For on thing, they are the first edible greens of spring.  And for people who once lived or still live close to the land in Appalachia, ramps have long been a source of joy and hope each April, greeted with parties and feasts.

In recent years, chefs and foodie fashionistas have fallen in love with ramps.  Now you find cultivated ramps in upscale urban farmers markets and even some Whole Foods (so I hear).  Yes, another poverty food gone chic.

As I looked into my bag of ramps, I remembered this folklorist named Mary Hufford.  Mary spent a lot of time hanging out in West Virginia’s “Big Coal River Valley” back in the nineties documented the lives of the mountain people who, for generations, used the forest for gathering and hunting.  She described communities deeply connected to the seasons and one another.  Ramps as part of a larger world of quilting bees, the Baptist church—and, of course, the annual Ramps Supper in the “Ramp House” on Drew Creek. 

You can see her work on ramps here.  It’s just about one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen..

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/tending/essay4a.html

Not exactly the kind of stuff they cover on the Food Network, is it, now.

But back to the muddy ramps on my kitchen counter.  How to cook these things?  Of course I wanted to make them like they do in West Virginia.

I reached out to Rebecca Tolley-Stokes at Potlikker, who wrote me that ramps are eaten many ways--fried, plain, boiled, but very often with some sort of pork fat and eggs or potatoes, in a skillet on top of the stove. 

So when Nancy arrived at my house, we did just that.  First we fried up the bacon. Then we added some sliced potatoes and salt, then the parboiled chopped ramps, and then got everything a little soft.

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much.  I figured it would taste just like any other kind of humble potatoes and greens dish. But the truth is that the ramp surprised me.  It’s a divine creature--complex, sweet, with just a little bite.  A cross between onion and garlic.  No wonder chefs love it. 

Shortly after my first taste of ramps, I tracked down my hero Mary Hufford, now the director of the folklore center at U. Penn.  It’s been ten years since she finished her study, so I wrote and asked if the folks in her mountains were still collecting ramps and having their ramps suppers.  Here’s what she wrote back. 

“I haven’t been to a ramp supper in a few years, but I think they are still holding them in southern West Virginia.  My understanding is that ramp patches are increasingly harder to get to, because they grow in the high hollows that are being blasted away through mountaintop removal mining--a violent and extremely wasteful way to generate energy and is devastating to the communities living near sites of extraction.  It is destroying a world class ecological treasure, the central Appalachian Mixed Mesophytic forest, and the habitat for ramps.  It’s an unacceptable price to pay for coal, no matter how “cleanly” the coal industry promises to burn it.

“In such a historical context, ramp suppers and ramp patches bear watching as indicators of national political health and well-being—spring tonic for the heart, tonic for the democratic communal well-being.”

A tonic for the heart….  A tonic for democracy.  Imagine….

Thanks Mary.

And thanks to my friend Joann for bringing me my first ever ramps.

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At home, recipes are recipes, but the second piece is installed as a fragment to draw attention to the page, not just the sentimentality of “grandma’s recipe” and what’s written on the page.


In between the recipes I painted images directly on the walls from the recipe pages, in particular the women’s names who are credited for recipes, so often anonymous and overlooked, here writ large and with some of the page details.


I was careful to cut out the details of things like the threads of the binding coming unraveled, to call attention to the details of the visual image.


They’re tiny on purpose as these are things often overlooked, constrained to the domestic world and not often considered apart from their use. I liked that you could miss them, and then when you saw them, they were fun to find, like following clues.


This one is on a door leading to an outdoor corridor . . .


Once you see them, they lead you along . . .


A few are blank pages to call attention to the visual language of the page - the underlying grid, the color of the aging paper, and the emotional response you have. For me it’s possibility in the blank page . . . the emptiness of ancestors gone . . .


They were placed outside and inside elevators . . . a quote from my statement: “The handwritten recipe page imparts meaning through implied or actual experience and process, echoes life’s impermanence, measures and maps a personal history over time that enriches a sense of identity, evolves through experimentation and changes in taste and availability of materials and produces a visceral connection to ancestors perhaps long gone.”


This one is one of my favorites. It’s for devil’s food and I hung it on the soda machine but it was a subconscious decision. My instructor pointed out the irony.


Wonderful contrast of aging pop machine and aging old recipe . . .


Once we get to the building with the art studios in it, I start to draw out the visual language of the recipes because now that we have left home and gone to the studio, the recipe is not just a recipe but becomes what I make from it. People stole them regularly. They are beautiful . . and the stealing became part of the piece - how the recipes were coveted and went out into the community . . .


