poke salad (you poke around in the woods and find stuff to eat)
Funny stuff.
Actually there is a common weed that grows here in the south called 'poke sallet' (poke salad, pokeweed, poke) that makes mighty fine eating.
http://www.motherearthnews.com/library/1971_March_April/Poke_SalletI'm confused, I thought 'milk gravy' was one of the four basic food groups.... beans, taters, biscuits and gravy.
Okay, amateur etymology attempt here -- perhaps my version of poke salad is a joke based on the practice of collecting pokeweed for food? I know my gr-grandmother used to walk out in the woods with a burlap sack and come back with dinner of dandelion greens and what-not and we always called it "poke salad." I have heard other people use the term that way, but come to think of it I think all of them were black.
Milk gravy is kind of a fanciful version of the original poor folks country gravy aka "white gravy," but the white refers to the flour, not the final color of the gravy. With country gravy, after you cook the bacon (or sausage or ham or whatever), you add some white flour and make a rue in the grease and burnt bits left over from the meat. You want to get the flour very, very dark brown without quite being burnt, then deglaze the pan with
cold water, add pepper and simmer until thick and even.
With milk gravy, you just use milk instead of water and only slightly brown the flour. To me, when you use milk you get a very different taste and it tastes like milk instead of the meat poured over your biscuits. In a way, it tastes too fatty, which is ironic when you consider how little fat the mmilk would be adding to the equation! And the contrast of the dark brown gravy over pale biscuits is nicer, too. Of course, it may have something to do with the kind of gravy I grew up eating.
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