Potlikker Or Pot Liquor?

Although many youngsters may be clueless, Southerners of a certain era know what potlikker is and that it was loved by most everyone. They've probably tried it with cornpone or cornbread, but important questions remain: Is it spelled potlikker or pot liquor? Is the cornbread crumbled or dunked in it?
In the 1930s, a time when lots of people would have eaten potlikker of necessity, great debates played out in major newspapers over just those questions. Here's how it happened, plus a little history of potlikker for any young'uns or non-Southerners out there.

Potlikker

Potlikker (I'm using this spelling because it was the version preferred by all the old timers I grew up around) is the juice left in the pot after cooking turnip or collard greens. My own preferences for eating potlikker would be a bowl of turnips with the roots cut up with corn bread and not the sweet stuff that foreigners try to pass off as corn bread. Dipping corn bread should only be done by people who have ‘pinky’ fingers that automatically pop out to the side when they pick up food. Corn bread should either be crumbled into the potlikker remaining in ones bowl or potlikker poured over the cornbread crumbled or not. 

 

Collards and cornbread in potlikker

In his book "The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma's Table," Rick Bragg wrote: "It is the poor folks' version of the Italian wedding soup and a fine meal in lean times …. The broth from the greens, fortified with pork, was also an excellent meal for the sick, rich in iron, to get them out of bed and back in the mill or the field …."
Though claims of its curative qualities may be farfetched, potlikker is indeed packed with nutrients, for, during the cooking process, vitamins and minerals leech out of the greens, leaving the collards, turnips, or mustards comparatively bereft of nutrients while the vitamins A, B, and C as well as potassium suffuse the potlikker. In terms of how you cook your greens, there is, of course, a ridiculously large range of recipes and opinions. Some people like 'em sort of sweet, some people do shorter cooking, most use some pork, but some don't. Personally I'm big on a lot of bacon or pork of some sort, some chopped onion, a lot of long cooking, and a good bit of pepper. Longer cooking, starting with a pot full of water and cooking it down, begets more potent potlikker, and I like that.

 

Collards with ham bathing in potlikker

Huey Long Jr., former U.S. Senator and governor of Louisiana, waxed poetic on potlikker in his 1933 autobiography, "Every Man a King."
He wrote: "Potlikker is the juice that remains in a pot after greens or other vegetables are boiled with proper seasoning. The best seasoning is a piece of salt fat pork, commonly referred to as 'dry salt meat' or 'side meat.' If a pot be partly filled with well-cleaned turnip greens and turnips (which should be cut up), with a half-pound piece of the salt pork and then with water and boiled until the greens and turnips are cooked reasonably tender, then the juice remaining in the pot is the delicious, invigorating, soul-and-body sustaining potlikker ... which should be taken as any other soup and the greens eaten as any other food. ..."
Long added that potlikker is typically eaten with corn pone, which is dipped into the liquid.

 

Bowl of collards in potlikker with a glass of potlikker

It was that last assertion that started a debate in 1931 that played out in public.

Food writer John T. Edge, now head of the Southern Foodways Alliance and author of "The Potlikker Papers," wrote: "I wrote my graduate school thesis about the Potlikker and Cornpone Debate of 1931, which began when Julian Harris, an editor at the Atlanta Constitution, published an Associated Press story about the sale of highway bonds by Gov. Huey Long of Louisiana. Long credited the sale to a supper of potlikker and cornbread, which he served the lead investors in a financial syndicate. In an editor's note, Harris, who crumbled his cornbread into potlikker, questioned Long's habit of dunking. In response, Long telegrammed Harris. And Harris telegrammed Gov. Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York, who vacationed at Warm Springs, Ga. The debate was on."
It continued from mid-February to early March, during which the Atlanta Constitution received more than 600 letters to the editor on the subject.

 

The debate was renewed in 1935, again initiated by Huey Long during a famous filibuster. In 1989, Zell Miller, then lieutenant governor of Georgia, argued the proper name of the liquid in an article in The New York Times:
"In an article on Senate debates on food that ran on this page Feb. 10, mention was made of a 1935 filibuster in which Huey Long lectured his colleagues on the merits of potlikker. Due to an unfortunate consultation with a dictionary, that great Southern delicacy was referred to as 'pot liquor,' prompting the following communication from a regional authority on the subject:
Dear Sir:
I always thought The New York Times knew everything, but obviously your editor knows as little about spelling as he or she does about Southern cooking and soul food.
Only a culinarily-illiterate damnyankee (one word) who can't tell the difference between beans and greens would call the liquid left in the pot after cooking greens 'pot liquor' (two words) instead of 'potlikker' (one word) as yours did. And don't cite Webster as a defense because he didn't know any better either. Sincerely, Zell Miller, Lieutenant Governor State of Georgia."

  

Turnips with the roots in potlikker