[JoeFromCA]

A true Southerner knows what polk salad is, how the word polk is pronounced ("poke") and where polk greens thrive best (in the barnyard; it's the only thing the cows won't eat).

My mama used to make the best polk salad in the county.

[codger]

It ain't polk salad.

It's poke sallet.

[Terry Mross]

I hate to tell you this but it's not spelled "salad". Didn't you ever hear Tony Joe White sing "Polk Salit Annie"? Or maybe it's "salet" but it ain't "salad".

[southernnorthcarolina]

A true Southerner knows what polk salad is, how the word polk is pronounced ("poke") and where polk greens thrive best (in the barnyard; it's the only thing the cows won't eat).

My understanding of the origin of the term "poke salad" differs from yours (not to say that mine's necessarily the only accepted version). In parts of the rural South, a "poke" is simply a bag (as most Southerners now say) or a sack (as many Northerners say). The word "poke" still shows up in the phrase "a pig in a poke," meaning a problem the nature of which you don't understand until you get into it. A poke salad, as I always understood the term, was simply whatever wild greens you gathered and put in your poke (bag). But I could be wrong...