Creeping Ignorance on Poke Sallet

JAMES W. BYRD

IN EAST TEXAS during the early spring, the folks cook and eat “poke sallet.” Not all of the folks, of course. Only those who have maintained a belief in the folklore of their southern ancestors greet the season of spring by saying:

“I'm going out and pick me a mess of poke today. I'll pareboil it and have some greens, or I may dress it up and have a real good poke sallet.”

Even in East Texas, this statement might not be understood by the so-called younger generation, especially the city dwellers, the immigrants from the north, and the educated whose heads are filled with nothing but “book learning.”

In the field of folklore, there are many instances when printed records, the so-called scientific “facts,” are at variance with folk “beliefs” or folk “lore.” The case of poke is a prime example.

To begin with, the printed records all use the term “pokeweed,” which I have never heard in folk speech. Note the unfavorable connotation of the word “weed.” And that isn't the only word used with an unfavorable connotation. Webster's New International Dictionary (2nd ed.) defines “Pokeweed” as a “coarse American perennial herb (Phytolacca americana) with…white flowers and dark purple juicy berries…. Both the berries and root are emetic and purgative. The root is poisonous but the young shoots are sometimes eaten like asparagus.” Thus, Webster's begins with an insult and ends with a falsehood when defining a succulent plant that gave aid and comfort to the early settlers of Texas and still does to their descendants.

One would expect more knowledge and more objectivity in a distinguished-looking book published by the University of Texas Press. In Roadside Flowers of Texas Howard Irwin discusses both the small pokeweed and the great pokeweed, with only the latter being admitted as edible. He says:

Although he reluctantly admits it is “sometimes eaten as greens,” Irwin would certainly discourage any cook by calling this “utility fraught with danger.” He then reiterates the point with a warning against the poisonous root.

Fortunately, there were few reference books on the frontier or the diet of the early settlers would have been more restricted than it was. Guided only by folk knowledge, or “lore” handed down in oral tradition, the settlers prepared poke by recipes inherited from Tennessee mountain ancestors or obtained from Indian friends.

An Indian cookbook published by the Museum of the Cherokee Indian mentions poke as one of the early spring plants “that the Cherokee people have eaten for as long back as any of us know about and are still enjoyed by many today.” Usually the plants are “parboiled, salted, cooked some more with grease, if available.”²

Historically, Tennessee is a parent state for East Texas,³ and many of the folkways of that state survive among East Texans. One Hunt County informant⁴ tells me that her recipes came from some of the first settlers in the Ozarks, whose speaking and eating habits were patterned after those of relatives in Tennessee mountain areas. My informant had recipes for poke stalk pickles, fried poke, and poke greens.

Still today, she says, some of the mountaineers pickle poke stalks. They are the only pickles some of them will eat (or can afford).

The method is simple: “Use only tender stalks not over 6 inches high. Cut in 3-inch lengths. Trim off leaves. Cook in clear water about 5 minutes. Discard water. Cover again with salted water, and boil about 5 minutes. Discard water. Pack stalks vertically in jars. Cover with this solution: To each pint of vinegar, add ½ teaspoon mustard seed and 2 tablespoons sugar. Heat to boiling, pour over pickles, and seal.”⁵

Another use for the stalk, she says, is to “strip it, cut in small pieces, roll in meal and fry. Tastes like okra.”

These are exotic uses, however. The standard method, reported by dozens of East Texas informants, is to cook the young leaves as greens, often mixed with other wild greens or with domestic mustard greens and turnips. Some of the wild plants mentioned (lamb's-quarter, sheep shire, sorrel, rabbit lettuce, also called wild lettuce, and sour dock, also called curly dock) are similar to the list in the Cherokee cookbook, and it is probably from the Indians that the white man learned to utilize wild greens. In East Texas, these greens are cooked with salt pork, as turnips are cooked. They are served with cornbread and perhaps a homemade pepper-vinegar sauce. Poke greens are especially delicious, being more mild-tasting and digestible than turnips.

It is poke salad or “poke sallet,” however, that has made the plant survive the creeping ignorance that besieges it on all sides—especially the northern side.

Webster's New International snobbishly defines “poke salad” as “greens from the pokeweed,” labeling even that definition as “Rural, U.S.” East Texas folk know, however, that it is usually called “poke sallet,” “sallet” being explained by Webster's as an archaic and dialectal form of “salad.”

An informant in Commerce makes poke salad that pleases the most discriminating taste. Mrs. J. B. Yates, who learned her method from family cooking near Wolfe City, says no recipe is needed. Simply pick the tops or tender buds. Wash them. “Pareboil” them about half an hour (this is the folk pronunciation, also archaic and dialectal, which means boil and drain, from Old French parboiller). The draining is to get rid of a strong taste as well as a supposed poison. Put in half a cup of bacon drippings. Cook until all water has been evaporated. For every two cups of cooked poke, stir in five beaten eggs and scramble. Add salt and pepper. Serve with cornbread.

