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...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...
...re a 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...
Does all 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...
...ramps the new arugula? They're more than that. They're more valuable than arugula, because of their shorter growing season and because it takes much more skill to use them well. And they really are good, at least when cooked by the master chefs who use them so ostentatiously...
...waiting room at Broward Pain Clinic is swarming. A woman begs a receptionist, "There's no way he can squeeze me in?" "We're packed," the receptionist explains. "Packed, packed, packed...