Eating on the Wild Side
Don't they look cute?
As much as I’m always looking for something good to eat, I’m not always looking for odd food to eat. For example, you’re not going to catch me jumping on the offal bandwagon that so many foodies seem to be riding these days. You can keep the ugly little parts of animals – I don’t want to know when I’m eating them, even if they slip into a hot dog here or there.
On the other hand, I’m willing to try a new fruit or vegetable on the occasion that one crosses my path, which happened just this week. I’ve read about the fiddlehead fern in one of my foodie magazines over the years, and was aware that they’re a limited season vegetable that appears in the markets during the spring. So when I found a box of them in Whole Foods this week, I decided to buy the curlicue vegetable, despite not knowing what I’d do with them. As I was checking out, the clerk asked me how I planned to prepare them, assuming I was a foodie in the know. After I confessed that I had no idea, she warned me that employees were told that they needed to cook them well, or they’d be toxic. Nice. I attempted not to flinch as she put them in my shopping bag.
Upon arriving home I did the first thing any clueless chef would do when faced with a potentially toxic ingredient, I performed an internet search for a recipe. I turned up very little, and most of what I found looked like it would mask the flavor of the fiddlehead, so what would be the point? Next I turned to my reference book, “Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini” where I found a lengthy chapter devoted to the fiddlehead, which turns out not to be a particular type of fern, but the unopened top of any fern. The most commonly consumed variety in the U.S. and Canada is the ostrich fern, pictured above.
My favorite piece of information from this chapter was the following quote from John Mickel, senior curator of ferns at the New York Botanical Garden, “”There is considerable evidence that they are a cause of cancer of the stomach and esophagus,” and he recommends only eating young ostrich fern. I was tempted at this point to toss away the entire package of fiddleheads but decided instead to continue my preparations since they’ve been consumed around the world for years, and you don’t hear about people dropping from ferns every day. I cooked them for the recommended 5 minutes, plus a few more to be sure I killed the toxins, then tossed them with butter and salt, one of the suggested simple preparations. I decided not to allow the girls to eat them given the associated risks, in case I hadn’t cooked them properly.
So did we like them? Not exactly. They seemed like an odd, chewy, astringent variation of lawn grass, not like “a walk in a moist forest” as Chef Jean George Vongerichten has been quoted as saying. This particular experience won’t be repeated, but at least I lived to tell the tale.
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Why am I craving fugu. I think fugu and fiddleheads would be a good first course as long as I had rhubarb pie for dessert. Has anybody seen any good wild mushrooms?
I believe you’ve planned the perfect meal, except maybe you’d like to add a little arsenic to the coffee.