Once in the art building the focus changed. Now the wall paintings draw imagery from the pages but call attention to the visual language more and more. They evolve as art evolves.


Once inside the actual art studios, I started pulling drawing elements from the page, like this script “p” so evocative, and the negative space of the rectangle that references the recipe page without showing it. This is about four feet high.


Here’s my last wall drawing, trying to evoke the old recipe without copying it . . .


This is a detail shot of the wall drawing. And a quote from “Reading the Language of Objects”: “Compressed inside its small material self, the genie of meaning, captured by the artist, is released by a viewer who willingly participates in the mysteries of making.” Coming soon: new paintings and a baking performance piece!

Were you to just set out your jam in a cool place, it would grow bacteria. 

This is where the sugar comes in. You wonder if people didn’t have much back in the 1800s.  In general, sugar had become readily available to the middle class people living in urban areas of Europe and the U.S, thanks to European plantations in the Caribbean and slave labor.  (But that--and the whole big magilla of sugar history--is best for another day.)

In any case, sugar was not optional in making jam--it was essential.  Remember that “fruit preserves” were invented as precisely this--a method of preserving fruit for winter before refrigeration came along.  Sugar acted not only as a sweetener but as a preserving agent.  Cooking breaks down the fruit so it can absorb the sugar.  In some historic recipes, you also find the addition of vinegar for the same reason. 

The only way I’ve ever seen fruit preserves made without sugar is when it’s been cooked and pounded into sheets then then sun/air dried and rolled up for the winter.  This is called “fruit leather” in the old cookbooks.  But also, I’ve read of Indians of the Northwest who used to preserve fruit this way.  So cool.  I’m sure you’ve also seen kids eating these under the guise of “fruit roll ups.” These of course have LOTS of sugar--a la corn syrup.

So in sum, my vote is that unsugared uncooked jam is a modern invention, though please if there’s someone out there who knows otherwise, correct me.  I also think it’s probably more delicious--full of fruit flavor--and perhaps one way that modern recipes are sometimes better than old!

see also: Quince

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Oh she liked the tile okay. It was the objects that concerned her. I explained to her why I love painting food, how I think of food as symbol and metaphor as much as sustenance, how I love the association with domesticity and work that is repetitive and a ritual of daily life. How I want to say something about how food connects us to our past and brings people together. “Why don’t you pour something onto the tile?” she suggested, “Like soda.” “Olive oil?” I asked. “Fine,” she replied. So oil it was.


As a painter, it was interesting to think of the tile in a more conceptual way but as a cook, it wasn’t.


Finally, I chose a cooking image to sketch in oils instead. I also brought my little potted herb garden with me and plucked some herbs to chop for my lunch. This one is not on the tile but more are coming with the tile included. On the day of my first critique, my professor told me that I had a productive week and told me to revisit the work of a favorite artist of mine. In the pages of an enormous book about this artist from the university library I found clues to what I am after if only I can master it. Stay tuned!

Progress!  We can’t believe we did it. 

Here are our beets, coming up. 

And here is our first heirloom tomato (black prince), coming from flower to fruit. 

We put in a tee-pee for climbing beans. 

These are baccicia beans just pushing out of their shells toward the sun.  These seeds were sent to me by a reader of “Lost Ravioli” from Napa.  More than a hundred years ago, Italians brought these beans to California. 

We’ve also got carrots, corn, broccoli, spinach, chard, and many kinds of peppers and herbs growing, amongst flowers.  This is borage… a very “not to be forgotten” vegetable with many many uses.  Both leaf and flower are edible.  And the bright blue flowers are beautiful.  Now each day when I open my front door, I see theater and drama.  Things are happening.  It is a fascination and a joy.

see also: Vegetables in the Front Yard

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Cooking with fire makes you think about just how recent it is in human history that we have had stoves. 

Usually the fire is too hot. Or it’s too cold.  It needs a lot of attention if you’re not used to it. 

You get smoke in your eyes, and your clothes smell.  Also, the warmth of the fire, I can assure you, doesn’t reach terrible far. 

Still, there was a certain triumph to finally getting the eggs to boil.  I felt as hough I’d really accomplished something. 

There were really some beautiful moments on our trip.

And of course this:

And this:

And then the rain came.

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A little research and I became sure that the winepress belonged to an Italian family.  Not too surprising.

