Home › Vegetables › Greens
Greens
Mustard, kale and turnip greens are cooked the same way as spinach. It is necessary to pick and wash each leaf carefully. The old fashioned way of cooking turnip greens seems the most popular, and some think it quite a treat to be able to enjoy the hog jowl and greens. Have meat boiling in water sometime before adding greens. Cook until tender. Serve on platter with meat in center and poached eggs around border of dish.
A loose method rather than a measured recipe, and it leans on the reader knowing how spinach is handled. The essentials are a long head start for the meat and a short finish for the greens.
- Hog jowlCured pork cheek, sold smoked or fresh at Southern markets and many butchers. Smoked slab bacon or a ham hock stands in; allow about 1/2 lb for a large bunch of greens.
- Give the meat a head start"sometime before" is left vague; a good half-hour or more at a bare simmer, until the pork is soft and the water has turned into seasoned broth, suits the instruction. The point of the head start is that the greens cook far faster than the pork, which needs time to give up its fat and salt.
- WashingThe instruction to pick and wash every leaf is not fussiness. Turnip and mustard greens hold grit in the crumpled parts; several changes of cold water, lifting the leaves out rather than pouring them off, is the only reliable way.
- "Cook until tender"For turnip and mustard greens that will usually mean something like 30 to 45 minutes in the pot liquor, and kale about the same. It is not the spinach timing implied by the first sentence, which needs only a few minutes.
- QuantityThe recipe gives none. Greens collapse to almost nothing, so reckon on a generous heap of trimmed leaves -- roughly two pounds -- for four as a side dish.
- The poached eggsPoach them separately in plain water while the greens finish, and set them on the platter at the last moment. Drain the greens but keep the pot liquor to spoon over, or serve it alongside in cups.
Hog jowl and greens is a fixed pairing of the American South, where cured pork supplied both fat and salt to a vegetable that has neither, and the resulting broth -- pot liquor -- was drunk or sopped with cornbread rather than thrown out. The recipe treats mustard, kale and turnip greens as interchangeable and folds them into its spinach method, then allows that the older Southern treatment "seems the most popular." The ring of poached eggs is a touch of table presentation, of a piece with the era's habit of turning a plain platter of vegetables into something worth carrying to the dining room.