Spring marked an important shift in diet for the homesteaders of Appalachia, really anyone who lived off the land. After a winter of rationed preserved meats, pickles, and fermented vegetables, spring offered the year’s first fresh vegetable and fruit nutrition.
Watercress, one of the first things to pop in the cold, running springs on the mountain sides, offered some green freshness, leafy bitterness and crunch, and a jolt of Vitamin A and C to sturdy the immune system. All the things missing from the winter larder. Appalachians called them “creases”, and their harvest was as fun as it was nutritious and delicious, as families romped on the mountainside in the season’s first thaw.
As the weather warmed, out came fiddlehead ferns, morels, stinging nettles, ramps, elderflower, wild strawberries…as summer thunderstorms came on and the weather got hot, mushrooms burst from every corner. So many varieties they didn’t all have names. Some so specific to the foraging of certain families whose systems have adapted to eating them, they would otherwise not be edible for most people. As fall crept in, the trees dropped beechnuts, chestnuts, and black walnuts, and the forest floor teemed with the deep, savory aroma of porcini, chanterelle, and hen o’ the woods mushrooms, just to name a few.
The sheer variety of wild foods available in East Tennessee makes it easy to understand why foraging was so prevalent. In Michigan, by the way, we have a pretty similar bounty of wild foods, they’re just a few weeks behind. Homesteaders, by nature, are people who like to wander in the woods and wilds, be out in nature and in tune with the seasons.
Modern day foragers who sell to restaurants or at farmer’s markets, are often odd balls who can be difficult to deal with. Many of them would rather be alone in the woods than with people. Foraging requires that you be very connected to the wild lands you inhabit. You have to know that certain mushrooms like to grow under dead elm trees, and be able to identify that wine glass shape through leaves and thickets. You have to know the long and ancient history of the land you stand on. Michigan, for example, was formed as the glaciers receded during the last ice age, and as the ice ebbed back it deposited the rock and soil it collected further south, making bands of different kinds of earth which changed what plants favored what places to grow. So if you’re looking for ramps, which like rich, loose, well drained soil from a hardwood forest that was basically a bed of composted leaf matter, and you’re standing on sand, you would want to move north or south to find them, not east or west.
It’s not just about developing “eyes”, as foragers say: the moment when the landscape shifts and all the sudden you see detail you didn’t the moment before. Nature leaves clues, and you have to hunt for those clues before you start to hunt for food. And there is no way to rush this knowledge, and no way to gain it without being in the woods.
This is also why foraged foods are so pricey. It’s not just the rarity of knowledge though, but also the capriciousness of the weather, and the time involved to find and harvest. A farmer in a field can harvest thousands of green onions in the time it may take to reap a handful of ramps.
For a few years at the onset of The Southerner, we hosted a dinner every spring in collaboration with a forager friend. We invited my tony chef friends to come cook a course. We took them out on a forage the day ahead of the event so they got to get out into the woods and learn about where to find things and how to sustainably harvest them, how to prep things like stinging nettles to make them safe to handle and eat, and then they came back to the kitchen and made absolute magic.
The dinner became so popular that towards the end it sold out in minutes. Then COVID hit, and we decided to let it quietly go away. We hosted about 50 people who we made very happy one day in May, and disappointed hundreds of others who couldn’t get tickets. It was expensive to put on and I started running out of famous friends.
But most importantly, there was a huge excitement from a new group of people about foraging. A lot of restaurants were featuring foraged foods prominently, and a lot of young nature lovers started to learn more and head out into the woods. It got so popular that environmentalists began to worry about the safety of a lot of wild species, especially the popular ones like morels and ramps.
Perhaps the most important knowledge a forager should take into the woods with them regards knowing what not to pick. Over-harvesting a patch of ramps erases it. It’s important to know the signs that someone else beat you to it and a piece has already been harvested, so you have to leave it alone.
