Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where we’re revisiting the “Meal That Never Was”, in honor of MLK Jr Day on Monday. (editor’s note: That line originally said “yesterday”, but an unexpected grocery trip and meal to cook ate up Jon’s work time)We’ll get into all the details in a bit, of course, but for those of you who want to jump the jabber and get to the grub, here’s a link. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

 

Looking Back, and a Blunder

So, if you missed our post last-year, a brief refresher: The Meal That Never Was is a somewhat famous dinner from the 1960’s. Specifically, it is the meal that Martin Luther King Jr was headed to when he left his motel room, and was assassinated. We talked about it, and the necessary conversation of how politics and food interact, last year, while we made two of the components of the dinner: Fried Chicken, and Sweet Potato Pie. This year, we decided to “pig out”, and focus on the pork-rich rest of the meal: Black-Eyed Peas, Collard Greens, and Ham Steaks.

The keen-eyed of you will notice that one of those things is not on this plate.

Our intent was simple: if we hit all three, it’s a complete meal on its own, AND we can handwave that we “finished” the meal. (Technically, there should ALSO be Sweet Potatoes as a side dish, in addition to the Sweet potato pie, but Sweet potatoes are on the list of “foods Jon has to be careful eating”, as are Black-Eyed Peas and Collard Greens (ALL Oxalate-rich foods), so we figured in exchange for not having to chug a quart of milk with dinner, we’d count the sweet potato pie as enough.) My mother even ran out and bought the ingredients Saturday morning, because Nate and I had multiple rehearsals this weekend supporting our local community theater.

However, as they say, the best-laid plans oft go awry. Somehow, over 4 days of discussing the recipes, and multiple direct confirmations, my mother had never registered that we were saying HAM Steaks. In a Shyamalan-tier twist, literally, as the Black-Eyed Peas and Collard Greens were finishing their multi-hour cooking process, with 15 minutes before dinner, I turned and asked my mother “so which fridge did you put the ham steaks in?” And she said, “We don’t have ham steaks.” What followed was maybe the angriest I’ve seen Nate in the kitchen without suffering physical pain, as he was incredulous to discover that somehow, she’d made her way through at least 5 conversations about the topic, and never heard “ham”. Like the end of the Usual Suspects, suddenly multiple conversations we’d had snapped into focus:

Sunday Night

Nate: “All the meat’s ready, right?”

Mom: “We’ve got the steaks and the pork.”

Nate: “You mean the hocks.”

Mom: “Yeah, sure.”
 

Monday Morning

Mom: “Oh, Jon, Nate and I had steak hash for breakfast, because the steaks were buy-one, get-one. You can reheat it and top it with a fried egg if you want for breakfast.”

DAMN YOU, DISCOUNT MEAT.

So I guess NEXT YEAR we get to make Sweet Potatoes and HAM Steaks to finally finish this thing. For now, let’s get to the food, and what it means.

 

It ain’t easy, being Greens

Collard Greens are the wild child of a group of sisters I have referenced often, but I don’t recall if I’ve ever mentioned she’s part of them. (editor’s note: he did. During the ONE other time he’s cooked Collard Greens. he ALSO made the same “it ain’t easy” joke there, so we have to assume he completely forgot about that post.)That’s right, it’s the Brassica Oleraceas. For new readers: Brassica Oleracea (which I always first misremember as “oleacera”) is the species of wild cabbage that is the overarching species for…like, HALF of a small produce section: Broccoli, Brussels Sprouts, Cabbage, Kohlrabi, Collard Greens, Kale, Cauliflower, Broccolini, and the rare “Jersey Cabbage”, as well as all the various derivatives (the varieties of Kale, Broccolini, Romanesco, etc.)

Here’s a handy little breakdown I found. You don’t see Jersey cabbage here because it only grows in like, tropical Atlantic islands. It’s basically like a, cabbage palm tree: the long middle stalk hardens over time, with the top sprig of leaves being basically the same as kale/collard greens.

Somewhat funnily, of the group, Collard greens are technically the “oldest”, in that the original name (in Gemanic/English) for the plant was “colewort” (literally, “cabbage-plant” That’s how crucial brassicas were to Western Europe cuisine: the etymology just STOPS, because they needed a word for “this specific plant”. This is also why it’s called “Coleslaw”.) which was eventually bastardized into “collard”. (Probably with a stop at “collort/collord”, or some attest a descent to “colward” as the interim). So while there is now a different plant called “colewort”, Collard is one of the three ‘closest’ cultivars, namewise. (Kale, obviously, has a strong running with “Cole”. And “Cole-flower” or Cauliflower as it goes by now, is similarly old-school.)

