Ramps? Pickled? What?

[This comes to us from our dear friend Chefdip. I've never had a ramp, and I've certainly never had one pickled, but he takes it there, and makes the rest of us look bad in the process. Shad roe? Shaved asparagus? Sorry, I'm busy with my Betty Crocker yellow cake over here.]



















Springtime seems to bring the most delicious things to the farmers markets:
fava beans (which are worth the great trouble involved in preparing them), earthy morel mushrooms (best eaten when cooked gently in butter), the most delicious asparagus (which I both roast and eat raw, shaved in a salad), and tender, young salad greens. And of course, the shad are running, and that means shad roe, which I look forward to each year with an anticipation bordering on lunacy.

Ramps are also in season. Americans have been eating these wild, garlicky little leeks for ages, but only recently have they become a flash item in restaurants. They're only available for a short time in the spring, they grow wild in parts of Appalachia, and they're highly perishable. But they're intense and delicious. I like to eat them with shad roe and capers, in a soup with new potatoes and thyme, pan-roasted with chicken, oven-roasted with scallions--just about any way I can.

But because they go bad so quickly, I like to pickle them, to extend my ramp season. I can then add these pickled ramps to a braise, to salads, to a sauce for soft-shell crabs, to frittatas.

Last weekend, I pickled my ramps in two ways. Both involved a base of 1 cup of white wine vinegar and 1 cup of sugar. To the first batch, I toasted some mustard seeds, coriander seeds, black peppercorns, and bay leaves and added this mix to the liquid. I blanched the ramps for just a minute or two, then put them in a sterilized jar and poured over the pickling liquid. In the second batch, I toasted off about 4 tsps of the Bengali spice mix called panch phoran (five spices): nigella seeds, fenugreek seeds, mustard seeds, fennel seeds, and cumin seeds--the aromas in the kitchen were unreal--and added this to the brine. After about three days, you have a truly wondrous thing.