poke weed is a good salad in the spring. If you have lamb quarter you can mix with the poke and also dandylion greens.
boill the greens intil they turn color then drain the leaves and put into a skillet with some pork fat, like bacon fat or lard and cook until will done.
serve with corn bread. The root of poke is deadly leave them alone. I wouldn't want to mess with the berries either.
We would take the stalks cut into 4 inch pieces and boil in water. them roll them in corn meal and fry in the skillet with lard. good eating!
If the stalk was large we quarter them before cooking.
I spend a lot of time stamping out pokeweed from my pasture and property- they are almost impossible to get rid of. I'm not sure you could pay me enough to try eating them. I have heard that you can get the toxin through your skin while pulling them up.
I grew up eating spring poke weed..it is great mixed with lambsquarter and sour dock. The person who said the roots are poison are absolutely correct. When my kids were small, they reached thru the yard fence to gather some poke berries "because they were so pretty" I caught them in the act, but they had purple smeared all around their mouth. I called poison control center who said their stomachs had to be emptied immediately! Our local Dr gave them the stuff (I cant spell it) and in 20 minutes they were empty.. and no sign of the berries in the vomit..thankfully!! They were little and all the excitement made them not want to talk,so we could not get the information out of them if they had swallowed them or not.
Apparently, the birds can eat what we cannot. The poison control center said if they had stayed in their stomachs 2 hours, it would be too late ..they would have died.
We have lots of pokeweed too. I've wanted to try it but I'd be nervous. It sure would be nice to actually do something with it though! At least the birds like it