Hi Judy
I looked up poke salad as I hadn't heard of it, and found this article.
Margaret
Poke SaladThere is a delicacy here in the Deep South that is free and available to anyone. This vegetable cannot be purchased from a grocery store, but it can be picked from most any back yard or bartered from a friend or neighbor. This plant is called poke salad, or poke salit, as my family says it. I always thought it was called poke salad because it has the appearance of salad greens and when you pick the leaves, you put them in a poke (that is a paper sack for you non-southerners).This perennial plant, Phytolacca Americana, or pokeweed plant, grows wild in the eastern United States, and may reach a height of eight to 10 feet. It is strong smelling and has a poisonous root, and you can see poke salad growing out by the highway if you know what to look for. Poke salad bears small white flowers (which lack petals) in a grape-like cluster that later becomes shiny dark purple berries. These berries are believed to be toxic to humans, but are eaten by birds. (Bird poop tainted with these berries can be quite hard on your car's finish, by the way.) These berries have also been used for dye production. In addition, many a southern child has made poke berry mud pies to the feigned amazement of their parents. Older children take great pride in poke berry sling shot fights.The plant is generally poisonous, and a seasoned poke salad expert must train one in the proper usage of poke salad before one enjoys a big savory heap of this delicacy. Some rural folks claim poke salad is poisonous unless it is cooked with lots of fatback, but this has not been documented scientifically.The fresh and very young leaves of poke salad are best to harvest for Granny to cook. The leaves are carefully and thoroughly washed then boiled until they are tender. The liquid (which is also believed to be poisonous) is drained and the leaves are rinsed again. When poke salad is cooked, it resembles spinach and tastes like asparagus. It is a very nutritious greens dish.My Momma used to put the boiled and rinsed leaves in her cast iron skillet, add in hot pepper sauce, fat back or bacon grease and fry it until it was "done." It's best served with a heap of pinto beans, a big pone of cornbread, three or four slices of a Vidalia onion, and a huge Mason jar topped off with sweet iced tea. As my Daddy says, "I eat a big old bait of poke salit yestiddy and it shore wuz good!"Another way to cook poke salad is to put the boiled and rinsed leaves in a big skillet with some bacon drippings, an egg or two, a half cup (or more) of chopped onion, and then scramble it all together. Poke salad has the potential to be very versatile; a person from California might want to make a poke salad quiche (but don't tell Aunt Ruth, she'd have a fit). Poke salad would be tasty on a pizza or baked in a calzone. Anything's possible.I have searched in vain throughout Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee for a restaurant that serves poke salad. The reason that poke salad isn't on the menu is probably the liability of serving apotentially toxic dish. That or the fact that most Southerners don't feel it would be right to charge a neighbor for something that was free and made out of pure love. Sure we can charge fifty cents for an order of pinto beans, but not poke salad. It just wouldn't be right.I have often wondered how this delicacy was discovered. Through the years, hard luck has chased my family like a pack of hungry beagles after an egg truck. Perhaps the discovery of poke salad wasmade out of survival instead of want. Several generations ago, my foremommas probably had about six to eight hungry kids to feed, and my foredaddies were out in the fields picking cotton or tobacco. Out of sheer desperation, my foremommas thought, "Lookit this here weed,it's so purty and green -- I bet it'd eat real good. All I have to do is cook it to pieces and smother it with lard." And then, history was made and passed down from generation to generation.In addition to poke salad's economy and taste, it is being studied by researchers for use in treatments of autoimmune diseases including AIDS and rheumatoid arthritis. The chemicals in poke salad promote cell division in white blood cells that normally would not divide. Poke salad is also being studied as an agent to combat fungal infections.