Foraging for fiddleheads: A springtime tradition in the Maritimes is in full swing

Sarah Plowman has the story of the long-standing Maritime family traditions and secrets of foraging for fiddleheads.

Just off a road in a wooded area that hugs a river, dinner is sprouting. Some fiddleheads, the curled greens that have been a staple in New Brunswick for generations, are waiting in plain sight. Sometimes, they’re hidden under the brush.

With a bag in his hand and his eyes on the ground, Andrew MacLean explains how to forage the ostrich fern.

“There’s only a two-week window where these things are ripe, so you have to be pretty quick on the ball,” he said. “If they grow too large, they’re bitter.”

Some people like to boil the fern and add vinegar, explains MacLean, but he says they taste best sauteed with lemon and garlic.

MacLean first went fiddleheading with his grandparents in Tide Head, N.B., which bills itself as the world’s fiddlehead capital. It’s a tradition he continues every spring.

“This is kind of a major thing for my family, but not just my family, but New Brunswickers from all over, all ages,” he said. “You can just kind of tell the story of New Brunswick based on fiddleheads.”

Fiddleheads through history

“In the beginning, the Wolastoqiyik, Mi’kmaq, and the Passamaquoddy really loved the fiddlehead. When the Acadian population came over in the 1700s, they were taught about the fiddleheads by the Indigenous peoples,” said Maclean, a historian and author who tells stories of Canada’s past in his books and on his website backyardhistory.ca.

“And then, very soon after the English arrived with the Loyalists, they didn’t have much food in the beginning. And they went for the fiddleheads, which grew very early in the spring.”

Maclean says, in the 1980s, Vermont tried to make the fiddlehead its official vegetable, sparking an angry response from people in New Brunswick who protested with poems. Vermont ultimately didn’t go through with it, he says.

Maclean’s family freezes the fiddleheads and eventually cook to add to Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner. A quirky tip to wash them is to use a bingo cage. “If you put that in shallow water and the fiddleheads inside them and use it to wash them, it’s way less of a fuss, Maclean said.

‘Since time immemorial, we’ve picked fiddleheads’

On Tobique First Nation, Shane Perley-Dutcher carries a traditional woven basket through a grassy area next to a stream. He’s on the lookout for fiddleheads and doesn’t want any that have overgrown.

“You want to get them when they’re nice and curled up,” he said.

Like MacLean, Perley-Dutcher has been doing this since he was a kid. He grew up picking with his aunts, uncles and grandmother.

“We always had spots. ‘Our secret spots’ they would say,” he joked, pointing out people are protective of the areas where they forage.

As he quickly spots, picks and throws fiddleheads into his basket, he leaves one in the bunch he picked from – a lesson he learned from his family to leave one for the next person.

Perley-Dutcher says fiddleheads are a traditional staple and medicine because of their nutritional benefits.

“It’s like the first medicine of the spring, of the year,” he said. “Since time immemorial, we’ve picked fiddleheads. And it was always known as part of our diet, our traditional diet, along with salmon.”

He washes his fiddleheads in the stream in the traditional basket he brought to remove any brown, papery scales.

Jamie Simpson, author of Eating Wild in Eastern Canada, points out how the ostrich fern likes to grow along riverbanks, particularly riverbanks that get flooded in springtime.

It grows into a full-size fern with a big frond that kind of looks like an ostrich feather, he says.

Eating them safely

According to the government of Canada, fiddleheads can cause food poisoning if they have not been stored, prepared or cooked properly.

Health Canada recommends cooking fiddleheads in a generous amount of boiling water for 15 minutes or steaming them for 10 to 12 minutes until tender. The water used for boiling or steaming the fiddleheads should be discarded after.

What’s the best fiddleheads recipe? It depends on who you ask.

“A little bit of butter, some salt, a little bit of lemon juice, a little bit of vinegar, and they’re just perfect,” said Simpson.