What’s important is that the plants grew like weeds, and spread around the Mediterranean both into Africa, and across Europe. So when Black and white Americans were settling and farming the land, while they’d grow some cash crops in their fields, in their personal gardens, EVERYONE grew Collard Greens. They didn’t crumple under the humid heat of Southern summers, and we hardy enough to endure the winter as well. One traveler in 1883 noted that there was no WORD more popular among the poor whites and Blacks of the South than the dish.

Listen, I’m not saying Collard Greens aren’t great, but I think there were certainly more popular words at the time.

Much like Fried Chicken’s association with Black communities began because poultry were the only livestock they were permitted to raise and sell to buy their own freedom, so too did collard greens become an emblem of Black American existence, as a supplemental crop they could eat with their rations. The dish was also popular for its liquor, or “likker” as it is often rendered in the traditional style: Collard greens have to be boiled to make them tender, which leaches out minerals and vitamins…into the cooking water. This water, infused with the seasonings used on the dish itself, was viewed as its own dish, a sort of fortified broth to keep them strong.

I’ve drunk worse/weirder pork-liquid products.

Speaking of seasoning, let’s start our recipe for Collard Greens, with that most foundational of southern ingredients: Seasoning Meat. Specifically, in this case, a smoked ham hock. The idea here is simple: meat is expensive, but packed with flavor, fat, protein, etc. Thus, it is a deeply common practice in frugal cuisines across the world to use it more as a garnish or flavor component. And in the South, this is sometimes referred to as “Seasoning meat”: meat you use to season the dish. You know, fry one slice of bacon, and you can cook off an entire pan of Brussels sprouts in the fat, sort of deal.

This ham scum can flavor pints of greens! Seriously though, don’t leave the scum in. Just run a nice little fine-mesh strainer through the top inch and get the weird stuff out.

Here, you’re building the backbone of your potlikker by just boiling a ham-hock for 45 minutes. This is where I do want to touch on one of the off-putting elements of this meal, and why it’s not as bad as you think (well, it probably is for YOU, but why it didn’t use to be.) Specifically, that this meal takes about 3 hours to put together. Which sounds like a lot, and it is, but it’s mostly hands-off. Like, of that 3 hours, you will be directly involved for MAYBE 1 of them, and that’s if, like me, you’re really babying the peas and greens at the end. Back in the day, this was a great selling point: put the pot on the stove, and go handle other things. In the modern era, where you’re more likely to be getting off work, and waiting three hours means an 8:30 or 9:00 dinner, it’s less appealing, though it’s not nothing: having a spare hour to, say, do laundry or something while your pots bubble away can be a relief.

During this time, you do have about 5-10 minutes of work to prep, as it’s important to work on your greens. Collard greens are tough, hence why this recipe takes so long to cook: you’ve really got to work at them to get them easy to eat. Hell, many recipes entirely give up on the stems of the leaves: better to leave out the vitamins and fiber that the stem holds than to spend the extra 20-30 minutes until those parts are edible. We chose to keep ours in, though we chunked them down. You also want to rub your greens, and wash them thoroughly: like with leeks, it’s very easy for sand or grit to cling to them, so a thorough washing, and even a re-washing may be called for to have them ready to go in the bot when the hock is ready.

Anyway, that picture of the ham hock I showed you? All wrong. Turns out the recipe I had used as the initial chassis of my tinkering was for a LOT more collard greens than we had bought, so after boiling the ham hock, it was literally impossible for me to add the greens to the sauce pot I had grabbed, because this recipe was intended for like, a STOCK pot. So I poured out some of the likker, and made do.

I wrote that line Monday night, and for some reason, “Make do” came up like, 3 times Tuesday.

Speaking of, it’s worth noting that family collard greens recipes are a wide and wild field. My approach was based partly on the idea of what I imagined a family seeking to impress a guest with limited resources would use: as such, other than the greens and ham itself, everything else I used came from a pantry. No bacon fat, or fresh chopped onion. But it was also fairly maximalist: I had garlic powder, I had seasoned salt, I had (dried) minced onion, I had hot sauce, I had sugar, I had apple cider vinegar, I had cayenne. My goal was simple: I aimed to have a brown-sugar glazed ham-steak, and thick, creamy black-eyed peas. So I wanted my greens to edge closer to acidic and spicy, in order to cut some of the richness from the other two.

And…that’s really it. Let that simmer away for 90 minutes, and then come back and adjust the seasoning to taste. If you want to be really fancy, like we were, you can pop the ham hock out, and strip out the now partially-broken-down meat, to scatter into the greens as little nuggets of meat.

Hidden in the murky greenery.

With those sorted, let’s blacken that eye.

