#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!

We’ve been driving up into the mountains so much the last couple of weeks that we hadn’t wandered the wetlands trail that is less than a mile away from where we are staying for a bit. Some things had changed, the water was thicker with lily pads and new flowers were showing, and some things were the same, old flowers, but more abundant.

Water hemlock, pretty but deadly, the most toxic plant in North America, it’s best not to even touch it in case the sap accidentally enters your bloodstream through eyes, mouth, or cuts in the skin.

The lily pads have gotten so thick it is difficult to tell that there is even water out there in some places! The one I got close enough to identify was spatterdock (yellow pond lily), the birds that we saw flitting around over the water were most red wing blackbirds, one of my favorites.

Foxglove beardtongue, red clover, and Deptford pinks

Crawdad (local name for crayfish, a freshwater crustacean, all of us outdoorsy kids grow up trying to catch them in creeks) chimney and two golden harvestman on a poke leaf

Spatterdock, sallow sedge, and bankclimber (freshwater mussel) shell

Martinique, home to a distant heart

Photography by Xuebing Du