Sandwiches of the South: Collard Greens and Cornbread

I visited my brother in North Carolina earlier this year. He’s lived there for, oh, about 12 or 15 years now I guess, and somehow I had never made it out there. So we flew to Raleigh, Mindy and I, and we spent several days with my brother and his wife. We ordered barbecue, and we visited the Raleigh Farmers’ Market, and we walked around the art loop in downtown Cary. We ate so many biscuits. And one day Mindy and Eric and I drove down to Lumberton, to the parking lot of the Public Schools of Robeson County where the Brenda’s Touch food truck was catering an event, and they were kind enough, once they were done serving the people they were there to feed, to let us try some of their signature dish, a collard greens sandwich.

The photos I was able to take of it that day did not do it justice. The dish consisted of two pan-fried cornmeal hoecakes with a thick layer of collard greens between them. Three crisp strips of fried fatback were served alongside the sandwich, and they included a collard greens egg roll as well as some homemade hot pepper jelly, which was thinned to a dipping consistency, similar to the sweet chili sauce you might eat with spring rolls at a Thai restaurant. The collards were good, savory and slightly bitter as collard greens tend to be; the fatback with its rind on was like a thin strip of extra crunchy chicharrones; the hoecakes were sturdy but thin and wide enough that the sandwich had to be eaten quickly before they disintegrated, with plenty of napkins on-hand and a fork for backup. I loved this sandwich, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. My brother has driven through Lumberton at least once since then looking for collards sandwiches as well.

These collards sandwiches first came to my attention when my friend Jonathan Surratt wrote about them on his great sandwich blog Bounded by Buns nearly two years ago now, and my subsequent obsession with trying them did not directly lead to me booking a trip to North Carolina to visit my brother–I was, as mentioned, overdue to visit him and really enjoy his company–but it didn’t hurt. Since that trip I’ve learned more about them and there’s a fascinating history behind the dish. This particular type of collard greens sandwich developed among the indigenous Lumbee tribe of Robeson County, a sort of hybrid tribe that came together in the swamps of southeastern North Carolina, descended from the surviving members of various lost native tribes and their intermarriage with European and African Americans. 

Given the Lumbees’ mixed ethnicity and the strife that came with that living in the Antebellum South, their struggles against Confederate officials during the Civil War, and their conflicts with the Klan in the mid-20th Century, it is perhaps not surprising that Lumbee food seems very much like soul food. Cornbread. Fatback. Chicken and pastry, a Lumbee dish that in other company might be called chicken and dumplings. Livers and gizzards, odds and ends, the kinds of creative uses of foods that people eking out a living on the edge of poverty in the South have always eaten. And of course collard greens, a staple of the South that was most likely originally brought to North America by enslaved Africans. All these foods, so closely identified with the Southern Black experience, are also the staple foods of the Lumbee tribe, and the collards sandwich combines several of them.

Collards and Cornbread

The Lumbee collards sandwich is built on hoecakes, a kind of cornmeal pancake often fried in bacon grease. At least, that’s how I make mine, and I use the easy method–self-rising cornbread mix, buttermilk, egg, and a little sugar are all that went into these.

The main ingredient, of course, is the collards. I’m no collard greens expert—I grew up on fatty, starchy, unseasoned midwestern foods, exactly the kind of things you’d expect a doughy Central Illinois boy like me to eat. But I’ve grown to really enjoy collards and often make them as a side with barbecue or fried chicken or really any kind of meat-and-potatoes dish that needs some greenery to chase away the scurvy. While I was chasing down the pig ear sandwich at Big Apple Inn in Jackson, Mississippi last year, I had some collards from a restaurant called Bully’s that were so good I thought they’d ruined me for any other greens the rest of my life. But I still make some pretty damn fine collards. Mine are pretty different from how the Lumbees cook them–sliced thin and sauteed rather than stewed in a rich pot likker–but this is how I like them. So take this recipe with a grain or three of salt.

Finally, these sandwiches are served with fatback, which comes rind-on in strips about 1/2-3/4″ wide and 3-4″ long, fried crisp like curled up linear bits of chicharrones.

And while this type of fried fatback may be available in any grocery store you walk into in North Carolina, it’s a little harder to find around here. However, for salty, unsmoked, rind-on pieces of pork fat, Hormel’s salt pork is a pretty decent substitute. It’s shaped differently, and actually has some meat attached, but it’s pretty close.

There is little else to the sandwich. A hoecake, covered in a generous layer of (drained) collards. Several crisp slices of fatback, though Brenda’s Touch served the fatback on the side, perhaps to keep it from getting soggy in contact with those greens. And another hoecake to finish.

My hoecakes may be a little thicker and fried a little darker than the ones I had in Lumberton, but they’re sturdy and well able to withstand the pile of greens I’ve inflicted on them.

