Living High on Pork Avenue

Today I had a traditional meal I had not had in a while. Cornbread and vegetables. I fixed green beans and collards, and I served them with a sliced Vidalia and a sliced tomato. Very, very nice.

Yesterday, Mike made BBQ chicken, and I made greens. Because the chicken came out of the smoker faster than I anticipated, the greens had been cooking less than three hours when dinner was served. For this reason, they were practically raw by Southern standards, and the flavor was substandard. They were probably better than the collards in 99% of America’s restaurants, but then restaurants make them badly.

I had hoped to make the greens with neckbones, but my local grocery was out of neckbones and hocks. I grabbed some fatback, but when I got home, I decided not to use it because it wasn’t smoked. I used half a pound of fried bacon instead, along with most of the grease. I also added a garlic clove, salt, MSG, butter, pepper, and a few squirts of hot sauce. In retrospect, I think half a can of chicken broth might have been nice.

Mike put vinegar in his greens, and he raved about them. I kept telling him they were garbage compared to the real thing, but he didn’t seem to think that was possible.

After we ate, I boiled the greens for maybe 90 more minutes, and they finally gave up. They wilted completely and gave up all their flavor. Instead of salad in hot water, I had sweet, wilted, wrinkly greens swimming in an acidic, aromatic reduction you could sell by itself in a high-end restaurant. Call it soup.

Yesterday, when I realized I wouldn’t be able to use the fatback in the greens, I put it in the smoker with the chicken. When it came out, it was gorgeous. It had a golden glaze on it. It was tender. It smelled like heaven. Today I used it in my beans.

Pole beans are the best green beans. They have lots of flavor, and they take a long time to fall apart when you boil them. You can boil them with pork for hours without ruining the texture. I did not have pole beans, so I put my regular beans in water with salt, garlic, pepper, sugar, butter, and MSG. I sliced the fatback into the pot.

After a couple of hours, the beans were getting soft, but there was still too much liquor in the pot, so I removed the beans and boiled the snot out of the liquor and pork. I reduced the liquid by a factor of maybe three. Then I put everything back together. The blandness was gone. The flavor was even better than the flavor of the greens.

I made cornbread using my standard recipe, which is 2 cups Martha White, 1-1/3 cups full-fat buttermilk, 2 eggs, 1/4 cup bacon grease, 1 tbsp. sugar, and 1 tsp. salt. I had to replace about two tablespoons of grease with butter because I was running low. I baked at 450° in a #6 skillet. The cornbread came out with a dark brown bottom and lots of crunch. It was beautiful.

I will explain how I eat this stuff. I slice the onion and quarter the slices. I slice the tomato. I butter the cornbread. Then I go at it, and most of the time, I try to get a piece of Vidalia on my fork with whatever else I’m eating. I dip the cornbread in the liquid from the greens and beans.

If that sounds weird, you may be one of the millions of people who don’t like vegetables much, or maybe you’ve never had greens or beans cooked correctly with pork.

Mike is a real challenge. I made hoe cakes, which are small fried cornbread pancakes, the other day. They were supposed to go with chili. Mike grabbed a squeeze bottle of cheap jelly and blasted some hoe cakes with it. I nearly died.

Today he said he thought the undercooked greens had been great, and he said he didn’t understand dipping cornbread in the juice from greens and beans. He can’t even understand why a person would put Oberholtzer’s Kentucky sorghum syrup on cornbread instead of store brand grape jelly made from dye and corn syrup.

He has a date in another city today, and he didn’t manage his time well. I sat down and ate like a king, and he had to get in the car to drive across the state. He was not happy when he saw the food.

In these apocalyptic times of Bidenian inflation, supply chain problems, and disease, it’s good to remember that the price of a dish and its sophistication are totally unrelated to how good it tastes or how good it is for you. One day people who can do wonders with collards, corn meal, and salt pork will be living much better than urbanites and suburbanites who think they can’t eat anything Gordon Ramsay doesn’t eat.