Ramp Festival Time!

I thought Ramps were indigenous to just the Cosby, Tennessee area of the Great Smoky Mountains, and I also thought that the local Ramp Festival there was the only one of its kind in the United States. Kind of weird for me to be so wrong on both counts, but then I’ve never gone to the Festival or ever tasted of the wild leek that literally stinks up the town every May. Maybe I’ll make a trip up there this year and try the things out. After all it took me 60 plus years to discover mixed greens, and I now try to put them in everything I cook!

Again, the Knoxville News Sentinel’s famed Sam Venable is responsible for my enlightenment. In today’s paper, he wrote of the wide-ranging interest in these smelly, onion/garlic veggies and mentioned a number of celebrations of these plants throughout West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee. I’ve read that they serve up gourmet scrambles using the ramps and eggs, eat them raw, or slice them into fried potatoes and chop them into a cornbread mix. In fact one group of women in North Carolina dehydrate the ramps and combine them with stone-ground cornmeal, and sell the mixture as “fast as they can pour it into 11 ounce bags. The outfit also packages and sells jars of ramp salt and ramp seasoning.” For more info, contact the Smoky Mountain Native Plants Association (P.O. Box 761, Robbinsville, N.C. 28771)

Ramp consumption used to be limited to the mountain poor, but now the consumption is so great that the National Park Service has banned ramp-digging in the Smokies. And in Cherokee National Forest, visitors need a free permit to gather up to five pounds for personal use. Organizations may collect up to 500 pounds of the ramps in Cherokee for a charge of 40 cents a pound. It’s no wonder that native plant groups are working with farmers toward “a goal of creating a sustainable harvest of homegrown ramps, perhaps to help offset some of the loss from tobacco cutbacks. Funny how things go around, ain’t it?” says Venable.