Pot Likker: Using Everything

Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal is a philosophy of cooking as much as a recipe book — built on the principle that waste in a kitchen is a failure of imagination, and that the most flavourful things in any cooking process are what most cooks discard. Pot likker (the liquid left after braising greens) is Adler's central example: a deeply flavoured, nutritious liquid that is the most complete expression of the vegetable's flavour and is routinely poured down the drain.

The cooking liquid remaining after braising greens (collards, kale, turnip tops, chard) — dark, intensely flavoured, rich with the vegetable's released flavour compounds. Used as a broth, a sauce base, a grain cooking liquid, or a soup base.

Pot likker used as the liquid for cooking cornbread, rice, or beans carries the flavour of the greens into the new preparation — producing a depth that water or commercial stock cannot replicate. The flavour is transfer: the greens flavour everything that cooks in their liquid.