Fiddlehead Fern Staple Menu Delicacy in Spring

The fiddlehead fern is a delicate button, as likely to be sauteed with olive oil and herbs at New York’s Four Seasons restaurant as it is to end up under Cheese Whiz in a Vermont kitchen.

Not that everyone loves them. But those who know the green, which tastes like a cross between asparagus and broccoli and is high in Vitamins A and C, feel strongly about them.

“People really love them and can’t get enough of them, or they wish they weren’t on the plate,” said Bradley Koehler, chef-instructor at Montpelier’s Tubb’s Restaurant, run by the New England Culinary Institute.

The immature heads, which grow into the bright green fronds of the ostrich fern, are pursued with ritualistic zeal by people in Vermont and Maine.

The season doesn’t last long--three weeks each spring, at best. But tons of fiddleheads are harvested, with as many as 15 tons going to a Maine cannery and others to a Bethel company that sends them fresh around the country. The rest are bound for farm stands, grocery stores and restaurants--or simply to the kitchen table, blanched and sauteed with a little butter.

Christian Albin, executive chef at the Four Seasons, has used fiddleheads each spring for at least 15 years, generally as a side dish. “We sell a lot with soft shells (crabs) and fiddle ferns, and the people love it,” he said.

Lyndon Verkler, chef-instructor at the New England Culinary Institute, has cooked them just about every way--as soup, blanched with a vinaigrette, with pasta wheels or even as pesto, substituting fiddleheads for basil.

Robert Fuller, chef-owner of Deja Vu Cafe in Burlington, sautes them with exotic mushrooms, shallots, white wine and a touch of Cheddar cheese for an appetizer. But for Fuller, the charm is in the shape.

Bob Dickson, 29, eats the greens sauteed in butter with salt and pepper, and tried putting Cheese Whiz on them recently. “It was wicked good.”

For Dickson, they’re more than a delicacy--they’re a source of income. Each year, he takes time off from his work as a heavy equipment operator to pick fiddleheads. He pockets at least $75, and as much as $150, a day.

Peddling fiddleheads is not as easy as it sounds, he said. It’s hard on the back, the knees and sometimes leaves him with bloody fingers from reaching down the stem to snap off the head. And of course, it is important to pick only the hairless ferns with a curved stem; the fuzzy ones are bitter.

Removing the brown papery covering from the fiddleheads is tricky. Washing them with a garden hose over a screen works; so does blowing the skin off with a leaf blower. One chef even rigged a tumbler in a stream behind his house.

Never, never wash them in your sink, warned Jerry Kelley, the Vermont Agriculture Department’s expert on specialty foods. “You can clog up a sink with this stuff very, very fast.”

Fiddleheads, it appears, are a tough business.

“We don’t talk a lot about competition to Vermonters, especially when it gets to fiddleheads,” said Butch Wells, whose family-owned business W. S. Wells and Sons has been canning fiddleheads under the Belle of Maine label for a quarter of a century.

About half the company’s fiddleheads come from Vermont, the rest from Maine. They are pickled with spices, canned in water or shipped fresh to restaurants around the country, including the Four Seasons.

But Wells won’t say much more.

Most of his competition is from the province of New Brunswick, Canada, which has at least two canneries and a strong affection for fiddlehead ferns.

Wells’ one New England competitor, Bill Griffin at White River Fiddlehead Greens Co. in Bethel, won’t say much either, except that fiddleheads are a hard sell in the Deep South, OK in Florida, and taking off in Texas.

“I talked to all these people before I started in this business and they wouldn’t tell me anything, so I’m not telling anything,” said Griffin. “This is the weirdest business I’ve ever been associated with.”