Making Dining Music With Fiddleheads

BOLTON, Vt. — Fourteen-year-old Ashley Stevens fell out of his canoe into the frigid Winooski River, climbed onto the muddy bank and picked fiddleheads for five hours as his wet clothes stiffened and dried in the frosty spring air.

It was worth it. On that early May day, Ashley made $50 for the 86 pounds of ferns he hauled to the weigh station.

And he’s made about that much every day of the fiddlehead season.

“I know where to go,” said Ashley, who grew up along the Winooski.

For four or five weeks a year in Vermont, fiddleheads, young ferns found near water in the Northeast, are big business for anyone who cares to pick them. Before they uncurl to their mature height, the plants resemble violin heads.

The ferns, which taste like asparagus when cooked, are usually sauteed in butter or olive oil and served as a side dish. Restaurants offer them as a seasonal specialty; supermarkets sell them by the pound ($3.49 at Hannaford Brothers).

Last month the White House served them at a gourmet dinner for Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien along with maple-cured salmon and herb-crusted lamb.

John Farrar, the fiddlehead maestro of Richmond, parks his pickup every evening and waits for the pickers to bring in their mesh bags of fiddleheads for weighing. Farrar often collects more than 1,000 pounds of the tightly curled green discs.

He drives them to W.S. Wells & Son in Wilton, Maine, where they are prepared for sale fresh, canned, and dried in soup mix. Wells processes about 35 tons a year, all from local pickers who bring in the fiddleheads by bag or bucket.

Farrar is careful to take only ostrich ferns. Some other kinds are said to cause cancer in cows or stomach upset in humans.

“They all kind of look like fiddleheads,” said Butch Wells, owner of W.S. Wells & Son. “I’ve had people drive for two hours with 200 pounds of the wrong kind of fiddleheads.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends boiling fiddleheads for 10 minutes or steaming them for 20 minutes to get rid of an unidentified toxin that can cause food poisoning.

At the Woodstock Inn and Resort, owned by Laurance Rockefeller, chef Thomas Guay follows that advice.

“They lose some of the color, but it’s kind of a reassuring way of serving them,” he said. Then Guay sautes them and adds lemon juice, salt and pepper.

Diners order them because they’re a novelty, he said.

“It’s Vermont; it’s pure Vermont,” Guay said. “They’re fun, they’re stylish, they look great; you know, you don’t get them everywhere.”

But at a recent dinner where fiddleheads were served to many people, “I don’t think I talked to a single person who really liked them.”

Indeed, Ashley, the 14-year-old picker, and Farrar said they hadn’t eaten a fiddlehead in years.

Barry Snyder, a chef who owns La Poule a Dents restaurant in Norwich, said he would never serve a fiddlehead.

“I hate fiddleheads; I don’t have any preparation that I’ve ever liked them in,” he said. “They taste like grass. If you cook them just a little bit, they still taste like grass. If you put a lot of garlic on them, they taste like garlic and grass. Then you blanch them, they go to mush.”

Not so, Wells said.

“I believe I’m having some for supper tonight,” he said. “I’ve had them in stews, and I’ve had them in quiche, and something they call Impossibler Pie. And we just have them plain, as a side dish.”

Even his kids eat fiddleheads.

“They like pickled fiddleheads,” Wells said. “They don’t like them any other way.”