ATKINSON, N.H. — It’s a delicate time of spring for foragers — almost too late to harvest dandelions — but not past the prime for fiddleheads.

In a meadow behind Maple Avenue in Atkinson, some of the edible fiddleheads of the ostrich fern sprouted this week. Their season will be over in a couple of days, said Katherine Birdsall, who pointed out the spot where her fiddleheads poked their green heads up, curled as tightly as the scroll on the end of a violin, hence the name.

Fiddleheads are the leaves of young ferns, she said. Not all ferns are safe to consume, said Birdsall, who also has some inedible varieties in her garden. Ostrich fern fiddleheads, however, are a prized New England delicacy, as well as a favorite rite of spring.

“They just started,” she said, looking over a stretch of ground strafed with roots that look like small, round and gnarled tree stumps. She predicted the fiddleheads would be all out this week. Once the leaves unfurl, it is too late to harvest them. Birdsall topped off the crozier on several fiddleheads to show how crowns are removed from the stalk. They have to be plucked while they are still curled up, she said.

Birdsall tasted her first fiddleheads sometime in the 1950s when her father-in-law discovered the patch growing in the wild behind the Maple Avenue house. Fiddleheads have to be washed and cooked before eating, she said. They cannot be consumed raw as trail food.

“We gathered them and cooked them for lunch like a green,” she said. “We boiled them, but you could steam them, too. They have their own special taste.”

Fiddleheads taste like asparagus, said Liz Barbour of Hollis, founder of Creative Feast. She serves them with prosciutto, but also recommends just cooking them and seasoning with butter, lemon, salt and pepper.

There is a trick to preparing fiddleheads, Barbour said — they must be blanched twice — from three to five minutes each time — to be satisfying.

“If you don’t break through that little mystery, your experience might not be that good,” she said.

Barbour buys her fiddleheads from a local farmers market in Milford or from Market Basket.

“It would be great if I had fields and could just help myself,” she said. “I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of foraging.”

Barbour, who focuses on cooking with edible flowers and herbs that can be grown in the garden, thinks dining in the wild is a lost art because so much land has been taken for development.

“It’s a very romantic notion that you can still go out and forage in the fields,” she said.

But Russ Cohen of the Boston Mycological Club disagrees. He has been eating and cooking wild edible plants since 1974 when he was a student at Weston High School in the Bay State.

Cohen, of Arlington, Mass., said the tradition of foraging fiddleheads has persisted in rural areas, including Southern New Hampshire, where people remember parents or grandparents cooking up “a mess of fiddleheads.” It was part of the way of life before refrigerators and supermarkets, he said.

“People lived off things they had accumulated over the winter,” he said. “So a fiddlehead was one of those native plants they picked to get something green before anything came up in the garden.”

Cohen cooks fiddleheads by blanching them in boiling water for two to three minutes. Then he takes them out and throws them in an ice-water bath. He eats them then or uses them in salads, casseroles or any dish that can accept greens.

In his opinion, the trick to fiddleheads is cooking them soon after picking them in the wild. Unfortunately, many people discover fiddleheads in the produce section and may be disappointed with the taste and texture, not realizing these fiddleheads may have been stashed for days in a truck en route from Canada.

“Don’t decide until you pick them yourself and cook them up right away,” he said.



Margo Sullivan writes for The Eagle-Tribune in North Andover, Mass.