ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times

DATE: Wednesday, January 8, 1997             TAG: 9701080004
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 8    EDITION: METRO 
DATELINE: AYDEN, N.C.
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS

CAROLINIANS GET CREATIVE WITH COLLARDS

Can't figure out what to do with those collards left over from New Year's Day dinner? Take a tip from the queen of creative collard cooking.

Laura Webb, an organizer of the annual Ayden Collard Festival, can cook just about anything with her favorite vegetable.

She can whip up collard pizzas, collard tacos and collard pies. But her culinary specialty is a five-layer collard cake - alternating layers of corn bread and greens, garnished with hunks of steamed okra.

``I make that cake every now and again, just for the fun of it,'' Webb said.

While Webb may hold court in the kitchen, the true collard queen is Mandy Carroll, 15.

Mandy is the most recent winner of the beauty pageant held in conjunction with the town's annual collard festival in September. She won a $350 college scholarship and the right to hold the collard queen title for a year.

``The New Year's Day meal means more to me this year because I'm the collard queen,'' she said after sitting down on New Year's Day to a meal of collards, ham and black-eyed peas.

Mandy's meal was typical of a New Year's Day tradition in the South, but her collards were prepared with a Yankee twist.

``Most Southerners would probably be shocked if they knew how I make them,'' said Mandy's mother, Penny, a native New Yorker. ``I put garlic in them.''

But most folks in Ayden, the unofficial collard capital of the world, prefer to keep their greens simple.

Guy Braxton, 65, picks the greens from his garden, boils some ham, then adds the collards and potatoes.

``My mama and daddy growed them when I was growing up,'' Braxton said. ``I've been eating them ever since.''

Braxton did have to endure a 27-year stint in the Navy, where he never got a bite of collards.

``I sure did miss them when I was away,'' he said.

Town leaders started the Ayden Collard Festival back in 1975 after neighboring Grifton introduced its shad festival. Despite the vegetable's homegrown roots, the idea for the festival came from another Yankee, who had just moved to Ayden and tasted collards for the first time.

``It was a lady from Ohio, of all places, who thought of it,'' said former Mayor Marvin Baldree.

- ASSOCIATED PRESS

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