Italian laborers immigrated to this town more than a hundred years ago, hired to dig the original water and sewer lines and lay railroad track.  They were housed in tents and barracks in open lots, and some local church documents describe them making huge bonfires at night and singing in their camps.  Most wanted to make money and go back home to Italy.  But eventually many stayed and saved enough money to buy houses.  The winepress probably comes from the time period--somewhere between 1900 and World War II.  But of course, winemaking itself goes back in the Mediterranean to the dawn of recorded history there.

And so that winepress got me to thinking about migrations—perhaps the most fascinating aspect of all human history for me.  What we take with us and what we leave behind.  And how the migrations never end.

Four million Italians came to American between 1880 and 1920.  (The entire population of Italy was only around 15 million).  Then seven million African Americans came up from the American South to the North, as part of the Great Migration—between 1910 to 1970.  And before this, the huge forced migration from Africa that began in the early 1600s.

Many Italians fled their neighborhoods when African Americans moved in.  They did so out of racism and out of fear.  The irony is, however, that once Italians left their immigrant neighborhoods and moved to the suburbs, they dispersed into the vast American culture and usually began to lose their ethnic identity, having children who would not grow up in the neighborhood enclaves hearing dialect, listening to the old people tell stories, and making wine in the basement.

And now the African American neighborhoods too are changing--becoming less connected--as children grow and move away and newcomers move in. Lina tells me it is mostly young professionals now interested in this house, which is located close to the train to New York.

Do I sound nostalgic?  Not really.  Life constantly moves forward.  But that winepress got to me—a big immovable hunk of concrete shaped into the very foundation of a home.
Too big to move.  It had to be left behind. 

Oh yes.  One last thing.  Those looking for a house in Montclair with a quick commute and wine-making facilities in the basement should contact Lina Panza.

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“The second reason is that they’re extremely funny.  Whenever you’re in a bad mood, just come out here and watch them. They’re very silly--and not very smart.  Our family has lots of chicken jokes.’

The third reason is my passion for sustainable living.  They eat all my vegetable scraps--they eat pasta and bread and salad--everything.  I make hardly any garbage.  Their manure gets aged for compost and makes beautiful flowers and vegetables.  We can all live peaceably in the world.  You don’t need fourteen chickens to do it.  We can all find a way to slow down and be mindful.  The chickens do this for me.”

Grace makes it look so easy and wonderful that before I know it, I’m asking her about where I can get a chicken coop and some Blue Araucanas of my own.  Oh those fresh eggs are so appealing.  But wait...what about the gross parts?  I had a lot of questions for Grace. Here’s my Q& A--gathered while sons number 1 and 2 (ages 7 and 12) stared enraptured at the clucking girls and begged for a flock of their own.

LS:  “Do you get rats?”
GG: “Yes, of course.  Rats have been on the earth longer than we have.  When I have to, I use poison.  That’s one nonorganic thing I do.  But we also have hawks come by and help. 

LS:  Did you grow up doing this? 
GG:  It’s familiar to me.  I began my life in Malaysian where lots of people have chickens. 

LS:  Is this legal?  Do your neighbors mind?
GG:  In our town, we’re allowed to keep up to 25.  I’m well under the limit.  As to the neighbors, we asked them first.

LS How did you get started? 
GG:  There was a guy I knew who had chickens and I admired them, so I started with three.  Then I made a big leap and ordered 15 through the mail. 

LS:  How much does it cost to feed them?
GG:  Probably about $50 bucks of chicken feed a month.

LS:  Do you have predators?
GG:  Racoons are my number-one predator.  I’ve got a pesky one right now who’s determined to reduce my flock.  At night, I get the girls into the coop and lock them in where they’re safe.  But sometimes, when they’re still out, a raccoon will get a bird. You come out and find some feathers and maybe a few bones.”

LS:  Is it gross to clean out the chicken coop?
GG:  ....

LS:  Are other families doing this in our town?
GG:  I’d guess about ten. 

LS:  What does your husband think of this?
GG:  He kind of lets me be.  He grew up on a farm, so he sees this all differently.  They’re not pets. 

By the way, Grace’s commitment to sustainable living is bigger than chickens.  You can often find her at her shop Terra Tea Salon and Fair Trade Eco Market “>Terra Tea Salon and Fair Trade Eco Market on Church Street in Montclair, NJ.

