The Bitter the Better
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
—Keats, “To Autumn”
When I think of the smell of the autumns of my youth, I think of windfall apples softening to rot under the branches of the orchard behind the house where I grew up. I think of vented barns stuffed to the tier poles with the tannic scent of Burley tobacco curing. I think of the first cool nights and a distant edge of leafsmoke on the air. I think too, and always, of the sulfurous, floral steam of a pot of turnip greens rattling on the stove.
Of the many foods I love, it’s turnip greens—long-simmered with bacon grease, salt and maybe a hint of brown sugar—that occupies an almost mystical place. It is not an exaggeration to say that if I think of turnip greens when I have not been thinking of them (if, for instance, someone mentions the dish to me), I instantly feel something akin to lightheadedness, a sensation almost as if my legs are about to give way. I’m not alone. I have talked to other people who experience this phenomenon, and it is real.
I’ve often pondered what it is about turnip greens that inspires such intense and visceral craving. They are, to be certain, nutrient rich, earning a perfect score on the Aggregate Nutrient Index, but it has to be more than that. I love blueberries, for example, and they too are dense with vitamins and minerals, but I don’t nearly swoon when I think of them.
When I was growing up, we ate turnip greens with hardboiled or deviled eggs and a crusty disk of my mother’s magnificent cornbread baked to just this side of burnt in a cast iron skillet. The greens, along with a small cruet of apple cider vinegar, were served in a bowl with a generous amount of the cooking liquid we called “pot liquor.” It was a meal whose many pungent odors would linger in the house for hours.
The vinegar is more than a condiment; it’s an integral part of the experience. When we moved to Arkansas, I discovered that people west of the Mississippi douse their greens with white vinegar in which green or yellow tabasco peppers have been steeped. I have come to love that too.
When you encounter turnip greens growing in the garden, they don’t immediately seem like the kind of thing one should eat. The plants are almost thorny, with little hair-like burrs that make the skin on your hands and arms itch and sting when you’re picking them. In order to break down the tough, fibrous leaves and stems they must be brought to a boil and then simmered a long time. A quick sauté in a wok—the way you might cook spinach or bok choy—would never suffice.
The greens, while they’re cooking, produce a scent that is unique to them. Our children found the smell so malodorous that they banished me and my stock pot of greens to a propane burner on our porch. I have spent many cold, blustery afternoons in hat and gloves, my glasses clouded with steam, hovering around the grill with a shaker of salt and a long-handled wooden spoon.
Once cooked, turnip greens are bitter and spicy. I’ve read that we Americans don’t appreciate bitterness in our food, at least not in the way other cultures do. I remember being fascinated some years back by the bitter melons growing along a trellis spanning one entire side of our local Thai restaurant. The vines, forming a nearly impenetrable 12-foot tall wall, were hanging full of the strange, warty fruits. When I asked the owner about them, he brought us small bowls of a kind of stew made with bitter melons, a dish not on the menu. It was, I can confidently report, an acquired taste.
In the county in Kentucky where I grew up, many people, including my father, raised large turnip green patches. The best turnip greens are those you grow yourself, those picked and cooked on the same day.
Among devotees, the greens were a frequent topic of speculation and debate. One of the best farmers I ever knew—a man renowned for his turnip greens—once pronounced his judgement on the flavor of greens by remarking “The bitter the better.” It was a phrase that delighted my father and a sentiment with which he concurred.
Back when bags of ammonium nitrate were still widely available at farm supply stores—back, that is, before people started using it to make homemade bombs—my father would sprinkle the powdery fertilizer on his greens patch just before a rain to jolt the little seedlings into rapid—and therefore tender—growth. I favor a more organic approach and this year I’m using some of the composted goat manure our son Warren bought me for Christmas, a gift he presented in five-gallon buckets wrapped in a red, glittery bow.
Turnips and their greens are a remarkably cold-tolerant crop, improving in flavor after a frost or two, even overwintering to produce what are known as “run-ups” when the plants bolt or go to seed in February or early March. There are those who consider the run-ups the crop’s finest (if final) moment. My greens patch last year produced run-ups with stems almost as thick as asparagus.
I remember my father picking greens one frigid morning when the entire patch was sheathed in a thin coating of ice. I can picture him coming in the screen door of our back porch with a grocery sack full of the frozen crinkly greens, watery blotches bleeding through the brown paper bag as the leaves thawed. He said the ice-glazed stems snapped off in his hands. I rarely saw him happier.
Now, every year, there comes a moment toward the end of summer when the humidity evaporates and the sky goes blue and cloudless, and I start thinking about planting greens. If I’m able to plan ahead and have enough space, I leave a garden bed unplanted all summer and pile grass clippings there, food for the earthworms that work the soil underneath to a perfect crumb. More often than not, though, I end up having to sacrifice the last weeks of some warm-weather crop (cucumbers or squash, for instance) to make room.
I wait for a windless day, pour seeds and a scoop of builder’s sand into a rusted coffee can, and broadcast the mixture onto a freshly raked bed of soil. For several years now, I’ve grown “Seven Top,” a variety bred to produce greens and not turnips. The seeds are so tiny, and they germinate so easily, that even a tablespoon of them will result in a crop so thick it will require multiple, tedious thinnings. It’s a lesson I never seem to learn.
Planting greens and looking forward to them is one of the pleasures of fall, a season I’ve never loved in the way I love spring and summer. I have to work at appreciating the so-called Ember Months, cultivating a taste for their quieter pleasures. When “the pond / stiffens and the white field… brings out / its long blue shadows,” as Mary Oliver writes in “Song for Autumn,” I feel an old and a familiar sadness at the dwindling of the year, but then I think of drinking wine by the fireplace before dinner, flames flickering on our crystal glasses. I think of hiking the trails that crisscross the Ozarks all around us, open and accessible again after the ticks have burrowed under leaf litter and the snakes have coiled into their winter dens. I think of cool nights and a huge orange moon kindling the mountains to a bed of coals. And even if I have to steady myself to prevent my knees from buckling, I think of crumbled cornbread soaking up the vinegary pot liquor of a batch of just picked, just cooked turnip greens.
a cricket chirping
in the marigolds tonight—
moon like a bent nail
DAVIS McCOMBS is the author of three books of poetry: Ultima Thule (Yale), Dismal Rock (Tupelo), and lore (University of Utah). Read more.