Laura Dean Bennett
Staff Writer
What’s better than discovering a patch of ramps in one’s own woods?
Discovering two patches.
Like the famously expensive truffles found in Europe and so adored by the upper echelons of the world of cuisine, West Virginia has its own wild culinary delicacies.
One of the most unique is Allium tricoccum – the wild leek relative we call ramps.
These pungent little beauties “spring” up in the woods – not just in West Virginia – but throughout the Appalachian Mountains, from Pennsylvania to Tennessee.
Although they grow wild and, in certain places, are quite prolific, ramps can be hard to find for those who didn’t grow up around here.
But folks who make foraging for wild food practically a religion, ramps are a spring staple. They’re dug up by the handful, added to spring meals and preserved for later use.
We’ve long cooked ramps with our fried potatoes and scrambled eggs, put them into burgers, snipped them onto salads and baked them into cornbread and biscuits.
We use them to top baked potatoes, make ramp cheese balls, ramp ranch dressing and ramp vinegar.
Like spring onions from our kitchen gardens, you can often find ramps as garnishes on our dinner plates, to be eaten raw, dabbed into a pile of salt.
Chopped ramps take potato soup to a higher level and they make a marvelous pesto to serve over pasta.
We dig them in the spring and after eating them fresh as long as we can, we preserve, pickle and freeze them for use long past their natural season.
Natives know where to look and, if you’re lucky, will share their ramps with friends and neighbors or invite you to come along with them and dig some ramps of your own.
Our national forests and state parks offer some excellent ramp habitat in the higher elevations and, as long as you abide by foraging regulations, you may gather them there.
Just be sure to check with park rangers and local law enforcement to determine where and how to forage legally so you don’t run the risk of a fine.
It’s not nice to disrespect Smokey the Bear.
While you may need a guide to find a ramp patch where it’s legal to gather ramps, it’s not hard around these parts to find springtime ramp dinners and ramp festivals.
These events are a celebration of good food, good family fun and good old country cooking.
We may have tried to keep our pungent wild woodland onions/garlic/ leeks our own little “family” secret, but their smell and taste just couldn’t be contained.
It took a while for them to cotton onto our stinky little gems, but when the world’s gourmands found out about them, they sat up, took notice and started chowing down.
Ramps have, in the last several years, become all the rage in fancy restaurants.
They’re on spring menus in Manhattan and Paris.
They’ve become the darling of famous chefs.
They’ve been featured in Bon Appetit magazine, and I’m told that ramp salt is selling for $28 an ounce on Amazon.
Yikes.
Even if the stubborn odor of the ramson does cling to one’s person for days – and there may be those who have the temerity to object to it – these beguiling little devils have made converts of lots of otherwise normal folks.
Like cracking crabs and eating “the mustard” is part of growing up near the Chesapeake Bay and learning how to suck the heads of crayfish is de rigeur in Cajun country, here in the mountains of West Virginia, we wear the odiferous reminder of our ramps as a badge of honor.
And so can you.
