When Earth began to tilt away from the sun, and the mountain air cooled enough to flirt with frost, we bundled up and went to the garden. It felt ancestral, that pull, compelling us to tug on our wool things and grab the poplar baskets we kept on the back porch. Everyone in my childhood farming community in the Upstate of South Carolina understood: Frost, that precursor to the deeper Appalachian winter, could destroy what was left in the fields, save perhaps the collards, their leaves left bent and tender. It was under those conditions—darkening and on the verge of freezing—that we, the Graham family, made chowchow.
As with cornbread, in our house you couldn’t have a real meal without the relish, that crunchy, spicy, sweet alchemy of vegetables and copious amounts