 

Let’s Get It Started, and Other Hits

So, Black-Eyed Peas. Many will tell you they’ve fallen off since Fergie left the group. Other less generous critics will say they should have stopped when Kim Hill left. But what’s important is we’re not talking about them, we’re talking about these pea beans.

I feel like that might be misread as “pea brains”, which is maybe why that term didn’t catch on.

And that is, technically, what they are. There’s been a lot made of the fact that “Black-Eyed Peas” are actually beans, but…I mean, so are “normal” peas. Or, rather, they COULD be. Let me explain: “Bean” is just a word we use for the edible seeds of various plants in the Fabaceae family. Peas are the edible seeds of plants within that family, we just don’t call them beans because we already called them peas. This is one of those times where science hits centuries of linguistic or cultural inertia and goes “yeah, this isn’t worth fighting over.” Like, technically, pea=pods are fruit with beans, but no one CALLS them that, because it sounds insane due to the mismatching of technical and conversational terminology. (and differing technical terminology: tomatoes are also, botanically, a fruit, but are culinarily a vegetable. Peanuts are technically legumes/beans as well, but they are culinarily a nut.)   The distinction was made in the past due to the differing shapes of peas (which are normally fairly spherical) and beans (which are normally ovoidal or kidney-shaped), and it’s just been too much of a hassle to fix. So I’m going to try and call them “peas” the whole time, but if I screw up and call them “beans”, just understand that is also technically correct.

The best kind of beans.

Now, if the recipe for the collard greens was ‘pretty simple’, the recipe for the Black-Eyed Peas is STUPIDLY easy, because you don’t have to tear up the peas before cooking. Hell, if you’re smart/cheap/prepared, you can do the beans in half the time. Since I am NONE of those things most days, our recipe took 2 ½ hours. Why? Because we had to ‘quick soak’ the peas. This is another point where people get this “BEPs aren’t peas”: in Western culture, we tend to serve ‘normal’ peas fresh, and have a greater tradition of drying out ‘beans’ for later cooking. Now, that’s actually just a matter of preference: you CAN dry out green peas just like chickpeas or pinto beans, whatever. We just tend not to, due to different cultural recipe preferences. But Black-Eyed Peas are frequently sold dried next to the beans, and that adds to the confusion.

Anywho, the POINT is that dried beans/peas/legumes should be re-hydrated before cooking for textural and health reasons, which is BEST done through an over-night soak, but can also be done by bringing them to a boil, and then letting them steep in the hot water for an hour. This is a “quick soak”. So, just as we started the collard greens by boiling a ham hock, we start by boiling dry peas.

The dark waters of the boiling pot are quite off-putting the first few times.

Once steeped and re-hydrated, dump out the cooking liquid, and rinse the beans. This makes sure any dust or grit from the processing is gone. Then refill the pot with water, add the beans, and cook with any flavoring components you think would be good. Try to be a little light at the beginning, as the 90 minutes of cooking will evaporate some of the water, meaning that if you oversalt now, it’s going to be insanely salty later. Season in moderation, is the key.

A couple bay leaves, a chunk of smoked pork the size of my fist.

So, yeah, our package of ham-hocks came with TWO, so we decided to use one in the greens, and one in the peas. Once brought to a simmer, just let that pot bubble away for 90 minutes with the lid slightly ajar to let off steam.

We did this at the same time as the collards, so there really was just a 90 minute window with nothing to do, until we came back to finish the two dishes, and start the ham steaks, which is when we made our discovery of the miscommunication, and had to quickly scramble to find another component. We ended up, as the pic at the top showed, going with Mac and Cheese. Not for any symbolic reason, but because we felt that we had enought meat with the torn-up ham hocks, and wanted an easy way to get some more calcium in the meal to help me out.

Thus, it was just time to put on the finishing touches: The cooking water of our peas (aquafaba, which can be used as a vegan egg replacer…if you hadn’t just boiled a ham hock in it) got drained a little, as we wanted a thicker base for our Black-Eyed Peas. Mashing up some of the beans to release their starch helped as well. We also pulled out the bay leaves, and re-seasoned, since the beans were a little plain. We went with some celery salt, hot sauce, normal salt, and pepper.

Here’s your meaty mush, milord.

The result was almost as thick as refried beans, and piled high next to the pasta and greens. This is hot, filling food. Indeed, it was a little difficult to hold the plate, not from the weight, but because the greens and peas were SO WARM from their hours of simmering that it was painful to try and hold the plate right under them.

So, how’d they taste? Fine. Of the two, I liked the Collard Greens more: I did get the recipe JUST up to “sharp”, so the acid and spice were cutting the thick peas and cheesy mac. I feel like I probably could have doubled the seasonings for the peas and not ruined the dish.

