-century service for asparagus, which poke was understood to imitate.
Poke was a spring green of necessity and of habit across the eastern United States, appearing in the weeks before garden vegetables were ready, when the winter store of roots and cabbage was exhausted. Cookbooks of this period treat it as a wild asparagus, and the bundling, boiling and service on buttered toast follow the asparagus method. The frank warning that older shoots are poisonous shows that the danger was common knowledge, and that the tradition of repeated parboiling, which this particular author has dropped, was the working safeguard. The dish survived longest in Appalachia and the South as "poke sallet" or "polk salad," usually parboiled through several waters and then fried with bacon fat and egg, and it entered wider memory through Tony Joe White's "Polk Salad Annie," released as a single in 1968 and charting in 1969.