Flag Pond is a small community just across the NC border into Tennessee. We’ve driven through many a time but hadn’t ever actually stopped. The annual Ramp Festival was a great reason to spend a few hours in town. Ramps are basically a wild member of the garlic-onion family and are often called wild leeks. They grow wild in the Appalachian mountains and are highly resistant to any sort of farming so they’re not common outside of the mountains and not really even easy to find in the mountains except for a month or so each year.
The ‘festival’ is really more like a lunch, or maybe dinner depending when you get there. There are a couple of gospel / bluegrass bands but the main reason to visit is to eat. A ticket costs $7 and you can wait in line in front of skillets frying up either bacon or potatoes with or without ramps. Just in case you weren’t hungry yet you will be by the time you reach the actual food.
It started raining while we were collecting our food so we ate in the Flag Pond School gymnasium. Here’s what you end up with, from the top clockwise on this plate are fried potatoes with ramps, bacon, cornbread, raw ramps (optional), and soup beans with a bit of chow chow on top. There’s also slaw and desert on separate plates. In the potatoes, the ramps really just taste like strong scallions. They’re not really noticeably strong until you eat the raw ones. Those have a pretty good spicy onion kick to them and you’ll have no problem remembering what they taste like for at least 12 hours afterwards. Maybe a whole day or two.