 

A Temporary Conclusion

And that’s what we’ve got this year. But next year, the work continues. Much as King’s work continues to this day. We still struggle, every year, for the goals MLK Jr set out to achieve. So much of what he stood for as been rendered down, softened through decades of reduction, until it is easy for anyone to swallow without effort. So much of what he FOUGHT has been trimmed out of the history books and education, like the inconveniently thick stems of the collards, so much of his message washed and re-washed until it was palatable to a mainstream audience without needing to chew its points over. As the admonition goes, King did not die. He was killed. He was hounded by law enforcement for years, hated by the general public before his death, and murdered for his beliefs. Those beliefs included, yes, at their softest, the invocation and hope that one day his children would live in a world that saw past their Black skin to judge them as people. But in the VERY speech that famous line springs from, he also said “There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied? We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro* is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality…We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.” These are the complaints we still here NOW. This very week, voting rights legislation struggles in the Senate, as MLK’s son leads marches to push our nation to fulfill the dream of his father. The George Floyd protests were larger than ANY moment of King’s era, but have struggled to produce the same results…or so they seem. As I was reminded in a recent interview with MLK III, it is easy to forget that the Civil Rights era was, indeed, an ERA. It was 10 years between the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

Too long have we, the broader American people, and particularly, to cite King’s label, white liberals and moderates, allowed ourselves to be fed the softened, trimmed, and seasoned version of King. We have not spent the time to take his words in our own hands, and work with them ourselves. It is not much, but I think it is deeply relevant today. I urge you, in memory of him, if you believe him to be an inspiration, a great leader, or in anyway a positive force for good, as we as a nation extol him to be, I urge you to make the minimal sacrifice, and spend the 20-30 minutes it would take to listen to, or read, ALL of his “I Have a Dream” speech. Here’s a link to NPR’s transcript of it, where you can also play the ~ 18 minute audio file of the recording made of it that day. Give the man the length of a commute, to really hear the immediate context of his most quoted comment. And if you have the strength, go further. Read his work. Read the work of his compatriots, and his heirs, and those inspired by him to fight the same fights as him. See if you wish to follow his dream. And as/if you do, take in hand and in heart the knowledge that the work is not yet done. His son marches to see his dream continued.

Martin says, in the speech, that the march to Washington is to cash a check. That the liberty, justice, and all the good of the nation promised in the Declaration and Constitution had not yet been paid out to all of America’s citizens. That he was coming to collect on that check, because he and his movement believed that America COULD match that promise, they refused to “believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt”. And I agree. America CAN do these things. But we haven’t yet. The meal is not yet served, the dishes not yet finished. Martin was killed before he could eat this meal. You and I haven’t finished making it to try it ourselves. But it will be completed. In time. As long as we keep trying to get it done. Justice will be served, one day.

 

Recipes

Collard Greens

Makes 4-5 servings

Ingredients

1 smoked ham hock, well rinsed

2 bunches collard greens

2 tbsp dried minced onion

1 tbsp apple cider vinegar

1 tbsp olive oil

½ tbsp seasoning salt

1 tsp hot sauce

1 tsp Worcestershire sauce

1 tsp granulated sugar

½ tsp crushed red pepper flakes

¼ tsp garlic powder

¼ tsp smoked paprika

Pinch of cayenne

 

Preparation

1. In a large pot, add the ham hock and enough water to fully cover. Cook over medium-high heat for 45 minutes.

2. While ham is boiling/simmering, cut stems out of collard bunches, and cut into 1 inch chunks. Cut or tear leaves to roughly 1-2” pieces. Rinse in a colander THOROUGHLY, in order to ensure no grit or sand ends up in the pot.

3. Add the greens to the pot with another 2 cups of water. Add all remaining ingredients, stir to combine, and cook with lid slightly ajar for 90 minutes to 2 hours, until stems are fully softened. Season to taste with additional salt, vinegar, and hot sauce if desired before service.

 

Black-Eyed Peas

Makes around 10-12 servings

Ingredients

1 pound dried black-eyed peas, rehydrated, either from an overnight soak, or a ‘quick soak’ according to bag directions

1 smoked ham hock, well rinsed

2 bay leaves

1 tsp hot sauce

2 tsps salt

1 tsp celery salt

1 tsp freshly cracked black pepper.

 

Preparation

1. Add beans, hock, bay leaves, and 5 cups of water to a pot. Bring to a simmer, and cook for 90 minutes to 2 hours.

2. In last 20 minutes, season with salt, pepper, and hot sauce to taste. Stir vigorously, intentionally mashing some of the peas against the sides of the pot in order to release starch, and thicken ‘sauce’.