The Mighty, Mercurial Wild Leek
The Mighty, Mercurial Wild Leek
Ramps in Springtime
Basque sailors who crossed the fierce Atlantic to cast their nets off the coast of North America in the 16th century knew they had reached their destination when they smelled the forest. An ephemeral mix of leaf and earth and rot that hovered out over the sea for hundreds of miles.
That forest, stretched over an infinity of rock and lake and stream, is long gone. Five hundred years of shipbuilding, farming, city building, railroads and highways, pulp and paper has laid it low. But there are still remnants of the old giant, denizens of the ancient forest that have refused to let go. Some of them are a little more ostentatious than others – the moose, the black bears, the wolves. Some are more modest, lowly, and harder to find, but are no less amazing and, in their own way, tenacious.
I am talking of course, about the mighty, mysterious, mercurial wild leek.
You may know it as wild garlic, a ramp, wild onion. You may know it from the little country festivals that pop up to celebrate its return each spring. You may know it from its brief appearances on the menus of the finest restaurants. You may know it from when it pops up on one of the countless foodie blogs that sing its praises.
I am here to tell you that the foodies’ praises are well and truly sung. In this age of mass produced easy access food, where bland and tasteless corn and strawberries are always in season, the wild leek remains rare and pungent. A spring tonic.
The long spade-shaped leaves have a delicate garlicky flavor and take on a deep lustrous green when cooked. And the wondrous bulbs are so intense that a bite of a raw one in the woods can produce a deeply unsettling experience, a momentary nausea, and a fear of poison. But sauteed in a little – okay, a lot – of butter, they lose some of their rough edges and take on a taste will set you on an odyssey to taste them again.
This year my odyssey involved a three-hour drive in early May, out of the city, through the ever-expanding badlands of suburb, through the ring of twee cottage country towns into the hard, redneck country. The trail was muddy, swamped with over-flowing beaver pond. I hiked in through the bush, fought the hordes of little biting black flies, and forded the creek, still high from the melting snow. Then I climbed an old logging road until I came to a three- or four-acre stand of maples.
Leeks are one of the first of the green to push up through the detritus of the forest floor. They are the cruelest of the plants, cutting through dead leaves and shoving old branch aside with a narrow, single-minded purpose. They flourish in the narrow spring light and then wilt and disappear after a few short weeks. They have proved resistant to all efforts to domesticate them.
Breakfast, the morning after, is always the same. A dozen or so leeks pulled writhing from the hot butter and settled onto farm fresh eggs with a pulsating melt of sharp cheddar. And in every bite is the ancient, wild and familiar taste, redolent of the forest floor, an ephemeral mix of leaf and earth and rot.