Pot Likker Soup Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What can you do with pot likker? ›

A take on the classic Country Ham Potlikker becomes the base of a luscious gravy for smothered pork chops and a zippy vinaigrette for a sweet and savory apple and bean salad. A rich Smoked Paprika and Sun-Dried-Tomato Potlikker buoys brothy orecchiette with savory-sweet turnips and braises hearty chicken thighs.

The biggest benefit of making potlikker is the obvious one: It's a flavorful base for soups, gravies, and stews. That's not the only benefit, however. Potlikker maintains much of the nutrients of the greens including iron and vitamins A, C, and K.

Pot liquor, sometimes spelled potlikker or pot likker, is the liquid that is left behind after boiling greens (collard greens, mustard greens, turnip greens) or beans. It is sometimes seasoned with salt and pepper, smoked pork or smoked turkey.

Don't toss that broth! Potlikker — the liquid left behind after boiling collards — is loaded with vitamins and minerals. Plus, it's delicious.

While slow cooking, the meat, bone marrow, and fat fell apart into the greens. The rich, meat-flavored broth, or pot liquor, left behind after serving the greens, contained high amounts of essential vitamins and minerals including iron, vitamin A and vitamin C.

Description. Like great provincial dishes around the world, potlikker is a salvage food. During the antebellum era, slave owners ate the greens from the pot and set aside the leftover potlikker broth for the enslaved, unaware that the broth, not the greens, was nutrient rich.

It was a staple food eaten by enslaved people in the South, often eaten along with baked or fried cornbread either dipped or crumbled into the potlikker. By the early 1850s, potlikker was a mainstay in Southern diets.

Liquor simply means liquid. Pot liquor is the liquid in the cooking vessel after cooking meat, vegetables, beans or any combination of those. Some regions of the US South East limit the term to the liquid in a pot of collard greens.

likker (plural likkers) Eye dialect spelling of liquor.

What is the broth left after boiling greens in the South? ›

So here's a tip: When you're cooking up a big pot of greens, don't toss out what may be the most nutritious part — the brothy water that's left in the pot. Lots of the beneficial nutrients cook out of the greens. And what's left? Well, if you learned to cook in a traditional Southern kitchen, you'd call it pot liquor.

~a dubha, knap-weed.

Where does the word pot-licking come from? The earliest known use of the word pot-licking is in the 1860s. OED's earliest evidence for pot-licking is from 1864, in Weekly Osage Chron. (Burlingame, Kansas).