The coy and edible sprout of the fiddlehead fern
Joan, of course, is the gatherer in our hunter/gatherer partnership, and when the hunt has been unprofitable, I am always willing to follow her into the woods, holding the bag and picking where she points. Yesterday we followed the old railroad bed along the Warner River on a quest for fiddleheads. Not just any fiddleheads, the term which describes the sprout of many types of fern, but the fiddleheads of the ostrich fern, those emerald-green coils which appear for only about two weeks at the end of April here in upper New England. We were both hungry for wild green food, the kind of hunger that dandelion greens won’t satisfy, a hunger for something green that you can chew and which fills your stomach. Joan found just one patch, maybe 25 feet in diameter, with more than a hundred plants and we picked enough for 10 meals. We can’t tell you where that patch is, though Bob and Ann know because they happened upon us in mid-pick, looking for fiddleheads themselves. You’ll know a patch when you find it because these fiddleheads are not hairy, like most others, and they have a deep groove in the stem like a stalk of celery. Leave several from each plant to grow to mature fern leaves, or the patch will disappear forever and you will go to Hell where you will eat blueberry poptart for all of eternity.
A happily-cooked fiddlehead has a sort of dark, nutty sweetness, somewhere between asparagus and artichoke, and has a texture to the tooth more like shrimp than anything else. I fried them with garlic and the greens of onions sprouting in their storage box in the back room, and we shared a bottle of beer and ate them over whole wheat angel-hair spaghetti, sitting in front of the TV watching A Passage to India on streaming Netflix.