Ramp Pesto Rigatoni

Ramp season. The first wild leeks of the year are pushing through the forest floor in eastern Kentucky, and every Appalachian who moved away is having the same conversation with themselves: is it worth the three-hour drive for a plant that smells like a skunk and tastes like God? The answer is always yes. The answer has always been yes.

I couldn't get to Evarts this weekend — two houses to frame before the rain comes Thursday — so I did the next best thing: I called Betty and had her describe her ramp harvest while I sat in my truck at lunch eating a gas station sandwich and feeling like an exile. She said the ramps on the hillside behind the house are thick this year. She said she picked a mess of them Saturday morning before church. She said she fried them with fatback and eggs and ate them on the porch and the dogs from down the hollow came sniffing around because ramps carry on the air like a rumor.

Since I can't forage, I ordered ramps online. Twenty dollars for a pound, shipped from West Virginia in a box with ice packs. Betty would find the idea of buying ramps morally indefensible — ramps are wild and free and putting a price tag on them is like charging for air or creek water. But I'm in Lexington and the creeks here don't grow ramps, they grow shopping carts, so I paid the twenty dollars and felt the particular shame of an Appalachian buying his birthright from the internet.

I made ramp pesto. This is not Betty's recipe — Betty has never made pesto and would be suspicious of it — this is mine. Take a bunch of ramps, green tops and white bulbs, and blend them with walnuts (or pecans, because we're in Kentucky), Parmesan cheese, olive oil, salt, and a squeeze of lemon. The result is a bright green paste that smells like a forest fire in the best possible way and tastes like spring compressed into a spoonful. I tossed it with pasta — rigatoni, because rigatoni catches sauce in its tubes like tiny flavor vaults — and topped it with more Parmesan and some crispy breadcrumbs.

Connie loved it. She's more adventurous than me with food, which is embarrassing because I'm supposed to be the cook and she's supposed to be the audience, but Connie didn't grow up in Appalachia where food innovation was viewed with suspicion and meals had been the same since the Civil War. She grew up in Richmond, where they had a Chinese restaurant and a Mexican restaurant and an Italian place, and she experienced culinary diversity before she met me. I experienced culinary diversity when Betty made spaghetti once in 1982 and Earl called it "foreign."

Clay asked what the green stuff was. I said ramp pesto. He said "What's a ramp?" I said it was a wild onion that his great-grandmother used to forage. He said "Why does it smell like that?" I said that's what spring smells like. He ate cereal. Progress is not linear.

Clay eating cereal while the rest of us polished off that rigatoni was—honestly—a more Appalachian ending than I could have scripted, and it felt right that the dish that caused the commotion came from something his great-grandmother used to pull out of the ground every spring. Ramps were the one wild thing Betty cooked that even Earl couldn’t call foreign, because they’d been growing in those hollers longer than anyone could remember. So here’s what I made: a pesto that takes about ten minutes and turns a pasta night into something that tastes like the hills decided to show up for dinner.

Prep Time: 10 min | Cook Time: 15 min | Total Time: 25 min | Servings: 4

Ingredients

1 lb rigatoni pasta
1/2 lb fresh ramps (green tops and white bulbs), washed and roughly chopped
1/3 cup walnut pieces (or pecans — this is Kentucky)
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese, plus more for serving
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus more as needed
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1/4 teaspoon freshly cracked black pepper
1/2 cup panko breadcrumbs
1 tablespoon olive oil (for breadcrumbs)
1/2 cup reserved pasta water

Instructions

Toast the breadcrumbs. Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a small skillet over medium heat. Add the panko and stir frequently for 3–4 minutes until golden and crisp. Season with a pinch of salt and set aside.
Cook the pasta. Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil. Cook rigatoni according to package directions until al dente. Before draining, scoop out 1/2 cup of pasta water and set it aside. Drain the pasta.
Blend the pesto. While the pasta cooks, combine the chopped ramps, walnuts, Parmesan, lemon juice, salt, and pepper in a food processor. Pulse several times to break everything down. With the machine running, stream in the 1/2 cup olive oil until the pesto is smooth but still has some texture. Taste and adjust salt or lemon as needed.
Toss the pasta. Return the drained rigatoni to the pot over low heat. Add the pesto and toss to coat, adding reserved pasta water a splash at a time until the sauce clings to the pasta and flows easily through the rigatoni tubes.
Plate and finish. Divide into bowls. Top generously with crispy breadcrumbs and additional grated Parmesan. Serve immediately — the color fades as it sits, which is a shame, because it is the greenest thing you’ll eat all spring.

Nutrition (per serving)

Ramp Pesto Rigatoni — Spring Came in a Box from West Virginia