Ramps, quail eggs, and bread: the makings for a simple Spring supper.
I grew up in Manhattan–actually Forest Hills, which is a ten minute subway ride from Manhattan, if you’re on the express train. We didn’t have a whole lot of nature there, per se, beyond Forest Park, Kissena Park, and Flushing Meadow Park, all of which were officially off limits, because of Son of Sam.
So, my experience in the great outdoors was sharply limited to seven summers at Camp Towanda, in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. The food at camp, by any standards, was stellar; we had an outstanding chef named Bill Alexander (who came to us from Yale) who made things like London Broil, and pizza, and pepper steak. When I tell this to my partner, who went to a camp called Happy Hill, she usually ends my waxing rhapsodic by telling me about having to blow the fly carcasses off the hamburgers she’d cook over a leaking propane grill just outside her flammable nylon tent, the summer that she was seven.
Anyway, one year at Camp Towanda, we had this guy on staff who was hired to run the nature den and to take us all on hikes. His name was Henry, or Hirsch, or something like that, and he was a rather doughy fellow, and pretty much what you’d get if you crossed Euell Gibbons with Newman from Seinfeld. One day, Nature Guy, who wore torn clothes from Kreeger’s and an old Army shirt with his name tag suspiciously ripped in half, took us on a hike through the perilous hills just beyond the camp boundaries. It was thrilling to hear him say things like “see kids, that’s a scrub-oak Lycidium, which is the Latin name for Acorn Bush” and “if you eat the flowering bud of the Pennsylvania Swamp Mug, you’ll be protected from mosquitos for an entire season!”
We were transfixed by his knowledge, even though he was lying through his teeth.
One day, he took us out to look for some edibles. This was something of a conundrum for me, since we had perfectly good edibles back in the dining hall, for which our parents had paid $1200 for us to eat for eight weeks. But Nature Guy wanted to show us that you could eat straight from the forest floor, and subsist on some pretty wondrous stuff. We watched with rapt attention, but he had no takers when he asked if we wanted to try a mysterious purple flower that looked much like a Venus Fly Trap. I’ll never know what it was for sure, but Nature Guy disappeared from camp the next day. We never saw him again.
I suppose this is why the idea of foraging for my own food has always been a little bit fraught for me. Maybe it’s because my idea of foraging involves making it to the olive bar at Fairway without getting elbowed in the head. I mean, what if you innocently go out to stalk the wild asparagus, and instead wind up stalking poison oak?
This is not good for my people. We don’t forage. We shop.
And so a few weeks ago, when the sun began to shine a bit more brightly, Susan called from her office to tell me that she was bringing home a surprise: the two huge bunches of ramps that she got at a really good price ($2.99) were not it, though. What was? Quail eggs and a loaf of Sullivan Street Pain Pugliese. She had splurged, and we put together a delightful early Spring meal of sauteed ramps on garlic toast, topped with poached quail eggs.
Ramps and fried quail eggs on garlic toast: a nice meal.
The next night, we seared heavily salted-and-peppered chicken, and served it with ramps that I’d cooked together with some pancetta that we had kicking around in the fridge.
Render the pancetta first, then add the chopped ramp stems.
Add the ramp tops, toss, and cook them down to a tangle.
Salt, pepper, chicken, ramps, dinner.
It was right then that we decided how lucky the folks down in West Virginia must be, to have ramps growing all over God’s green earth in the middle of forests and lawns everywhere in that state. And we bemoaned the fact that since they can’t be propagated, they show up in (usually specialty) food shops at utterly ridiculous prices, just like truffles ($2.99 was a fluke; the next day, the ramps were $9.99 a pound).
A few days later, Susan took our dog out for a walk and came back beaming.
“I’m not sure,” she said, subversively, “but the neighbors over on the next street seem to have ramps growing near their front yard. They look like the same things I bought at Whole Foods last week.”
“Impossible,” I responded, looking up from the paper, “they must be lilies. Did you try one?”
“Hell no,” she said. “They could be lilies, like you said.”
“Ramps don’t just grow in suburban Connecticut,” I told her. “They’re a rare edible delicacy that’s limited to the wiles of upstate New York, West Virginia, and, probably, Berkeley, where Alice Waters wills them to grow, like the Amazing Kreskin bending a spoon.”
Still, I was incredulous. I mean, what if these were in fact ramps? That delicious, spicy-sweet, oniony harbinger of Spring, the short life-spanned wild leek that thumbs its nose at vegetable gardeners everywhere who have tried, and failed, to grow them. We would go over to the house around the corner. We would pull a few up. We would nibble. We would pray they weren’t lilies.
But there was one catch: I would be breaking my own foraging rule set in stone the day that Nature Guy didn’t show up at morning lineup at Camp Towanda, the day after he had eaten the fly trap. Plus, I would be removing something from my neighbor’s property without him knowing it, and there are very basic rules about that.
Still. Ramps? $9.99 a pound at Whole Foods. Or free, from my neighbor’s yard. I was willing to take a risk. We drove over and left the car running, in case we had to make a quick getaway. A concerned neighbor drove by and got out, while we were on our hands and knees, pulling.
“What the hell are you two doing? It’s like watching Lucy and Ethel.”
“Shhh! They’re ramps!”
“What the hell are ramps,” she asked.
“Extraordinarily delicious harbingers of springtime that grow wild and cannot be propagated and are a fortune to buy in stores. Try one,” I said, pulling one up.
“Those aren’t ramps,” she said. “Don’t you know lilies when you see them?”
Lucky for us, she was wrong.