Another informant, reared on a farm near Bonham, says this: Garnish the cooked poke with sliced hard-boiled eggs and strips of crisp bacon. Serve with creamed potatoes, cornbread sticks, and cold buttermilk—in an unhurried atmosphere.⁶

Recently an ex-Yankee reporter, writing in the Greenville Herald-Banner, questioned whether this can be called a “salad.” Webster's says salad is a “cold dish of green vegetables…usually dressed with oil, vinegar, and seasonings; called also green salad.” Then there is a bow to “Southern, U.S.,” where salad is “cooked greens or poke salad with seasonings.”

That salads are always cold is Yankee fiction, not fact. In southern cooking there is also a warm potato salad, seasoned with vinegar, pickles, and boiled eggs.

Obviously, frontier cooks seasoned salads with the oil that was available—bacon fat. “Wilted lettuce,” a popular dish in the Old South, was made by pouring hot fat over fresh garden lettuce leaves.⁷ And even in northern Pennsylvania, a Dutch Cookbook lists a hot salad called “Dandelion with Bacon Dressing.”⁸ In fact, the wild dandelion is so popular in the North that you can find it described in seed catalogues.⁹

From the point of view of word changes and associations, “greens” and “green salad” could have become so closely associated that they became interchangeable in folk speech—without the present distinction between “vegetable” and “salad” courses. In East Texas today, poke greens usually become poke salad only when dressed up with eggs and perhaps bits of bacon. This is the result of modern influence. Historically, in folk speech of Tennessee and East Texas, “sallet” is the word used in referring to any fresh greens. The pioneers also referred to “turnip sallet” and “mustard sallet.”

It is easy to believe that the settlers of East Texas found poke greens a welcome change from their limited rural winter diet. But they weren't eaten simply because they tasted good. There was, and is, a widespread belief that they are a good spring tonic. More than half of my informants mentioned this as a reason for eating poke salad in early spring. One wrote, “It was a good spring tonic after a winter of meat and bread.”¹⁰ Another said, “It was good for blood in the spring.”¹¹ Others said it was equal to a “round of laxative.”¹² And what would Webster's think of this: “My great-grandmother served it to her family to rid them of poisons accumulated during the winter!”¹³ A Dallas lady wrote, “Men felt it brought back youthful vigor.”¹⁴ A liquor store owner of Longview confirmed this. He said, “It made you feel frisky as a snake that had shed its skin.”¹⁵ A housewife from Greenville commented: “My mother made us eat it as a tonic. Seems our old family doctor had said years ago that if a family would eat a mess or two of poke salad each spring, then he would do their doctoring free for that year.”¹⁶

In this belief, folklore is backed up by scientific fact. Before such words were popularized, a source of vitamins and minerals was found by the folk. Even before Hadacol, they had an iron tonic for their tired blood.

The belief that poke contained poisons was, and is, widespread. That is why it is parboiled (or pareboiled), sometimes twice. The overcautious cook loses much food value by cooking too long. The rumored poison in the poke leaves is a libel grossly exaggerated. Although all informants had “heard” that poke was poison, only one knew of an example. She had read in the paper of some babies who got sick from sucking on raw poke stalks left in the back of a car.¹⁷ My statistics show the danger is not as fraught as some have thought. There must, however, be some poison there, for insects do not attack poke as they do turnip greens. Poke is blessed with a built-in insecticide. Its leaves are unmarred, whether young or mature.

The most poisonous part, the root, has also been useful to man, or so the folks think. Several reported that the boiled root was a good treatment for the seven-year itch.¹⁸ Beaten poke root was made into a poultice for “boils.”¹⁹

The dark purple juicy berries have been put to even more uses. “Sure cures” for rheumatism and arthritis are made from them. They are put in the chicken water to keep parasites off the chickens, and to cure certain fowl diseases. They make excellent bird food and will attract wild birds. They make a useful purple dye. Their juice is ideal for turning youthful palefaces into redskins. Historically, their principal use was for homemade ink. Southern writer William Faulkner recorded that use in a story set before the Civil War.²⁰

When we consider the aid and comfort this humble plant gave our pioneers, it is time to strike back at Yankee publishers and their carpetbagger representatives flooding the South. Some scalawags are now joining them. When I mentioned the poke plant recently, a native East Texas boy said, “Don't that grow mostly around outhouses?” Another said, “No, it grows mostly around the barns and the hawgpens.” They are as ignorant as Webster's when recording that it is “eaten like asparagus.” Poke grows, of course, wherever the soil is rich—along fence rows, roadsides, and lake dams. I was told in Hunt County that raccoons eat the berries and scatter the seeds far and wide. It can be found in April growing in the most sanitary soils. As for eating it like asparagus, experienced cooks laugh at such ignorance. Asparagus, grown easily in East Texas, is boiled briefly, standing on end with the tips out of the water, probably in an old coffeepot. It is then served with a cheese sauce. There is no comparison to poke in cooking, serving, or tasting.

Texas-born Dwight D. Eisenhower once classified T.V.A. as “creeping socialism.” I have borrowed his phrase to explain the status quo of the poke plant in East Texas. Falsehoods have crept into northern-written dictionaries and reference books—slander is being published by our universities—libelous rumors are invading the oral traditions. Today even the folk are mixed up on poke. Someone must stop this creeping ignorance on poke sallet. It should be done by the Texas Folklore Society; if not, then by a much-need Texas Poke Lore Society. Membership would be open to anyone who could prove he was a proud possessor of a pure, palatable pint of pickled poke.