Have you ever eaten fiddleheads?  They're nutritious (high in potassium), low in calories (just 20 per 100 grams) and delicious to eat, with a flavor that falls somewhere between asparagus and artichokes.  Given their name because of their resemblance to the tuning end of a fiddle, fiddleheads are best steamed fresh and served as a vegetable, but they can also be served in salads or pickled.

But just where do you find fresh fiddleheads? Try New Brunswick, a much understated province on Canada’s east coast. For a very short period of time each spring, fiddleheads – the bud of the Ostrich fern – can be found sprouting along river banks all across southern Canada and the northern U.S., but the heart of fiddlehead country is New Brunswick in Canada and neighbouring Maine in the U.S.

How do you go about picking fiddleheads? Your best way is to latch onto someone who knows their fiddleheads, as eating the coiled buds of other ferns might land you in the hospital – or worse! You’ve got to be able to differentiate the Ostrich fern from its look-alikes and that’s not easily done by a Prairie gal.

We joined forces with Angela Watson, a native New Brunswicker who offered to take us fiddeheading along the beautiful Nashwaak River, near Fredericton. Dressed in rubber boots and equipped with paring knives, we carried our buckets down to the river bank with optimism. Angela told us she had picked 10 pounds of fiddleheads last weekend with her father in just an hour, so chances were good that we wouldn’t come back empty handed.

But it was getting late in the season. May 15^th is generally the peak time for fiddleheading and it was May 24^th. We managed to pick about two pounds after much searching for just the right size. “You don’t want them too small, and once they’re more than about four inches out of the ground, they’re not as tender or tasty,” says Angela.

Angela showed us how to unwrap the fiddlehead bulbs – they’re covered in a thin brown membrane – and slice them off with our knives. We dropped our pick into the buckets, learning to slice them right below the bud.

But picking was only half the fun! We were anxious to taste this delicacy that all the New Brunswickers were raving about. We rinsed our fiddleheads in a mesh basket in the stream and brought them back to the house. It wouldn’t be long before our taste buds were satisfied.

After careful washing – and don’t be surprised if the wash water turns reddish brown, as fiddleheads contain a lot of tannin we are told – they’re ready to be steamed. A few minutes will get them to the tender-crisp stage preferred by Angela. “But my grandmother still boils them for at least 10 minutes as she likes them really soft,” says Angela.

Toss them in butter, add a little salt and better and a dash of vinegar, and voila! We gobbled the freshly-cooked fiddleheads, glad we’d had the opportunity to taste them within minutes of picking. During the duration of our Maritime visit, we ate many meals of fiddleheads. All good, but none so good as that moment when we’d tasted the ones we’d picked ourselves.

For more information and lots of easy recipes, you can purchase an excellent book called “Cooking North America’s Finest – gourmet fiddleheads” written by J. Melvin Nash and published by Quebecor, or surf the Internet for many informative Web sites on fiddleheads such as http://www.umext.maine/edu/onlinepubs/htmpubs/4198.htm.

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