Cut, strip, and tear three bunches of turnip and two of mustard greens. Peel and cube turnip roots to cook or not.
Put greens in a clean stoppered sink, sprinkle with salt, cover with water, and agitate to knock off sand and other debris. Repeat until thoroughly clean. Drain thoroughly and load into a pot on medium heat. Add about two cups of water or light stock, a chopped white onion, and a pound of sliced bone-in ham or smoked turkey tail.
Reduce heat and cover. Stew, stirring occasionally, for at least two hours. Adjust salt, add a little pepper, and let sit before serving.
Contrary to popular belief, Southerners don’t always cook vegetables “to death.”
Here in the South, we enjoy a wide variety of vegetables either raw or lightly cooked as in this recipe, which has been prepared long before the word “Dixie” came into use, and is a signature dish not only here, but–in variations–across the globe.
Use the freshest mustard, turnip, kale/collard, or spinach. Wash thoroughly, shake well, strip stems, shred, and drain. For a half-gallon of greens, fry six to eight slices of bacon until very crisp. Remove bacon, add another quarter cup of corn oil, reheat the oil, add about a half cup of vinegar, and a tablespoon or so of a red pepper sauce. Add a teaspoon of sugar, and let this cook down by about a third.
Place drained greens in a large bowl or pan, pour the hot oil/vinegar mixture over the greens, and toss with plenty of salt and black pepper. Top with thinly sliced white onions, crumbled bacon, and chopped boiled egg. Sprinkle with more black pepper; serve with a bowl of pintos.
Jackson, Mississippi stands at a crossroads in the Deep South, so it was a shock for me to discover people here who do not serve greens and peas on New Year’s Eve or Day. Of course, like any Southern metropolitan area, Jackson has people living here from across the nation and the world who have good reason not to know they should have a pot of peas on the stove on Dec. 31 or Jan. 1, but you also have people here living in detached, pretentious affluence who consider peas, collards, mustard and turnip greens, with their ethnic and rural connotations, coarse and common.
Fortunately, such people are by far the exception rather than the rule, and most people in Mississippi’s capitol city cook leafy greens and field peas at the turn of the year in observance of a regional tradition. Black-eyed peas are a type of cowpea, as are crowder peas, and serving them instead of any other variety of beans (for they are beans) is mandatory. This culinary tradition entered the Southern repertoire by way of Sephardic Jews who settled in South Carolina, Georgia and Maryland well before the Civil War, and they brought with them their tradition of eating black-eyed peas at Rosh Hashana. Stewed greens are almost always served as well, but the type of greens is a matter for the most part a matter of preference, to a lesser extent that of geography, but almost invariably turnips or mustards, collards and cabbages. In the broadest sense, cabbage seems to be most often served in urban households, greens in rural households, and collards most often in the lower South and along the east coast, but this statement is based on the least systematic and most cursory research.
The tradition that associates these foods with financial prosperity is clouded in folklore, but then luck has always been associated with riches, though there are those among us who would say such a relationship is unworthy of the morally evolved. In the past, people were known to have cooked peas with coins in them to ensure wealth (a risky practice), yet peas, largely because of their shape, are symbolic of coins, as leaf greens are of paper money, an obvious analogy in this country where the currency is green on the “back” side.
In other parts of the country, New Year’s foods usually typify family holiday traditions. We should find comfort in knowing that our traditional New Year’s table bears hope for the coming year.
