Here's a cute and informative piece from the Second World War

[conuly]

Two Cooks and a Cabbage

First you get to see two young girls competently using an open fire to boil half a cabbage each (I should forward this one to Free Range Kids!), and then you get a good piece of advice: Never boil green vegetables in large quantities of water. Truer words were never spoken! As observed, when you do so you only end with tasteless muck and all the vitamins leached away. That goes doubly for brassicas like cabbage and kale. We love kale, but I find nearly every recipe calls for far too much water, even when the writer clearly was trying to aim low! You should have barely enough to cover the bottom of the pot when the pot is full to the brim with kale. Steam it, stir fry it, bake it, eat it raw, but never boil your greens.

(Pokeweed may be the exception to this, but given how much cooking is required to make that safely edible, is it really worth it? I wouldn't know, because I simply assume it is not.)

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I've eaten pokeweed, and no, it's not worth it; the world is full of better spring greens. Pokeweed berries make great magenta ink, though.