Fern Tips Vinaigrette

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Title: Fern Tips Vinaigrette
Categories: Harned 1994, Salads, Side dish, Wild foods
Yield: 4 servings

2 tb Vinegar or lemon juice
6 tb Melted butter or salad oil
1/2 ts Prepared mustard
1/2 ts Each paprika and salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 ts Chopped chives or
1 ts Grated onion
2 Hard-boiled eggs; chopped
2 c Fiddlehead ferns
-- cooked and chilled

Combine all ingredients except the last two; mix well. Arrange
hard-boiled eggs over top of the chilled, cooked fiddleheads and pour
vinaigrette sauce over all.

The author wrote: "Fiddleheads, the coiled tips of young fern
fronds, are a springtime delicacy especially prized by New Englanders
and wild foods enthusiasts. Their season lasts only two weeks or so
in May. Three kinds of the curled crosiers are gathered: those of the
ostrich fern, the cinnamon fern, and the common bracken fern.

"The fiddlehead is ready to pick when it is pushing up swiftly
through the ground with its tightly coiled tip, shaped like the head
of a fiddle. Fiddleheads are picked in the morning when they are
woodsy-smelling and fresh flavored and snap off crisply into the hand
of the picker. By afternoon the glowing green-coiled crosiers can
have outgrown the edible stage, becoming unfurled fern fronds.

"The cinnamon fern (Osmunda cinnamomea) fiddlehead is gathered when
it is about eight inches tall. The crosiers and one-half inch to two
inches of the stem are eaten. A grayish-yellow woolly covering on
the stems and tips must be removed (sometimes with difficulty) before
the fiddleheads are cooked. They are washed and then rubbed to
remove the fuzz. Fiddleheads will keep for a couple of days in the
refrigerator after picking, but wild flavors and freshness are
transitory. Better to pick fiddleheads in the morning and eat them
before night - or freeze them."

"The ostrich fern (Pteris nodulosa)...is the tall, graceful plant that
grows on stream and river banks where the water comes up in the early
spring. So abundant are the ostrich ferns in the lush natural
ferneries of the Winooski valley near Waterbury, Vermont, that
quantities of the fiddleheads are harvested, packed in snow, and
transported to Maine where they are canned for sale in specialty food
stores.

"Fresh, crisp fiddleheads are steamed or boiled in salted water for
20 to 30 minutes, until just tender. Their flavor hints of asparagus
and mushrooms combined, and they are delectable served with either of
these compatibly flavored foods. But the best dish of plump
fiddleheads is simmered gently and served hot, enhanced only by the
simplest adornment of melted butters, served within hours after the
crosiers are gathered..."

From _The Wild Flavor_ by Marilyn Kluger. Los Angeles: Jeremy P.
Tarcher, Inc., 1984. Pp. 245-248. ISBN 0-87477-338-5. Typed for
you by Cathy Harned.

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