My White Boyfriend’s Collard Greens Taste Better Than My Black Mom’s
My family’s method of making collards may not be the best way…
--
It gives me no pleasure to make this admission. In fact, it is with great sadness that I share this with you. If put on the witness stand to testify, as I most surely expect that I would be, just like Lieutenant Colonel Markinson in “A Few Good Men,” I would say: I don’t want a deal and I don’t want immunity. I want you to know that I am proud neither of what I have done nor of what I am doing.
Like most kids, I feel like my mom is the best cook of every type of food. Her fried chicken is the best, her macaroni and cheese, her potato salad, her sweet tea etc — all of it, the best. So much so that when I’m out at restaurants I don’t even order the foods that are on my Mom’s repertoire of top tens because I know a restaurant could never measure up.
So please understand that I never intended to try my man’s collard greens and I certainly never intended to do a comparison with my Mom’s. See, what had happened was, my man invited me over to cook me dinner. This was early in the relationship so we weren’t living together yet. As we were walking up the stairs to his apartment he said that the food was almost ready but before we ate he’d be making some collard greens. Hearing this I was, as my mom would say, took off my feet. Which is to say, I was shocked.
You’re going to make collard greens?! For dinner tonight? How is that possible? In my family, collard greens take hours upon hours to make. Cleaning them takes an hour then boiling them in a vat of water with bacon grease, ham-hocks and neck bones takes several hours. I’m talking several. The longer you boil them the better. That way the collards really start to take on the taste of the pork.
Getting to Chad’s house at 7pm and hearing that he was going to start make collard greens then, I figured we were not going sit down to eat until 1 or 2 in the morning. I was pissed at what was clearly is poor lack of time management.
