Your Next Contribution to a Covered Dish Dinner

            It’s Saturday afternoon in July and a brain-frying 95 degrees in the shade – which is why I’m inside and looking for something fun to think about.  So I picked poke salad - because of Tony Joe White’s Poke Salad Annie.  In case you don’t remember it, here’s a link to a YouTube cut of White’s performance on the Johnny Cash show, circa 1970: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRPO9qXCyyg.

            You won’t have any trouble finding pokeweed.  It’s all over the southern United States. Probably along the edges of your yard or sunny road ditches leading to Grandma's house.         

Mature pokeweed (from http://bulletin.ipm.illinois.edu)

           I’ve tried branch lettuce and rabbit tobacco, but can’t say I’ve eaten  poke salad, so I started wondering how to prepare it.  What I found were a few recipes and lots of cautions, e.g. – it’s poisonous, will kill you, even starving animals won’t eat it.

Immature pokeweed

            In spite of all the cautions from a variety of agricultural/scientific agencies, there are plenty of web sites that explain how to cook pokeweed.  If you like it, you should plan to attend the Poke Salad Festival in Blanchard, Louisiana. Though I’m not going to try it, here’s a recipe (from: http://www.trippyfood.com/tag/poke/) that sounds like how Poke Salad Annie might’ve prepared her pokeweed:

·      Pick enough young, tender pokeweed leaves to fill about two paper grocery bags full.

·      Boil them in water and rinse.

·      Boil and rinse.

·      Boil and rinse.

·      In a well seasoned iron skillet, fry several chunks of bacon and cook down for the fat.

·      Add the pokeweed, scrambled eggs, onions, salt and pepper.

·      Remove the bacon, unless you really like something bitter and foul-tasting.

What remains is, according to the web site, delicious.

By the way, Indians used pokeweed berries to make dye and smoked dried pokeweed roots for medicinal purposes.

THIS INFORMATION IS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. 

 EAT, SMOKE, TATTOO OR MEDICATE AT YOUR OWN RISK.