Feature article
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Ramps: Revered from Unicoi County to New York
By Fred Sauceman
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This Saturday, May 12, from noon to 2 p.m., I’ll be signing both volumes of “The Place Setting” books at Main Street Café in Jonesborough. The restaurant’s popular Main Street Dog is featured on the cover of the second book, which came out at the end of March 2007.
This Saturday also marks the 22nd annual Flag Pond Ramp Festival, going on from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the old Flag Pond School, on the south end of Unicoi County.
The emergence of ramps, or wild mountain leeks, is a sign of spring in Appalachia. I recently exchanged pen for shovel to dig the precious, pungent plant in the mountains surrounding Flag Pond.
People have been digging ramps in these mountains for centuries. The ancient Cherokees dug ramps. They believed the bold flavor cleansed the blood and thinned it down after a cold winter. This spring, I joined in the age-old practice, hauled up to Street’s Gap in Unicoi County in the bed of Richard and Mary Waldrop’s 200,000-mile, four-wheel-drive Toyota pickup.
Richard is president of the Flag Pond Ruritan Club, an organization that puts on the festival every year. The slopes we walked across were sometimes angled as much as 45 degrees, so shovels became good walking sticks, in addition to digging tools.
Richard says this section of the Cherokee National Forest is a good place for bears, but he’s never seen any on a ramp dig. We’re near the Appalachian Trail, only a short distance from the North Carolina state line, and literally at the end of the road.
“You notice how black the dirt is?” Richard asks. “It’s rich dirt. That’s what ramps like. Real black, rich dirt. And they like dampness, on the northern side of a mountain. They won’t grow nowhere but on the northern side. And shade. They don’t like the sunlight at all.”
Even for a novice digger, ramps are easy to spot, once you see your first one. There’s nothing else on the forest floor like them.
Richard instructs me to loosen the roots about three or four inches into the earth, just like I was digging up flowers, and pull up the plant with my fingers. We shake most of the dirt off and stuff the ramps, leaves and all, into a 50-pound cattle feed sack.
I ask Richard if ramps are getting scarce.
“No, I don’t think so. You have years that they’re not as plentiful. But it takes five years for them to really start producing, spreading out. We’ve done this for 20 years now, and we haven’t had no trouble locating them. We don’t dig in the same place every year. We go different places in the mountains and dig, because we don’t want to dig them out.”
The April frost this year set the plants back about three or four weeks.
As we get down on hands and knees to drink from a mountain stream, Mary Waldrop spots another spring treasure.
“This is branch lettuce, and it grows near a stream normally, and older people used to gather branch lettuce and ramps in the early spring of the year. They would take them home and wash them and chop them up into bite-sized pieces, then make cornbread, and they would fry bacon to get the hot oil and they would put it over the ramps and branch lettuce. They called it killing the ramps and branch lettuce.”
Along about the first of June, the ramp begins dying down, in anticipation of the summer heat.
“When the leaves dies down and the growth in the forest gets up, you can’t find them,” Richard tells me. “That’s why a lot of people will put them in glass jars and freeze them.
“You eat up to the leaves. A lot of people take these leaves and put them in a salad. But we usually cut them off right about there, right where the leaves start growing out. There’s a male and a female of ramps. One is white and one is red. And they say they won’t grow, won’t pollinate, if there’s not one of each close.”
Richard shows me a ramp with last year’s seed on it, waiting to be spread by the wind to create new plants.
Ramps fried with potatoes is Richard’s favorite way to savor the harvest, second only to having ramps mixed into meatloaf.
“The best way I can describe the taste is like garlic,” Richard says. “And the Yankees love ramps. We got some friends, they’re wanting to move to Flag Pond, and they wanted me to mail them some of them in New Jersey. I ain’t going to do that.”
At the $450 per-person blacktie James Beard Foundation Awards Ceremony and Gala Reception at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall this month, the first dish listed on the menu was Puffed Morels with Ramps and Black Pepper. Grant Achatz prepared it. He is the chef at Chicago’s Alinea, a Mobil Travel Guide five-star restaurant known for its “Progressive American cuisine” and its “hypermodern, emotional approach to dining.” Ruth Reichl, editor of Gourmet, declared Alinea the “best restaurant in America” in the magazine’s twice-per-decade list of America’s top 50.
“People don’t realize how much they’d have to pay if they was in New York for a mess of ramps,” says Richard. “We’ve been on the Internet and they’re $60 a pound.”
At Unicoi County fruit and vegetable stands, a bunch with 12 ramps in it runs around $2.
“Do your kids eat ramps?” I ask Richard.
“No, the kids won’t eat them. They say it makes your breath smell bad. But the Indians say if you eat ramps in the spring you’ll live until another spring. That’s just an old saying. I’ll eat me some pretty quick so I can live until next spring anyway.”
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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