#pokeweed

Hue 30

And this is one of two portraits I've been drawing for the very kind hailey.m.c <3 the other one will be posted sometime in December. Thank you again for letting me work on this!

[ID: Cooked greens on a blue plate framed with wild plants. End ID]

Poke sallet

Pokeweed (Phytolacca americana L.) is a plant native to eastern North America, where it has been variously used as a medicine and dye, and foraged as a subsistence food. It is a hardy plant that often grows as a weed in gardens, in waste places, and on burned land, and is especially valued as one of the first edible spring greens available in Appalachia. Pokeweed has also been called "cunicum," "skoke," "coakham," "calalú," and "American nightshade" (a term more often used today to refer to Solanum nigrum).

Though the roots and berries of the plant are poisonous, the young leaves and shoots are edible if boiled in several changes of water. Traditions of eating pokeweed exist all through the plant's native range, from New England to Virginia, and in some places where it has been introduced, as far west as Texas.

Vickie Jeffries, herbalist and administrator of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, notes that poke sallet is eaten by Indigenous people in the southeast. ᎠᏂᏴᏫᏯᎢ / Anigiduwagi (Cherokee) people prepare young stalks of pokeweed by slicing and boiling them, then breading them in egg and cornmeal and frying them. In the Acadien (Cajun) cuisine of Louisiana, pokeweed is known as "chou gras" (lit. "fat cabbage"), and is used in soups.

After boiling, pokeweed is very tender and mild in flavor, similar to spinach or asparagus. The sallet (here meaning "cooked salad") is best with the addition of fat, salt, and acid: it is often served with eggs, bacon, pork fat, or vinegar.

History

The word "poke" in this sense had entered English by 1708, as a borrowing from the Powhatan (Virginia Algonquian) word "puccoon" (also rendered "pocan," "pocone" or "poughkone"). The term, which also means "blood," references Phytolacca americana, or any of a few other plants that yield a deep red or purplish dye.

John Smith, writing from Virginia in 1612, describes medicinal and ornamental uses for pocone:

Pocones is a ſmall roote that groweth in the mountaines, which being dryed & beate in powder turneth red. And this they vſe [use] for ſwellings, aches, annointing their joints, painting their heads and garments. They account it very pretious [precious] and of much worth. (p. 13) [...] Their heads and ſhoulders are painted red with the roote Pocone braied [ground?] to powder mixed with oyle, this they hold in ſomer [summer] to preſerue [preserve] them from the heate, and in winter from the cold. (p. 21)

An early reference to pokeweed (perhaps another species in the Phytolacca genus) as a wild edible comes from Jamaica in 1756. Patrick Brown writes that the "leaves and more tender ſhoots" of "Mountain Calalue, or Poke-weed," "are frequently uſed for greens, by the negroes"; boiled pokeweed was also eaten in Suriname as of 1774. Pokeweed is thus connected to a larger history of subsistence foraging by enslaved and free black Africans in South America and the Caribbean—the same history to which callaloo and gombo zhebes belong.

Colonists in North America had learned to identify and prepare the leaves and shoots of pokeweed for consumption from Indigenous Americans before the close of the 18th century. Charles Bryant writes in 1783 that the "[Indigenous] inhabitants" of "Virginia and other parts of America [...] boil [pokeweed] leaves, and eat them in the manner of Spinach"; in 1795, Benjamin Schulz avers that "the ſtems when boiled [young] [...] are nutritious and wholeſome, and in taſte equal to aſparagus," again attributing the knowledge to Indigenous peoples.

A new science for a "New World"

Colonists presumably learned to use pokeweed as a medicine from the same source. By 1745, it was purported in Connecticut to cure cancers and rattlesnake bites; poultices made from its berries or fresh leaves were held in the medical literature to be effective on wounds and skin lesions.

Later in the 18th century, however, scientists seem eager to disentangle these practices from their source. Colonists in all areas of art and learning felt an urgency, in the years following the American Revolution, to create a new "American" identity, artistic canon, and scientific practice that were not indebted to the scholars or institutions of the "Old World," as represented by Europe (and especially England).

