Carports and Collard Greens

I love country roads.

They are like the lines you’ve earned on your forehead, all the well-worn wrinkles around your face. They tell a story all their own.

Some country roads are nothing but dirt. Some are filled with gravel. Some go on and on without a destination in mind while others get your right where you need to go.
They have great names like Edna’s Road or Sit and Stay Awhile Street.

I guess I just love the wear and tear, the potholed hominess of them all. They remind me of family, because that is usually what you find at the end of them.

Growing up, we would wind our way up and down these roads, back and forth from Augusta to my grandparents’ house in Colbert. It’s a teeny, tiny town off Highway 72 going up to Athens. If you sneeze, you might just miss it.

Once you arrived at the house, you’d have to find a place on the side yard to park. My grandparents had a carport, but they never a parked a car in it. If you pulled one in there, where would everyone sit and cook and watch the cars go by?

That’s about all we did there, you know. As a child, I really didn’t understand why it was supposed to be so much fun, this congregation of family on a grease-stained slab of concrete more worshipped than Bethlehem. All the grownups ever did anyway was eat and talk, then eat and talk some more, and while they were talking, they were talking about eating. I just wanted to go into “town” and grab a pizza and a movie.

You should always be careful what you wish for. It’s true that you end up really missing something once it’s gone.

My grandmother made the best collard greens. It was one of the first things you smelled walking up to the carport. That and the smell of hot grease cracking in a fryer. See, the grease stains on the concrete in the carport didn’t come from my grandfather’s Pontiac, but from his Fry Daddy that lived a few inches away from the foot of his rocker.

Down here in the South, if you can eat something, you can fry it. So that’s what we did. We didn’t iron, starch, or press the sheets either. Why bother when we were just going to use it to cover the lunch dishes on the dining room table so the flies wouldn’t get them before pulling it back off again for dinner?

I haven’t been back to Colbert for a while. My grandparents passed away many, many years ago. I still think of them often, usually when I smell or taste something that brings me back to that small speck of time on that carport all those years ago. Especially if it’s fried okra, collard greens, sweet cornbread or vinegar based barbecue.

There are some memories that are not relegated to a faded photograph hanging in a frame or a letter saved in a shoebox. Some are sensory. They can replicate a past experience with one bite. They are to be savored, enjoyed and passed down to generations to come. Cooking was the centerpiece that brought my family all together. It still does.

My mom and her sisters still get together a few times a year at the beach house. It’s not the same little house they grew up in down by a winding country road.  It’s a new little house off a causeway on a barrier island off the South Carolina coast. The two places couldn’t be more different, but the smells, the food, the laughter, and the stories coming from the kitchen when they are all together are exactly the same.

It’s funny how we are always in such a hurry to get down the road a ways, but I think everyone gets to a point where they don’t have any other place they’d rather be . . . except maybe gathered under a small carport or at a small beach house filled with family and a pot on the stove full of collard greens.

So, now let me share one of my memories with you. This recipe is ridiculously simple but taste divinely complex. It smells so good slow cooking in the oven. It reminds me of the carport, my mom’s family and those lazy days of cooking, talking, eating, and watching the cars go by.

                                                        Aunt Shirley’s Apple Cider Pork

1 large Boston Pork Butt
3 cups apple cider vinegar
Red pepper

Sprinkle the pork with red pepper, cover with vinegar in a Dutch over, and bake in a 300 degree oven for eight hours.

As Aunt Shirley will tell you, the amount of vinegar might need to be tweaked according to
the size of the pork, so like any proper bathing suit cover, you just want to make sure it covers enough of your butt.

Aunt Shirley recommends mashed potatoes from scratch. I don’t know how to operate a mixer that has more parts than a small aircraft carrier, so don’t tell her, but I always cheat and buy the pre-made ones at the store.

Also, the leftover juices make excellent gravy. Now I was born in raised in South so I know better than anyone not to tell someone else how to make their gravy, but I never, ever cheat with a bottle of brown gravy. Aunt Shirley would definitely have my hide on that one! Enjoy!