Fit as Fiddleheads

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them with butter, or made a simple salad by chilling boiled fiddleheads in a dressing of sliced onion, olive oil, lemon juice and salt.

Oddly, though, their preparation rarely is mentioned in cookbooks. To remedy this defect, we asked several Maine chefs to tell us their favorite fiddlehead recipes, or unusual fiddlehead dishes they have found to be surprisingly popular.

At Sweet Leaves Teahouse and Restaurant in Brunswick, chef Josh DeGroot, 45, says he looks forward to fiddleheads as one of the first signs of spring. “As much as I love root vegetables, by May I’m yearning for something fresh and green. When I finally get fiddleheads, I go nuts.”

First, of course, they must be thoroughly cleaned to remove any grit as well as the brown, bitter, papery fuzz that attaches to the fronds. DeGroot does this by soaking them for at least 15 minutes in a large bucket of cold water and then rubbing them gently between his hands.

During the two or three weeks when fiddleheads are at their peak–usually in May–he celebrates by liberally sprinkling them “all over the menu.” They might be braised in apple cider broth with bacon, or blanched and served with a bruléed sabayon sauce. Another of his favorite dishes is a dramatic Napoleon with a layer of semolina pudding, topped by a layer of blanched fiddleheads sautéed with shallots and spinach, topped by a layer of goat cheese cream. (See our link to “Josh’s Tin Can Casserole with Fiddleheads,” portlandmagazine.com/fiddle.)

“Every region has its special funky foods,” he says. “It’s nice that fiddleheads are ours.”

Jeffrey Savage, the 33-year-old executive chef at Kennebunk’s On the Marsh restaurant, grew up in Biddeford and often saw fiddleheads along the roadside. “But I never knew you could eat one or saw one being cooked until I started working at Fore Street,” he says. On the subject of native local vegetables, he was as green as the fiddleheads.

But he quickly developed a taste for them. “They have a good crunchy texture with a leafy taste in the middle,” he says. Now he likes to fry fiddleheads in a tempura batter and serve them with pickled ramps, some speck or prosciutto, fresh peekytoe crab and claytonia (a miner’s lettuce that does well in cold weather), drizzled with buttermilk

dressing. He also sautés them with tagliatelle pasta, morel mushrooms, fresh thyme, parmesan, and shallot cream, for “a plate with a nice range of earthy tones,” he says.

Chef Esau Crosby, 42, grew up with Southern-style “subsistence eating–pickled pigs’ feet, chitlins, hogshead cheese. We ate everything, even stomach linings. So fiddleheads didn’t scare me at all,” he says, with a chuckle. He enjoyed the “earthy, mild green flavor” that some people liken to a cross between asparagus and white mushrooms, and their texture “reminded me of okra, except that it’s crisper.”

At Solo Bistro in Bath, Crosby sautés shallots in the fat of applewood-smoked bacon, adds a little butter and garlic, and then sautés the fiddleheads in this for just a minute or two. “It’s important not to overcook them, because that can bring out the slime,” he explains. He serves these fiddleheads tossed with fresh diced tomatoes and bacon, sometimes topped with some sharp Hahn’s End Ragged Island cheese.

Chef Rick Hirsh, 45, says a popular dish at his Damariscotta River Grill is cream of fiddlehead soup. He makes this by sautéing fiddleheads with onions, adding chicken broth, and puréeing them in a blender. Then he adds “cream and fresh garlic, maybe a little rosemary or sliced mushrooms. This sells very well,” he says.

Hirsh also enjoys a fiddlehead cocktail made by marinating blanched fiddleheads in herbal vinaigrette, wrapping them in prosciutto, and then grilling them on skewers.

CuiScene’s award for the most unusual fiddlehead dish goes to Harding Smith, the 38-year-old chef and owner of The Front Room on Portland’s Munjoy Hill. He grew up foraging fiddleheads, “cutting them in the woods with my dad,” and created Bacon and Fiddlehead Ice Cream as a kind of ode to spring. He makes it with puréed fiddleheads cooked in cream to which honey and rendered bacon fat have been added. When he served this bright-green ice cream at last year’s Fiddlehead Festival, “the only person who didn’t like it was a four-year-old boy, who made a face,” he says.

Smith also makes quiche using chopped, blanched fiddleheads with chunks of onions and lardons, baked in an egg-custard base. The quiche is a popular dish at his restaurant, he says. The ice cream, on the other hand, people call “intriguing.” n Best Breakfast in Town

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