This Small-Town Festival Celebrates a Pungent Wild Leek

If you’re never tasted a ramp, you’re missing out on a pungent yet totally delicious wild leek with green leaves that pops above ground each spring. It’s a favorite of foragers, but if you don’t want to get your hands dirty, the Summit County village of Peninsula hosts an annual festival during which attendees can try foods featuring the odiferous ingredient. 

Ramp Up Peninsula, set for April 25 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. along Main Street in the village, has food vendors and take-home items featuring ramps, such as pierogi and sausage. There are also craft vendors, live music and guided walks to learn how to identify the unfamiliar plant. 

Peninsula residents Diane Seskes and Don Carroll founded the festival in 2013 after attending other ramp festivals in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. 

A ramp tastes like a cross between onion and garlic, and it has been celebrated for generations around dinner tables in Appalachia and, before that, among Native Americans. If you plan on eating ramps, make sure the people you live with do too. 

“It was considered something that would clean your body,” Seskes says. “It comes out of your pores, and you don’t smell so good for a couple of days.”

For more information, visit explorepeninsula.org.

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