a dishcollards

Broad flat leaves of a loose-headed cabbage, stripped from the stem, cut in ribbons and stewed a long time with a piece of smoked pork until they are dark and soft, in a salty broth the South calls pot liquor. They are a staple of Southern cooking and one of the vegetables a Carolina barbecue buffet is judged by; cornbread is used to soak up what is left in the bowl. Eaten with black-eyed peas and cornbread on New Year's Day for wealth in the year to come.

The collard is an old non-heading cabbage, and the varieties grown in the United States thinned out after the Second World War as people left the land — five kinds in common cultivation by the end of it, with the rest kept alive by individual growers and seed savers and, since the early 2000s, by projects set up to bring them back. In the Appalachian counties the cabbage collard, yellow-green and part-heading, is the one grown; the coastal South grows the dark non-heading kind. The green carries meaning past the plate: Thelonious Monk wore a collard leaf in his lapel, Alice Walker wrote with collards, the first Obama state dinner had them on the menu, and the Latibah Collard Greens Museum opened in Charlotte in 2010. In eastern North Carolina the barbecue connection runs through the garden rather than the market — Bum's in Ayden cooks collards grown by the family and keeps a vegetable table few other eastern pits keep, and Grady's in Dudley stews them for a plate whose vegetables are peeled and chopped by hand that morning.

The leaves are washed several times to get the grit out, the thick centre rib is pulled or cut away, and the leaves are rolled and sliced into ribbons. They go into a pot with smoked or salted pork — ham hock, smoked turkey neck, pork neckbones, fatback — with diced onion, vinegar, salt and black, white or crushed red pepper, and some cooks add a little sugar. They cook down for an hour or more until soft. The broth left in the pot is the pot liquor and is served with them. The leaves may also be sliced thin and fermented into a collard sauerkraut, which is then cooked with flat dumplings.

On the buffet at Bum's in Ayden from the family garden; stewed at Grady's in Dudley; on the line at Dukes Bar-B-Que in Orangeburg; at Jackie Hite's in Leesville they were remembered as sweet and smoky; among the sides at Shealy's in Batesburg-Leesville and at Lewis Barbecue in Charleston, which is a Texas house that lists collards as the local one.