Cooking Out of Quarantine
On Death—and Warm Ramp Spring™️
My mom says the first year after a loved one dies is the hardest—not just because the wound is freshest, but because, as you experience landmark days for the first time without them, you remember where you were and what you did the year before when they were alive, when you could celebrate a birthday, a holiday, even an earlier than expected spring day together.
For the families of more than half a million Americans, that is what 2021 has felt like because of a pandemic our government let run roughshod over our country. I am lucky not to count myself among them. But, for all of us, I think, or at least for me, on some days, this feels like a year of mourning, and I’ve been finding myself doing that thing my mom describes, being catapulted back 12 months by Proustian triggers of nostalgia.
Which brings me to the subject of this newsletter: Ramp Season, otherwise known as Warm Ramp Spring™️, the month when all of your favorite chefs put their favorite allium on everything, dolloping them over focaccia, stuffing them inside ravioli, pickling them on top of raw beef, blending them into butter. Ramps, you see, like humans, contain multitudes.
But as soon as ramps started showing up on my feed again, I was instantly reminded of what I was like last ramp season, and all I could think — as though I were looking back on photos I posted to Facebook during high school — was: Who the fuck was that guy?
Because, for some reason I cannot recall, this time last year, I had a vendetta against ramps. Seriously. I couldn’t stop tweeting mean things about them. I was like an anti-allium Glenn Greenwald.
But, here’s the thing, ramps are delicious, and for those of you who are wondering what they taste like, imagine a world where scallions and garlic could bang and only pass down each of their best qualities to their progeny—those kids would be ramps. And yet, last year, eating them left me feeling nothing but vitriol, a stupefying fact I’ve been reflecting on in recent days.
And what I’ve come to believe is that 2020 made even the best things bad—the inverse of Momofuku Chili Crunch, which makes even the worst things decent.1 And, in this way, 2021 is a year of mourning, yes, but it’s also a year of rebirth—a time when we can be reminded of the color in everything that felt gray last year. And I hope you’re able to do that with cooking.
I know, after months and months and months of preparing meal after meal after meal, cooking began to feel like a chore. Helen Rosner wrote a gorgeous essay about this in the New Yorker. But as life begins to return to normal, as vaccines enter arms and smiles return to faces and feet return to streets, I hope you learn to love something you grew to hate again. Because so much is still so fucked in so many ways, but it’s spring in America. Ramps are back in season. And life, well, life is fleeting. So I’ll be damned if I don’t try to enjoy every bite.
The newsletter re: how to make carbonara without scrambling the eggs ....changed my/my family's life and saved hundreds of meals! the only problem is now I think I am a carbonara snob (haha you created a monster). thank you thank you thank you ....excuse me while I google "ramps"