Poke Salad Annie

In episode 418 I visit East New York Farms, an urban agriculture endeavor. We stopped by their farmers market on a Saturday morning. There are a lot of former farmers who live in the city taking advantage of the program. I met Annie Wyche, who used to live in the southern US. She had lots of interesting vegetables for sale.

But something she said required some more research:
"And we have callaloo. That’s a vegetable used mostly in the West Indies. We call it a polk salad down South. It’s the same thing. I was amazed that everybody be calling for callaloo, so I said, ‘that’s not callaloo, that’s polk salad.'”

Initially I thought she was calling it PORK salad, assuming that it was just some regional thing. Upon further research Annie was referring to POLK salad. I think. Or POKE salad. Confused. I still am too.

According to wikipedia:

Young pokeweed leaves can be boiled three times to reduce the toxin, discarding the water after each boiling. The result is known as poke salit, or poke salad, and is occasionally available commercially.

And poke salad is also referred to as POLK salad. And it's apparently NOT called PORK salad. It's been around for decades in the south. But before any blog readers go searching out pokeweed and mixing a salad, some caution is in order: it's poisonous.

So is poke/polk (not pork) salad the same as callaloo? Again, according to wikipedia, yes. Poke weed is one of the vegetables used in the dish called callaloo. So callalloo is a dish, not a vegetable? Well, it's both, according to wikipedia:

Because the leaf vegetable used in some regions may be locally called "callaloo" or "callaloo bush", some confusion can arise among the different vegetables and with the dish itself.

Some confusion?

Annie's still making money selling her poke salad/callaloo to folks at the Brooklyn farmers market. It's quite popular, not matter what it's called.

Of all of my questions about this weed would have been answered if I would have just listed to the lyrics of this classic 1969 song by Tony Joe White:



Yes, the name of the song is "Poke Salad Annie." Not POLK Salad Annie like is displayed on the video. And, as far as I know, not Annie Wyche.

Jason