Pot liquor facts for kids
Boiling collard greens
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| Alternative names | potlikker, collard liquor |
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| Type | Soup |
| Place of origin | United States |
| Region or state | Southern United States |
| Main ingredients | Liquid from boiling greens (collard greens, mustard greens, turnip greens); sometimes salt, smoked pork or smoked turkey |
Pot liquor, sometimes spelled potlikker or pot likker, is the flavorful liquid left behind after cooking leafy green vegetables or beans. It's like a rich broth that comes from boiling greens such as collard greens, mustard greens, or turnip greens. Sometimes, people season it with salt, pepper, smoked pork, or smoked turkey.
Pot liquor is very good for you! It contains important vitamins and minerals. These include iron and vitamin C. It is especially rich in vitamin K, which helps your blood clot properly. Another name for it is collard liquor.
Contents
The History of Pot Liquor
Pot liquor has a long and interesting history, especially in the Southern United States. It became an important part of meals because of how people used to cook and what they had available.
Famous People and Pot Liquor
Many people have enjoyed pot liquor over the years. Even some famous politicians have talked about it!
For example, Zell Miller, a former Governor and U.S. Senator from Georgia, once wrote about the traditional spelling "potlikker" in The New York Times. He was defending the way it was spelled.
Much earlier, Huey Long, who was a Governor and U.S. Senator from Louisiana, wrote about "potlikker" in his book, Every Man a King. He said it was a favorite of his political supporters from the countryside.
Huey Long's Description
Huey Long described "potlikker" as:
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. ...
Most people crumble cornpone (corn meal mixed with a little salt and water, made into a pattie and baked until it is hard) into the potlikker.
This shows how important and nourishing pot liquor was considered.
Pot Liquor and Nutrition
The practice of drinking pot liquor developed from cooking methods used by enslaved people. They needed to get as many vitamins and minerals as possible from the food they had. This was important because they often had to do very hard physical work. By using all parts of the cooked greens, including the liquid, they could get more nutrients. This made pot liquor a vital source of nutrition.
