Former governor and U.S. senator Zell Miller of Georgia wrote a defense of the traditional spelling "potlikker" in The New York Times.

[1] Much earlier, in his autobiography, Every Man a King, governor and U.S. senator Huey Pierce Long, Jr., of Louisiana, defined "potlikker", a favorite of his country political supporters, as ... the juice that remains in a pot after greens or other vegetables are boiled with proper seasoning.

If a pot be partly filled with well-cleaned turnip greens and turnips (which should be cut up), with a half-pound piece of the salt pork and then with water and boiled until the greens and turnips are cooked reasonably tender, then the juice remaining in the pot is the delicious, invigorating, soul-and-body sustaining potlikker ... which should be taken as any other soup and the greens eaten as any other food...

Most people crumble cornpone (corn meal mixed with a little salt and water, made into a pattie and baked until it is hard) into the potlikker.

[3]The practice of consuming potlikker was commonly employed by enslaved people in the United States to concentrate nutrients from vegetables.