The cornbread is lighter than it looks, fluffy like a pancake but slightly rigid and crisp-edged from a bath in bacon fat. The greens are savory from the richness of their pot likker, aromatic and spicy, vegetal and slightly bitter. The fried pork fat is less firm than actual strips of fatback might have been but stiff in a way that bacon is not, at least bacon with the rind removed. The combination of these textures and flavors works, the hoecakes more prone to crumbling than a standard bread would be but better able to withstand being picked up and eaten out of hand than most other pancakes.

It’s fantastic, as good as I remembered. But still, it could use… something.

A Digression: the Collards Melt

The recipe I listed above for collard greens makes… kind of a lot of greens, more than you’re likely to eat in a single sitting without the assistance of a family reunion or a church congregation. I needed to find other things to do with the collards. And generally speaking, that is no issue. I have served them this week with a Cuban style pork roast, and in a soup with Sea Island red peas. I’m talking about a LOT of greens though.

I’ve been hearing a lot about this sandwich lately though, the Collards Melt developed by chef Mason Hereford from Turkey and the Wolf in New Orleans and served both there and at the sandwich shop Big Kids in Chicago that he opened with his friend and fellow chef Ryan Pfeiffer. Or maybe it just seems like this sandwich is everywhere lately, since any search for a collards sandwich returns many, many references to it. But my friend Jonathan has written about it, or at least mentioned it in a piece about a beans & greens melt from JT’s Genuine Sandwich Shop in Chicago; it’s been in Bon Appetit and on Food Network; it was all over Chicago food media a few years ago when Big Kids opened, though maybe not quite as lauded as their fried bologna sandwich; and I was recently reminded of it again when both Mason Hereford and I guest-hosted the popular Sandwiches of History series of social media videos within a few days of each other.

A take on the classic Reuben or Rachel sandwich, this Collards Melt is a double-decker (or triple decker to use the verbiage from the Turkey and the Wolf cookbook, which agrees with the deck-counting method from our 2015 Edible History of the Club Sandwich) built on pan-toasted seeded rye bread, with melted Swiss cheese, a simple coleslaw, collard greens, and a spicy Russian dressing bursting with chopped cherry peppers.

This is, as you might imagine, a terrifically-designed sandwich. Most of the pieces that make a Reuben (or more accurately a Rachel) great are there–the crisply pan-toasted seeded rye bread, the nutty and mild yet vital melted Swiss, the zesty piquancy of the Russian dressing, the crisp and salty/sour cabbage of the slaw. The collards are an audacious yet admirable swap-in for the corned beef, soft, savory and bitter where the cured meat would be salty and chewy, yet with the center slice of bread helping to preserve the ridigity of the sandwich, the crisp textures are not lost. The cherry peppers of the spicy Russian dressing play nicely off the caraway of the rye and the creamy and somewhat sweet/sour dressing complements the greens themselves.

My version is of course not vegetarian, given my insistence on flavoring my pot likker with ham hocks, but with a good vegetarian collards recipe, this would be a stellar meat-free substitute for those classic deli sandwiches.

I have yet to make my way to Big Kids–or to Turkey and. theWolf for that matter–but after making this sandwich I can see that a visit is overdue.

Once More, With Feeling. And Hot Pepper Jelly.

So I was pleased with my version of the North Carolina collards sandwich, but I felt like there was something missing. And I have seen various writeups that call for adding pickled jalapeños to it, or more commonly spicy chow chow relish. But that first one I had in Lumberton, from Brenda’s Touch, had been served with pepper jelly, or at least the collard greens egg rolls had been. And as it happens, while we were in North Carolina, I bought this jar of hot pepper jelly from a vendor at the Farmer’s Market, which had been waiting in my pantry ever since for its time to shine.

So I made another collards melt, and this time I heated a couple spoonfuls of pepper jelly in the microwave, enough to soften the firm-set jelly to a spoonable, dippable texture, like the kind of sweet chili sauce you might dip an egg roll into. And I spooned that soft, runny, spicy/sweet jelly over the top of the fried salt pork before adding. thelid to my collards sandwich.

This was what I’d been missing, the resolution I was looking for. The capsaicin heat and sugar sweet of this pepper jelly were a perfect foil for this combination of salty and crunchy fried pork fat, the savory smooth, rich yet slightly bitter greens, and the sturdy, filling, crisp-edged cornbread pancakes. 

I suppose that maybe I’d like to try this collards and cornbread sandwich some day with chow chow, or pickled jalapeños, or some other spicy condiment. In fact I understand that the Robeson County Fair starts in just a couple weeks, and there will be many a vendor serving many a variation on this very sandwich. I’d love to go! though I think this is not the year, at least not for me. But I’d love to hear about it if anybody out there does! And if you do go, and you see Brenda’s Touch serving their collards sandwiches, be sure to try them! And tell them thanks, from me!