Two Traditions of Cooked Greens, Cassava Leaf and Collards

Two unrelated plants, one shared method

Cassava leaf in Sierra Leone and collard greens in the American South begin with plants that have nothing to do with each other and end up in nearly the same place: a leaf cooked far past the point of tenderness, with a fat and a piece of cured or smoked protein doing the seasoning, and the resulting liquid treated as part of the dish. Nobody drains it off.

Most writing about greens gets stuck on the ingredient. The interesting part is the method, and the method is the thing that crossed the Atlantic.

Neither plant is native to where it is famous

Worth clearing up first, because it undercuts the lazy version of this story.

Cassava is a South American root crop. Portuguese traders carried it into West and Central Africa in the sixteenth century and it spread fast, because it tolerates poor soil and drought better than most staples. The leaf is what you get for free at the top of a plant grown for the tuber underneath, and West and Central African cooks turned that by-product into one of the region's defining dishes.

Collards are a headless cabbage with a Mediterranean and northern European lineage, carried to North America by European colonists. What made collards Southern was not the seed. It was what cooks did with them once they were here, and the cooks doing it were overwhelmingly African and African American.

So on both sides, the plant is an import and the technique is the inheritance.

How cassava leaf is cooked down

Cassava leaf begins with pounding. The leaves go into a wooden mortar and are worked with a pestle until the fibre is gone and what is left is a fine, uniform green pulp. In Sierra Leone that pounding is the labor-intensive heart of the dish, and it is also why the finished stew has body rather than texture.

The pounding is not only about mouthfeel. Cassava leaves contain naturally occurring compounds that break down through crushing and prolonged boiling, which is why every traditional method pairs heavy pounding with a long cook and why nobody in the tradition treats a short cook as an option. The technique encodes a reason.

From there it is palm oil, onion and pepper, protein cooked into the pot, and time. What comes out is dark, thick and dense, and it is served over rice, which in Sierra Leone is the meal itself and not an accompaniment. Close relatives run across the region under other names, pondu and saka saka in the Congo basin, kizaka in Angola, and versions all along the coast from Liberia to Cameroon. The dish itself is covered in more detail in what cassava leaf is and how it is made.

How Southern collards are cooked down

Collards come at the same idea from the other end. The leaves are stripped off the tough center rib, stacked, rolled and cut across into ribbons. Into a pot they go with water or stock and a smoked ham hock, a smoked turkey wing or salt pork, sometimes onion and a dried pepper, and they cook for an hour or considerably more, well past the point at which a European cook would have called them ruined.

The ribbons stay ribbons. Collards do not break down into a purée the way pounded cassava leaf does, and Southern cooks do not want them to. What matters as much as the greens is the pot liquor left in the bottom, which is seasoned, salty and dark, and is either sopped up with cornbread or spooned over rice. Refusing to throw out that liquid is the single most characteristic thing about the dish. Turnip tops, mustard greens, kale and poke sallet all get the same treatment, and greens turn up on New Year's tables across the South next to black-eyed peas, one standing for money and the other for luck.

What the two methods have in common

Lay the two side by side and the overlap turns out to be structural, not superficial.

• Long, slow cooking is the objective and not a compromise. Both traditions cook greens for a length of time that a quick-saute culture would consider a mistake.
• A flavorful fat carries the dish, red palm oil in one case and pork or smoked poultry fat in the other.
• A cured or smoked protein is used as seasoning rather than as the centerpiece, in quantities that would not feed anybody on their own.
• Pepper is present and expected.
• The cooking liquid is kept and eaten with a starch, over rice on the West African side and with cornbread or rice on the Southern side.
• Greens are cooked in volume, for a table, not portioned out as a garnish beside something more important.

That last point is the one people underestimate. In both traditions greens are a serious dish that a household cooks a lot of, which is exactly why they still turn up in a catering tray and never on a plate of three leaves.

Where the two part company

The differences are just as specific. Cassava leaf is pounded to a pulp and becomes the sauce, so it is what the rice is eaten with. Collards keep their shape and stay a side, so the meat is elsewhere on the plate. Palm oil gives one a red-tinted richness that pork fat does not replicate, and smoke gives the other a depth that palm oil does not. One is finished with pepper cooked in, the other is very often finished with vinegar at the table.

They are not the same dish. They are two answers to the same question, arrived at by people who were in contact with each other whether the history books traced the contact or not. That larger inheritance is laid out in how West African cooking shaped Southern food, and the Caribbean branch of the same leaf-stew family, callaloo, turns up in the food of West Indian Day Carnival on Eastern Parkway.

Both greens, from one Crown Heights kitchen

FreeTown African & American Cuisine cooks on both sides of this comparison. Pan Collard Greens are $60 for a full pan on the catering menu, and cassava leaf is served here by name, which is not a common pairing on one Brooklyn order form. Why that pairing is unusual is the subject of West African and soul food from one Crown Heights kitchen, and the tray itself is covered in ordering a collard greens catering tray in Brooklyn.

What this page won't do is tell you what goes into either pot here. How the greens are seasoned, what protein is in them and what goes into the cassava leaf are the kitchen's to answer, not a writer's to assume, and getting that wrong is worse than not answering. Call 718-799-7160 and ask directly.