Collards.

Photo by Cece Kirksey for Blunt Food Magazine

Perhaps it’s a bit precious to say, but we’re not all that different from one another, line cooks and collard greens. At the end of service, after smoking oil has coated every surface of our arms and we’ve sweat three quarts of water into our chef’s whites, the collards have been through the same—and they come out more complex, jaded, and sexy than ever before. Then, they get hung up in the cooler to absorb their potlikker (braising liquid) and to be equally used and abused for the following service days. I’d like to have a conversation with them sometime. I’d ask them how they hold their organic bonds so tightly on that grill, or how stay so well hydrated. I’m curious how they inhale so much likker without a sabotaging hangover. How do they stay so stiff and well postured in their crates? I’d ask how they mature so peacefully in that big rondeau pot, how they only get tastier with age, how they invite diners to experience their own past, and how I could possibly get them to write a feature article. I’m sure they’d have a magazine’s worth, perhaps many, of stories to tell.

Collards are one of very few leafy greens that won’t wilt into paper-thin, stringy threads or simply disintegrate when braised or boiled. Perhaps it’s this, their worldwide versatility, or more likely their necessary role in the history of enslaved Africans in the South that named them a symbol of resilience and power in the culinary world. The iconic components of these braised “tree cabbages” were the only sustainable ingredients at the disposal of the time’s cooks, and now, like guanciale in carbonara, have made themselves unlikely pillars of a timeless cuisine.

Even as they spread their seeds across climates and cultures (Southeast Africa, Asia Minor, the American South) these collard leaves found their way into the same old stock pot on the stove, slowly turning their potlikker into a potent elixir for line cooks to re-up on every time they adjust its saltiness and kick. When it’s time to plate, the hot-held greens are slopped right into a bowl, then flashed and sent out as if they were an afterthought. Maybe they are an afterthought, considering they can just sit there and inhale heat all day without any damage done but a little extra mouthfeel. But these greens, as they evolve into the braised collards that pester us at almost every restaurant in the bottom half of the states, adapt a bit of personality from us cooks.

The ideal approach to making collards is likely the least agreed upon thing in the industry. A few kitchens stand by tartness, usually upheld by bottles and bottles of apple cider or champagne vinegars. Some simply use garlic and oil, and their collards come out a luminescent green, which is just pitiful. At my current restaurant, we dry-smoke the living daylights out of the collards before braising them, which adds a meaty depth of their profile and gives vegetarians a taste of what they’re missing out on. Some chefs like to keep the stems in the picture, others will threaten to castrate you if you fail to trim them out. Some like their potlikker bright orange and spotted with oil and spice; others like it a deep, dark brown; others a light green; and so on. All that stays consistent is the delicate bite of a stripped chiffonade collard that has left its crispness and chlorophyl in the dust.

I’m partial to a more homestyle take on collards, built up by smoked and boiled turkey legs—which have you picking bones out of the pot every time you stir the greens with a pair of too-short tongs, and steam-burning the shit out of your wrist. After the turkey starts to fall of the bone, and the boiling water has tinged a bit beige, I’ll add apple cider vinegar, Louisiana hot sauce, and an unholy amount of Tony Chachere’s until the liquid tastes bright and peppery. Once the liquid has reduced a bit and upped its potency, then, and only then, I’ll add my stripped collard greens and play with them a bit every thirty minutes over the course of three or four hours. Then, some caramelized onions. That’s about it.

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When the quality of your cooking performance is grounded in your stone-faced urgency and finesse, it feels wrong, so blissfully wrong, to stir a worn, blackened pot of collard greens for three to six hours, jumping between other prep tasks and leaving them at a deep, rolling boil on the range. In an environment where leaving something on the stove for thirty seconds too long is quite often a death sentence, having multiple hours of leeway to spare on these greens is bizarre; For that, collard greens are quite loyal. When you’re finished slicing a case of green tomatoes or passing nine quarts of purée through a strainer, you’ve got a resilient old friend on the stove to come back to, and they’re just beginning to soften. I’d say they deserve a bit of a thank you for not being a picky bitch requiring a hollandaise level of attention and accuracy.

What results from all this nonsense is a gloriously complex, practically unmatchable flavor that collects through every second of the collard green-braising process. No moment spent stirring the rolling stock pot is left unidentifiable on the palate. Every broken cell in the chiffonade collards, every loose drop of fat from the hock, every puff of the joint you hit while the pig’s trotter boiled or every note that Björk graced while you were listening to her in the background—it’s all there. It’s almost humbling, too, as the life of these long-awaited wilted greens reaches its end, to watch them get sloppily chowed down and deconstructed by starving diners in between bites of smashed potatoes and BBQ shrimp (each of which required a mere ten minutes of cook time). In just a few slurps at the dining table, four-plus hours of organic breakdown vanishes. All that’s left is a tartness in the cheeks, a subtle tingle on the tongue, and the historically recalled vein of resilience and grit.