Poke Salad

Around here it's just called poke. Farther north it's called pokeweed. Even farther north, among the tundra dwellers, it is likely unknown. South of here it's called poke salad. 'Salad' is in the older sense of the word meaning 'cooked greens'. It is a contraction of the Latin phrase herba salada, 'salted herbs.'

It is a hearty perennial that grows from a root often as big as a man's forearm so when it breaks dormancy in the spring, it quickly puts up thick, fleshy shoots. The stalks are sometimes cut into pieces, dredged with meal, and fried much as is done with okra (oh, that's right, if you aren't used to eating poke, odds are you aren't used to eating fried okra either). When the plant is older, the leaves are cooked like spinach, which they remotely resemble in taste. Our favorite way of preparing poke is to cut the early shoots leaves and all, chop them coarsely, and steam them or boil them as one would do asparagus, which taste they remotely resemble.

It isn't good raw. Raw poke is harsh and astringent. As the plant grows older, it develops mild toxins which can give you a good stomach upset so it's an early spring delicacy to be enjoyed in its season.

Poke is most often reckoned a weed and anyone doing battle with it in garden or lawn has squared off against a worthy adversary. Another 'weed' that makes itself know this time of the year is annual lambs quarter seen in the lower right of the above photo. I can't imagine there's a place anywhere it wouldn't grow.

I was looking into the nutritional content of various foods available to us and it is amazing to consider that the vitamin, mineral, and phytochemical content of some vegetables is so much higher that most of what we eat: kale, broccoli, and spinach stand out. But then I came across the nutritional information for some of our favorite wild foods: plantain, dock, fiddle heads, dandelion, purslane, cress, etc. and it is more amazing still to find that those foods have phytochemical and vitamin content far, far above any cultivated food in the garden. Lambs quarter is like that, as is poke. Poke even contains a substance called Pokeweed Anti-viral Protein (PAP) which is being studied as a treatment for AIDS.

As we enjoyed this year's poke, I thought about the nutritional poverty of the modern diet. Many people I know have never eaten more than an incidental vegetable and many have never tasted a bit of cooked greens, even finding the prospect revolting. Really nutritionally outstanding wild foods are all but unknown.

Glad to be pulling up my chair around the free man's table. Pass the poke salad!