But it’s difficult to resist that ancient drive to find food in the woods. It’s how we sustained ourselves before farming, of course, so it’s not hard to understand why so many people want to be a part of it. But we felt it was our responsibility to help turn the temperature down, so at least locally, our woods will remain vibrant with edible life.
I haven’t done it in a few years, but for a minute, our favorite rite of spring in our home was to make ramp carbonara. Amy and I would head out to the woods to get some ramps, which she would usually find. I never seem to develop “eyes.” We would grab some smoked jowl bacon my neighbor Fred and I made from his hogs, a couple of fresh eggs from their chickens, and a salty, grana style aged cow & goat cheese made by our friends at Evergreen Lane Farms just a few minutes away. I would make fresh egg pasta and cut it on a chitarra, an insanely inefficient way to make pasta, but enjoyable nonetheless.
We would lazily spend an entire, hopefully, warm and sunny spring day gathering and preparing dinner, then drinking some wine and hunkering down over this humble but deeply soul satisfying bowl of pasta.
To us, this was peak country living.
Ramp Carbonara
For two.
- ½ lb. whole ramps, washed and stemmed
- 4 eggs, as fresh as possible
- 4 ounces smoked jowl bacon, cut into small batons
- A small knob of butter
- ½ lb. semolina flour
- Lots of pecorino romano (if you don’t live by Evergreen Lane Farm)
- Lots of coarsely ground black pepper
To make the pasta:
Make a well of semolina flour on a clean work surface and begin incorporating the egg by whisking with a fork. Slowly add water as needed to form a cohesive, but not sticky dough. Knead the dough by hand until smooth and set aside for at least one hour.
Roll the dough thin enough with a rolling pin to fit through the largest opening on your pasta roller. Roll it through, fold it letter style and turn it 45 degrees, then roll it through again. Repeat this on the widest setting two more times.
Reduce the setting and repeat this process again. Remember that pasta dough gets its texture more from rolling the dough out than kneading, so a few folds helps tremendously.
Reduce the setting again and repeat. By now you want to start measuring the thickness of the dough against the wider side of your chitarra, which I’m certain all of you have. Chitarra pasta is supposed to be square, so stop reducing the thickness of your pasta when it matches the spacing of your chitarra wires. Of course, this all makes sense to you because you absolutely own a chitarra. Use a rolling pin to push your pasta through the wires and set it aside, dusted with a little semolina, under a damp tea towel.
This dish is hearty and wants a beefy noodle, so if you’re not inclined to make your own, buchatini is a good alternative.
Begin bringing 6 quarts of very heavily salted water to a boil. Put the jowl bacon in a heavy bottomed saute pan with the knob of butter and place it over a very low heat. Start rendering the bacon, allowing it to color very little for the time being.
While that is happening, separate the bulbs from the leaves of your ramps and finely slice them. Once any moisture has cooked off your jowl bacon and a decent amount of fat has rendered, add the ramp bottoms and cook them slowly, until they are fully translucent, and the jowl bacon has completely rendered its fat and is beginning to crisp. Slow and low is the name of the game here.
In a decent sized mixing bowl, place two whole eggs and 1 egg yolk, a generous palmful of grated pecorino, and lots of freshly ground black pepper. Combine everything with a fork.
Cut the ramp tops into thin ribbons.
Drop the pasta into the boiling water and cook until just firm, about two minutes. Raise the heat slightly in the saute pan and add the ramp tops, and saute briefly. Remove the pasta from the pot to the saute pan and cook for one minute, tossing to combine.
Loosen the egg mixture with a spoonful or two of the pasta cooking water, making sure to stir vigorously with a fork to keep the egg from curdling, then add the contents of the saute pan. Stir quickly and vigorously to combine and create a smooth, rich sauce with the eggs and the steam from the pasta. Add a few more spoonfuls of the pasta water if needed to bring the sauce to life. It should cling to the pasta with a nice sheen, but not be enough to pool in the bottom of the bowl.
Divide into two portions, top with a little more pecorino and pepper, and serve at once.