First of the Ramps

The first ramps came in the back door at 9:40 this morning. Two crates, dirt still on, from a forager up near Sandy Mush who calls the restaurant, never texts, and will not tell anyone exactly where the patch is. Fair enough. Some knowledge should stay in the family.

If you have never met a ramp: it is a wild leek, it grows on shaded mountain slopes for a few short weeks in spring, and it tastes like an onion that went to finishing school and then ran away again. The whole plant works. The bulbs pickle, the stems sweat down like shallots, and the leaves want almost nothing done to them at all, a hot pan and thirty seconds and good butter.

Here is what changes tonight. The trout gets ramp butter instead of plain brown butter, which is the single best version of that dish we make all year. The deviled eggs pick up a rough ramp-top salsa verde. And there will be a plate of whole ramps off the wood grill with benne and lemon that stays on the menu exactly as long as the crates hold out, usually nine or ten days if we are disciplined, which we are not.

We never buy ramps a day early and we never stretch the season with the refrigerator. The point of a plant like this is that it tells you what week it is. When the crates stop coming, the menu moves on to asparagus and green garlic, and the spring keeps rolling up the mountain without us.

If you want the grilled ramps, come this week and say so when you book. The kitchen holds none of them back.

Etta Boone, from the pass