Collards, cabbage and broccoli are the same species wearing different leaves
Collard greens belong to Brassica oleracea, the species that also gives us cabbage and broccoli. Collards simply never form a tight head, which helps them shrug off humidity and fungus. That toughness made them a winter lifeline in enslaved people's gardens, and today they carry deep meaning in African-American and Southern culture.
Botanists file collards in the kale group, or as the variety viridis. The group name Acephala is Greek for headless. Farmers have grown the plant for its large dark leaves since classical antiquity, and Greek and Roman writers mention it by the first century CE. It acts as a biennial where frost falls and may live for years in warm places, usually standing over two feet high and up to six feet in Portuguese types. Leaves taste best, and are more nutritious, after the first frost.
Across the world the plant goes by many names and recipes. East Africans call it sukuma wiki and saute it with onions to eat alongside ugali. In Montenegro and Dalmatia it is stewed with smoked mutton through winter; Turks on the Black Sea call it dark cabbage; Asturians put it in their pote stew. Portuguese and Brazilian cooks slice it into ribbons for caldo verde soup or serve it with feijoada, using cultivars that likely form a separate Tronchuda group.
In the American South, collards simmer with smoked meat, onions and vinegar, and the nutrient-rich broth left behind, pot liquor, gets mopped up with cornbread. Eating them on New Year's Day with black-eyed peas is meant to bring wealth. Under slavery they were among the commonest kitchen-garden plants, supplementing meagre rations because they survived both winter cold and summer heat better than spinach or lettuce. Thelonious Monk wore a collard leaf in his lapel as a nod to his heritage, and festivals in Georgia, California and Ohio celebrate the green.
Variety shrank after the Second World War as families moved to towns, leaving just five varieties in common cultivation, but seed savers and government collections kept others alive, and projects since the early 2000s aim to revive them. Raw leaves are 90 percent water, and a 100-gram serving provides over three times the daily value of vitamin K.
Source: Collard (plant)
