Word: likenesses
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...wrong. "I love ramps," says chef David Myers of Sona and Comme Ça in Los Angeles. "They taste wild to me, like an intense, pungent onion flavor mixed with the forest." "Ramps are a spring treat that have a quick season and are much better-tasting than cultivated leeks, scallions or chives," says Mark Fuller of Seattle's Spring Hill, one of Food and Wine's best new chefs last year. "Our guests also get excited for ramps." But does he think the humble ramp warrants this much hoopla? "Overvalued? Not to me," he says...
...other related wild onions that nobody pays attention to. If you take any random greens and pickle them and serve them with soft-shell crabs, or sauté the leaves in butter and put them atop incredible pancetta and artichoke spaghetti, of course it will be good! Ramps are like the foraged-greens version of stone soup...
...salad green, but it is a green vegetable, and it is the first legitimately green thing that appears from the ground in April, a month that, in terms of farm yield, is otherwise an extension of winter. For food snobs, therefore, ramps are overcelebrated and overly scrutinized, like the first ballgame played in April, even with 161 more games ahead." (See how gourmet food is making its way to your street corner...
...this sound familiar? The hyping of a previously unknown green that doesn't taste particularly strongly of anything? The testimonials to its cultural power? If so, you're probably thinking of arugula, whose cultural life cycle has already come and gone. Arugula, a salad green that looks kind of like lettuce, became so gentrified over the course of the past 20 years or so that Kamp used it in the title of his 2006 primer on how we became a gourmet nation: The United States of Arugula...
...worry is that ramps will soon become as passé as arugula, and that seasonal-minded cooks will take up another spring product, like the fiddlehead fern, as the green of the moment. There is nothing good about the fiddlehead fern. It's not even the wild cousin of anything good. And if fiddlehead ferns start getting touted on menus, then this green-market business will have definitely gone...