Hearts of Palm

Hearts of palm, an expensive delicacy, were served at fancy hotel restaurants early in the 1900s. But in Florida, where this luxury item was known as swamp cabbage, hearts of palm were so widely consumed during the Great Depression that the state of Florida had to enact laws to protect the palmetto tree, the source of these tender hearts. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author and Florida resident Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings loved this indigenous plant but seldom served it because she loved the environment more. “You cannot have your palm and eat it, too,” she said. According to Rawlings only an expert knew how to cut down the cabbage palm and strip the bark to get to the crisp, white, tender core. The Florida bear, she claimed, was one of those experts, because she had found palms slashed by sharp claws “and the hearts torn out as though by giant forks.” Rawlings, who named cooking as her only vanity, wrote about swamp cabbage in her memoir and her cookbook, Cross Creek Cookery, which was still in print in the early 2000s.