The song of spring is best sung with your mouth full.
Only hearty vegetables grow during this tempestuous time of year. The past month at my local farmer’s market began the ballad of the hardy, cold-loving plants. End of winter foods taste wilder, but their sharp green flavors turn sweet under oil and salt and heat.
Chives, leeks, ramps. Mustard, chard, kale. Lettuce — it’s own red and green category, sweet and succulent, or bitter. They shout at us: stop eating from the bins in the cellar and the Ball jars! Time now to pluck and chew things that are alive!
Old timers in the mountains call these foods tonics, and knew how to scavenge these and more from the woods and hillsides. They are believed to thin the blood and prime the human pumps for planting and harvesting.
For most modern Appalachians, though, spring means the excitement of tossing a salad that wasn’t cut weeks ago in California. It’s the thrill of skipping over the waxed produce aisle, where everything is just a little too perfect, or on the other end of the spectrum, tired and wrinkled at its edges, as I am after a long winter.
A sign at a local farmer’s market stall reminds me that nature has its rhythms, and that patience is rewarded.
“Onions aren’t in season. Use leeks!!”
Also in season: chives, garlic chives, green garlic, and that most pungent of wild herbs, ramps. Don’t believe the hype. Ramps will not chase away friends and lovers. Just cook them before you eat them. They’re particularly tasty in fried potatoes, like hash browns and latkes.
I love the liminality of spring — this between-time time.
Yesterday I turned the compost pile, and last night I added to winter’s chaff the trimmings of new leeks and mustard greens and the stems of fresh rosemary and thyme, all scraped clean. I look into this rotting cauldron and there I can see the future. Soon the bacteria sleeping here will wake to feast on rotten squash and watermelon rinds. The cycle begins again.
Tonight we ate leeks, sweet and browned with roasted potatoes flavored with olive oil and salt and piney, resinous rosemary. The skins hissed when they hit the black iron pan. We tossed a salad of red oak leaf lettuce and spring mustard greens with vinegar and oil. The nights are still cold enough for steak, which we seasoned only with salt.
In the morning we’ll eat ramps and eggs, a mountain favorite this time of year.
“Start slow, they’re strong,” a friend told me about this dish.
Tomorrow night perhaps I’ll use a ramp and morel quiche to chase the early May damp and chill from the house.
Tags: farmers market, greens, ramps, spring, tonics
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