Word: ramps
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Have you ever found yourself saying, "Ah, a fine spring day at last! I wish I had a ramp to gnaw...
...Then you're unlike the many, many chefs and green-market enthusiasts across the country who constitute the Church of the Ramp. Of course, they don't really gnaw on raw ramps, also known as wild leeks; they pickle them, char them and do a million other artful things with the onion-like stalk, the first green vegetable of spring in much of North America. There is no shortage of enthusiasts, both at home and in restaurants; after all, the Church of the Ramp is one of the fastest-growing denominations in the religion of seasonality. (See a special report...
...seasonality or green-market agnostic, as I am, you may not even know what a ramp looks like. I didn't for a long time, even as a professional food writer. I had some vague notion of them being some kind of wilted green, which isn't too far off the mark; they have a bulb at one end, long green stalks like leeks and leaves at the top. They taste somewhat garlicky. A nice enough plant, you might think, but nothing to get worked up about, right...
...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...
What makes ramps ramps is not their flavor, you see, but their cultural value. David Kamp, the author of The Food Snob's Dictionary, offers this explanation to TIME: "The ramp is not a 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...