Jody
what does "poke-greens"mean? Jody heard nothing; saw nothing but his plate. He had never been so hungry in his life, and after a lean winter and slow spring, with food not much more plentiful for the Baxters than for their stock, his mother had cooked a supper good enough for the preacher. There were poke-greens with bits of white bacon buried in them; sand-buggers made of potato and onion and the cooter he had found crawling yesterday; sour orange biscuits and at his mother's elbow the sweet potato pone. He was torn between his desire for more biscuits and another sand-bugger and the knowledge, born of painful experience, that if he ate them, he would suddenly have no room for pone. The choice was plain.
Dec 7, 2014 8:10 AM
Answers · 1
"poke-greens" refer to blanched leaves of young pokeweed plants. The leaves are traditionally blanched and eaten, but I personally have never eaten them. In the USA, "greens" generally refers to any sort of blanched herb used for eating. The terminology is generally restricted to the southern dialects of American English tho. Fun fact: Mature pokeweeds are actually pretty toxic. The blanching process is used on the leaves of young pokeweeds multiple times before consumption.
December 7, 2014
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