A Ramen That Merges Japan and the South

During a recent lunch service at Ramen by Ra, a five-seat stall on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the chef Rasheeda Purdie hummed along to jazz streaming out of a small speaker as she moved through the restaurant’s tiny kitchen.

Behind her, shoyu-flavored broth simmered away alongside a less common sight at a ramen shop: a pot of long-cooked collard greens, its liquid used as the base for her potlikker ramen.

Potlikker ramen, also called “collard green ramen” or “soul food ramen,” isn’t a new dish — the chef Todd Richards features a version in his 2018 cookbook “Soul.” But it’s now garnering a following on TikTok and at Ramen by Ra, where reservations book up months in advance.

Ms. Purdie’s version is made with Hawaiian Sun Noodles, her favorite brand, and topped with chopped greens and shredded, smoked turkey meat, all delicately placed into the bowl with the precision of a surgeon. It also includes a soy-marinated halved egg, with the soft, bright-yellow yolk adding richness to the broth.

A fixture of Southern cooking, potlikker is the earthy, complex broth that feels like an extension of collards, mustard or turnip greens (or a combination), deeply flavored with the essence of the greens and the ingredients they’re cooked with: butter or oil, onions and garlic, sometimes smoked meat or salt pork. To Ms. Purdie, and many other cooks, it’s a revelation — a kind of “liquid gold” to be savored, she said. Even its heady smell makes her emotional.

But during slavery, potlikker was seen as a byproduct or “salvage food,” as the historian John T. Edge wrote in his 2017 book, “The Potlikker Papers.” Tasked with cooking on plantations, enslaved Africans stewed collard greens with water, a popular preparation for many kinds of greens in Western, Central and Eastern Africa. On plantations, the liquid was strained from the greens and reserved for enslaved Africans, with slave owners unaware that it was the most nutrient-rich part. In the years that followed, potlikker’s presence grew: “Potlikker,” Mr. Edge wrote, went on to sustain “the working poor, Black and white.”

A world away, ramen, traditionally thought of as a Japanese dish, was on its own journey when Chinese immigrants brought springy, wheat-based noodles — cooked in a long-simmered broth made with meat, aromatics and vegetables — to Japan in the 19th century. In 1958, Momofuku Ando, a Taiwanese inventor, created instant ramen, able to be made by simply adding hot water to noodles and dehydrated bouillon, creating a pathway for the rest of the world to become acquainted with the dish.

Learning about how both dishes evolved and became staples in their cuisines gave Ms. Purdie the confidence to combine the two dishes. She had long loved ramen, eating it often after late nights as a line cook in Harlem, but during the pandemic she began trying to perfect it, buying as many books as she could in the process.

Soon, she was pairing noodles with her grandmother’s collards recipe, and her potlikker ramen was born. “It was the best ramen I’d ever made,” she said.

Pairing American soul food and Japanese ingredients may seem dissonant, but they’re actually a great match, said LaTonya and David Whitaker. At their restaurant, Soul Food House in the Azabu Juban district of Tokyo, they merge the two cuisines in their “Black Ramen,” a mix of black-eyed peas, shredded chicken and noodles from a nearby market, served with a side of cornbread.

While they don’t have access to collards, they’ve learned to make due with turnip greens, braising them with garlic, onions and even smoked meat. The broth is chicken-based, a recipe Mr. Whitaker learned from his mother-in-law in Clarksdale, Miss.

“The flavors might be a little different, but the heart and soul are the same,” Mr. Whitaker said.