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Collards capture unique flavor of the South
By Lee May

Gwen Tucker can make you hungry just talking about collards.

Lovingly, she recites her time-honored recipe, which includes adding a nice ham hock and making sure the big-leaf greens are cut across the grain so they'll be tender.

Tucker, a 52-year-old city of Atlanta employee, says knowingly that cold weather is collard time. "They're best in the winter when the frost falls," she says, "because they're very tender. Before the frost, put a pinch of soda in them. Years ago, black folks treated collards like chitlins; we didn't cook a lot of them in the summer."

Of course, white folks in the South eat tons of collards, too. Like barbecue, corn bread and anything fried, collards cut across racial lines, bringing the races together culinarily and, at the same time, bridging the gap between the South of yesterday and today.

Eating a mess of greens, complete with pot likker-soaked corn bread, in mixed-race company will make you remember simple, old-fashioned life from decades past and help you believe that racial harmony really is possible. Such a scene is more likely to be seen in this region than in any other because the stomachs of Southerners always have been integrated.

Camille Glenn notes in her book "The Heritage of Southern Cooking" (Workman Publishing Co., $22.95), "When you are offered old-fashioned greens cooked with slab bacon or ham hock, and corn muffins, you know you are south of the Mason-Dixon line."

Invariably, if you mention collards in the North, you'll hear somebody say: "You must be Southern."

You can find collards up North - in soul food and new cuisine restaurants and in countless kitchens belonging to transplanted Southerners. My parents grew and ate them in East St. Louis, Ill., after we moved there from Meridian, Miss., in 1955.

But while the greens are found in the North, they are by no means of the North; they are Southern to the spine.

Tucker, a native Atlantan, calls these greens part of Southern "taste, texture and tradition." She recalls that they were eaten "usually on Sunday in black neighborhoods. You could smell them" as you walked through. In traditional New Year's Day meals, they represent folding money.

Indeed, reaction to the smell of collards separates true Southern eaters from the rest, falling just below chitlins as litmus-test food.

Why is the South such collard country?

For one thing, they tolerate heat and drought - and do so better than other members of the cabbage family. And some Southerners, including Tucker, speculate that collards' historical appeal in this region stems partly from their low cost, in addition to their highly regarded taste.

Says Tucker, "They're cheap, compared to turnips. And they don't shrink as much" during cooking.

If collard knowledge made a Southerner, Eddie Hernandez would qualify. Born in Monterrey, Mexico, Hernandez, 39, moved to Atlanta from Texas in 1987 - and discovered collard greens.

Co-owner and executive chef at Sundown Cafe, which specializes in food with a Southwestern flavor, Hernandez says he was unfamiliar with the greens until a customer who grew them began "bringing me trash bags full of them."

Now, Hernandez knows collards well. He cooks them with chicken stock instead of meat, adding onions, tomatoes and peppers. "People come by and get a gallon and drive away with them," he says.

Thus, in Hernandez's cooking we see a good example of cultural exchange in the ever-changing South.

Tucker, too, embraces a bit of change, acknowledging smoked turkey as a suitable substitute for the venerable ham hock. However, she is quick to add that one requirement won't change: "You must have corn bread." Yes.

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