We had also done a photo shoot in Laura’s kitchen previously that yielded this image. I painted it from the photo. We both agreed that we liked the image, but it wasn’t exactly what we wanted for Jellypress. For me, the immediacy of working from life was missing. The camera decides so much for you. I wanted to experience the image I would paint without the camera lens distancing me from it.

In the same painting, over to the right, I painted a bowl of cooked strawberries. There was also a photo with the same feeling. Despite myself, the loss was coloring everything I did. Laura and I joked that we would name the image “The Strawberries of Doom.” Even though we were kidding, we knew there was some truth in it too. Life is not always pretty or fair and we are both nourished and starved as we live and learn. In the beauty of ripe strawberries, there always exists the mud they come from, the garbage of the compost that fed them, the rot that will overtake them in time as they in turn become nourishment for new growth. I wanted all that in the painting.

Finally, alone in my kitchen, I painted this image from life. I worked without over-thinking it. Just a simple image, I thought. Fruit, cutting board, the knife left for a moment by the unseen cook. It was only later, when people mentioned the knife’s edge, so prominent in the foreground, that I realized how much of us comes out in our art without our conscious control. It’s all there. 

I miss the smell of her cake in the oven, especially now that strawberries are abundant and stacked impossibly high in their supermarket plastic container towers. Back then, we got our strawberries from a “grocer” that Mom nicknamed “Gaw-jus” because he bragged about his picture-perfect produce in a heavy Bronx accent.

“I went to Gaw-jus,” she’d say, presenting me with the bags full of perfumed berries to wash and slice. “One for the cake, one for me,” I’d say as I cut them and we would giggle together over this weakness we shared, our inability to resist sneaking a little piece before the guests arrived. In my mind’s eye, I see her unguarded, pretty face nearly free of makeup. She prefers simple things. Her wedding ring is often the only piece of jewelry she wears. I remember her fingernails shining with a thin stroke of clear polish on the edge of her spatula as she stirred the egg whites into the cake batter.

“It needed trimming,” she’d say, giving me thin slices off the bottom of the warm sponge cake straight out of the pan that we ate with our fingers, taking them carefully from the knife edge.

It is always 1975 in these memories of my mother baking with me in a New Jersey kitchen wallpapered with outdated yellow and brown pop-art flowers. After all, it’s where the woman who bore me is baking — not just then, but always and forever somewhere in my center, that essential place lost to me so much of the time. And everything she tried to teach me — devotion, patience, the importance of ritual, humility — is there in that simple act of making cake from scratch.

Our sponge cake recipe is an old family recipe from Helen, my Uncle Richy’s mother. A matriarch. In our family, that means strong, compassionate, capable. And so much more. The cake is also much more than its label — usually sponge cake elicits groans in the same way that fruit cake does. None of them are considered any good. This one always gets the raves. I made it for a party recently and it was, as always, a revelation.

Grandma Helen’s Sponge Cake

9 extra large eggs, separated
1 and 1/4 cup sugar (scant cup)
grated rind and juice of medium to large lemon
scant cup all purpose unbleached white flour (Passover cake meal may be substituted)

1. Preheat oven to 340 degrees (convection) or 350 degrees for still oven.

2. Beat egg yolks on an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment for 10 minutes adding the sugar 1/4 cup at a time after 5 minutes. Add the rind and juice of the lemon and beat until well blended.

3.. Beat egg whites until stiff but not dry. Sift 1/3 of the cake meal or flour onto the yolk mixture.  Do not mix it in. Add 1/2 the whites.  Now, fold gently to just incorporated. Then add 1/3 more of the flour followed by almost the entire remaining 1/2 of the whites, leaving just a tad for the last fold. Fold gently. Add the rest of the flour and the tad more whites and fold very very gently to just incorporated. Do this quick as a bunny.  A rubber spatula works best.

4. Place batter in an ungreased tube pan with a removable bottom and tube section or in a spring form. Bake for 1 hour. Check cake after 40 minutes as baking times and oven temperatures vary. Remove from oven and invert pan to let cake cool. Using a sharp thin bladed knife release cake from the sides of the pan before removing and placing on serving plate.

5. With a whisk by hand, or on an electric mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, whip heavy cream to soft peak, adding vanilla extract and confectioner’s sugar to taste after the cream has thickened slightly. Do not overbeat. Slice strawberries thinly and sprinkle them with sugar to taste, then let them sit in the refrigerator until they form their own syrup. Slice cake and serve each slice with a generous helping of strawberries in syrup and freshly whipped cream.