Alongside the avowed goal of creating institutions independent of Europe's, however, is another, twin motivation: the new "American" science must not be in conversation with Indigenous practices or ways of knowing. Benjamin Schulz's 1795 Inaugural botanico-medical dissertation, on the Phytolacca decandra of Linnæus makes the intertwined nature of these goals extremely explicit. The "native plants" in "this country," he complains, are "as yet but little known"; they require "industry" to bring their medical virtues "to a ſtate of culture and perfection." The "discover[y]" of the benefits of native plants has, for Schulz, a decidedly nationalist quality:

who would venture to deny, that a genius equal, if nor ſuperior, to a Buffon, a Linnæus, or a Spallanzani, may be raiſed and foſtered among the freeborn ſons of America, when European habits ſhall no longer influence our various purſuits?

Schulz makes clear that the uses Indigenous peoples have for these plants do not 'count' against the type of knowledge he wishes to create. He denies the relevance of Indigenous knowledge to his proposed project in one dismissive phrase: native plants have been "hitherto unexamined except by ſavages" (emphasis mine).

Despite his claim that Indigenous knowledge is merely irrelevant in the creation of a new "American" medical science, we might wonder whether Schulz in fact perceives it as an active threat. For him, Indigenous medical knowledge must first be invoked, so that it can be denied:

The Cherokee-Indians made uſe of the poke-root in caſes of venereal chancres. The chancres are dreſſed with the powder of the root, well dried. It is certain, however, that this mode of treating chancres is not always, if ever, efficacious; ſince many of the Indians fall victims to the ravages of the diſeaſe just mentioned.

By contrast, Schulz accepts the authority of the European and American travellers, botanists, and doctors he cites in saying that poke has proved an "effectual remedy" for various cancers and skin complaints; he even writes that he has "no doubt of its efficacy" in curing venereal disease, though he had lately doubted whether "Cherokee" uses of the plant for the same purpose were "ever" effective! It seems that dependence on European writers may be acknowledged, even if Schulz wishes ultimately to supersede it: but dependence on Indigenous informants must be denied and effaced entirely.

Today, efforts are being made to assert and to share Indigenous foodways and epistemologies. The Native American Ethnobotany Database—a project that has been 50 years in the making—documents 60 uses of pokeweed as food, medicine, jewellery, and dye by nations including the Cherokee, Delaware, Oklahoma, and Rappahannock. This documentation may be supplemented with active teaching processes: NATIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems), founded by Sean Sherman, demonstrates how to forage and safely prepare pokeweed with the southeastern branch of their Indigenous Food Lab project.

You can help promote Indigenous foodways education by donating to NATIFS, or shopping in their online food market.

Recipe under the cut!

Martinique, home to a distant heart

Photography by Xuebing Du

Wings of Fire Design Project #74 - Pokeweed of the Leafwings

Description under cut

She is a walking red flag just like everyone else, but, seems like the type of person who is not home a lot, so I should get a lot of time not having to deal with her, which is great. Now, while cleaning the apartment I realized I'd have to clean the balcony too, and there's some stuff that's been growing on the balcony that I haven't paid any attention to.

Some of my pepper plants decided to fail, and then different wild seeds activated in their place; some of them looked pretty! I brought some seeds from the forest while taking the soil, so I get all kinds of trees and surprises, and this is one of the plants that randomly activated on my balcony:

That's pokeweed. It's poisonous. Very on brand for it to be randomly growing on my balcony. The leaves are conditionally edible I think? If you get them at a certain time of the year? This berry is described as 'the most deadly berry in this area' but I still found records of people eating a few just to gain some resistance, which makes it very tempting to try. It's also been used to color wine a darker color, the name we have for it here is 'wine-color', which seems suspicious that they did that if the thing is poisonous. Who is lying here.

Another thing that grew a lot were volounteer tomato plants! That happens because I re-use soil constantly, so lots of my soil has tomato seeds, and they activated by the end of the summer. Seeing them grow I knew there was no way they would actually make tomatoes, it's too late in the season, but they're pretty so I let them grow. But look at this!