Amirah and Chris, proudly posing with their freshly harvested and freshly arranged Green Glaze Collards. We weeded and talked about our favorite collard recipes, and marveled over the waxiness and relatively few bug-eaten holes in this heirloom crop. Food historian Michael Twitty (@thecookinggene) says: “The variety you see in the picture above is my personal favorite, Green Glaze. They are pretty, waxy, crisp, tough against bugs and extremely delicious. They also happen to be the oldest variety we have/know of collard green dating back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries, with the Georgia Southern or Creole collard out of the Deep South going back to the 1860s-1880s.” See Twitty’s Afroculinaria blog (and probably his book, the Cooking Gene, which is currently packed away in our new house so now I can’t check) for a description of how this European crop combined with African tastes and became so closely associated with southern Black foodways. A sneak peek: “In tropical West Africa, greens were available year round in gardens and markets and figured prominently in regular meals.” William Woys Weaver (@roughwoodseeds) describes the origin of this particular variety: “One of the oldest [collards] to survive, however, is the Green Glaze collard, a colewort that evolved out of the Green Glaze cabbage introduced in 1820 by David Landreth of Philadelphia.” Highly recommended! #greenglazecollards #afroculinaria https://www.instagram.com/p/BzO1kCJAloe/?igshid=1tlkbl58avaq6
