Okra Boy: At the Okra Strut festival in Irmo, S.C. Irmo doesn't know okra from pizza.
• Okra Pizza: Following is an email exchange about today’s column.
Okra replaced spinach as the official #1 veggie of this transplanted Yankee long before I permanently moved here 8 years ago.
It is particularly good to put lots of frozen okra (not whole) in with the pizza when you heat up frozen cheese pizza in your oven. I add sausage and diced onion and peppers too. And, it’s recipe-free.
I sure hope the ‘pot likker’ is booze, and not some questionable tradition of licking the pot clean. Ugh. (But, I stopped drinking years ago.)
Since I’m not a pristine Southern boy, I guess I should buy the darn book (alas, from a rival church — neither First Presbyterian nor Church of the Cross) and find out what to really do with it.
Thanks for reading the column and writing such a humorous note.
Pot likker is the liquid in a pot of cooked vegetables. It is flavorful because of the vegetables, and the bones, bits of meat and/or fatback cooked with them to make them A) taste good and B) kill you quicker.
The Perrier Jouet of pot likker would be the pot likker in collard greens.
Many people like to crumble cornbread in said pot likker and eat it with a spoon. Others, probably the more refined, insist that one should keep the pot likker and cornbread separate. These are probably the same folks who think sugar belongs in cornbread. They are surely the people who frown on those who pour some of their coffee into the saucer to cool, then slurp it down when it has “done been saucered and blowed.” If you think deaths have not occurred over these differences, you ain’t from around here.
In finer institutions, like Mary Mac’s Tea Room on Ponce de Leon Avenue in Atlanta, pot likker is a menu item. You can buy a cup of pot likker (with cornbread to the side). This gives it the stature it deserves. It is a full-fledged “side,” like high and mighty macaroni and cheese.
My grandmother worked as an office administrator for one of the Candlers in the Candler Building in downtown Atlanta. The Candlers, you may know, founded Coca-Cola and had more money than Fort Knox. The Candlers were and are prodigious philanthropists, but this particular Candler did not like to spend money on himself. He had a spartan office, and he never ate lunch out, except for a regular meeting of a business association. Grandmother would get the bill and see that all he ordered was a bowl of pot likker for 12 cents.
Pot likker will not get you drunk, but some say it is an aphrodisiac.
The Old Crow Medicine Show band, which recently played on Hilton Head Island at the Shoreline Ballroom, says this in its wonderful song, “Down Home Girl”:
Lord I swear the perfume you wear
Was made out of turnip greens
And every time I kiss you girl
It tastes like pork and beans
Even though you’re wearin’ them
Citified high heels
I can tell by your giant step
You been walkin’ through the cotton fields
Oh, you’re so down home girl
As Anne Cooke explained, the local folks used the liquid from a pot of field peas or whatever they were cooking as a “gravy” on white rice.
I highly recommend the Church of the Cross cookbook. Its “Company Carrots” recipe has been a huge hit with our family. And I understand the Bluffton Baptists and Catholics also have new cookbooks out.
In case you didn’t get to see Emmett’s column in The Bluffton Packet, here’s a link to it. It’s much better than mine, and Emmett I thank you for your constant inspiration, and hope I gave you proper credit.
Your recipe-free pizza sounds, uh, well, even more wonderful than okra casserole. Thanks for sharing it.
Thanks for setting me straight on ‘pot likker.’ I might try it, but perhaps only if I take up drinking again.
I’m going to update my resume to reflect this knowledge.
As Al Pacino (LTC Slade) said in “Scent of a Woman” — “I’m in the dark here!” Our Packet didn’t come this morning. But, as I was about to punch “Send” I got the 21st Century idea that I could read it online. David, I know Anne and her group appreciate your piece and the wider exposure it will give them.
My father used to relay the story where a big fan of okra exclaimed he could eat it twice a day. His friend replied in surprise, “Man, ain’t you ever had fried (sautéed?) okra fu breakfast?”
• Slide Easy: A colleague here at work quotes a man who once told a relative:
I ate okra only once and wouldn’t have eaten it then if I could’ve cotched it.
My colleague’s Uncle David called okra the “Slide Easy Vegetable.”
