Collard greens are staple of Southern and Black cooking in the United States, but the methods of cooking and eating them today can be traced back to Africa, when women in West Africa would gather assorted greens for their families. In the United States, the tradition of cooking greens with meat such as ham hocks arose out of the Antebellum South, when slave women would take the leftover green scraps from plantation homes and cook them.
Learn more about the history of collard greens here, and find a recipe here.