Collard Greens Taste Sweeter After the Frost
It's a Southern truth you can taste to verify.
“Southern food is a celebration of life. It’s about taking the bounty of the land and turning it into something that nourishes both body and soul.” Edna Lewis, Grande Dame of Southern cooking. The Virginia-born chef did more than anyone to elevate Southern food to haute cuisine.
Some children are obsessed with soldiers, dinosaurs, and princesses. Edna Lewis grew up in love with food and the land that yielded it. “I loved walking barefoot behind my father in the newly ploughed furrow, carefully putting one foot down before the other and pressing it into the warm ploughed earth, so comforting to the soles of my feet,” Lewis wrote in her seminal 1976 cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking.
On some occasions, the plough would expose the roots of a sassafras bush, which Lewis and her father would take back home to brew tea the next morning. “Planting season was always accompanied by the twilight arrival of the whippoorwill, repeating breathlessly and rapidly,” she recalled on another occasion. For Lewis, the “birds, the quiet, flowers, trees, gardens, fields, music, love, sunshine, rain, and the smells of the earth” were her muse and would play a large part in her ascendance to the heights of American cooking as the grande dame of Southern cooking. A proponent of locally sourced food long before it was fashionable, she would go to great lengths to seek out only the most genuine and freshest ingredients.
Collards and cornbread were a meal unto themselves at my grandmother’s North Carolina home. We learned to love them early—slow-cooked greens spooned onto a plate with crumbly cornbread—especially alongside Christmas ham and the ever-present pot of black-eyed peas simmering on New Year’s Day.
There’s a reason greens show up on Southern tables when the calendar turns. Their deep green color is said to symbolize money, and eating them on January 1 is believed to promise prosperity in the year ahead. Black-eyed peas, long associated with good luck, have been part of Southern foodways for more than three centuries.
All across the South, Hoppin’ John remains the most beloved New Year’s Day dish—a humble, soulful bowl that carries hope, history, and a wish for better days ahead.
At its heart, Hoppin’ John is a simple dish of black-eyed peas cooked with rice and pork — often a ham hock, bacon, or salt pork — seasoned gently and meant to stretch, nourish, and comfort. Like so much Southern food, it was born of necessity and resourcefulness, shaped by West African traditions brought to the Lowcountry by enslaved people and adapted to what was available in Southern kitchens.
The black-eyed peas symbolize luck and survival. The pork represents progress and prosperity — pigs root forward, never backward. Add rice for abundance, greens for wealth, and cornbread for gold, and suddenly the plate becomes a quiet prayer for the year ahead.
In many homes, Hoppin’ John is served on January 1, and the leftovers — called “Skippin’ Jenny” — are eaten the next day, said to bring even more luck. Whether or not you believe the superstition, there’s something deeply comforting about the ritual itself: returning to the same dish, the same flavors, the same hope.
It’s not fancy food. It’s food with memory. Food that reminds us where we came from, how little it once took to feel full, and how much faith our ancestors placed in a humble pot simmering on the stove.
Recipe for Spicy Collards by the late Edna Lewis from our Tides of Traditions online cookbook available to all paid subscribers. I could not resist including her Coconut Cake, one of her most famous and delicious contributions to our culinary South. Thank you to everyone who stopped by this past year to comment and enjoy this special corner of the internet. I am grateful for each one of you. Thank you for your love and support. Wishing a Happy New Year to all!!!!
Drum roll, please!
