It’s fiddlehead season once again, time for the hyper-seasonal celebration of one of spring’s earliest culinary harbingers.

Early harvests of the locally foraged ostrich ferns are now arriving at markets and restaurants around the state, and the excitement they create among chefs, home cooks and dining enthusiasts alike is in the air, practically a rite of spring.

But with the excitement comes a side helping of trepidation even for some experienced cooks.

“I think people are fascinated with fiddleheads because they’re a novelty that come and go so quickly. But they’re kind of a scary thing, to be honest,” said Portland area restaurateur and chef David Turin. “You have to prepare them right. They’re responsible for some food-borne illness, and a lot of people don’t know that.”

Although fiddlehead poisoning hasn’t been a widespread problem in Maine, public health and safety organizations like the Northern New England Poison Center annually caution that foraged fiddleheads may contain an unknown toxin (though food scientists aren’t sure) as well as surface bacteria. These contaminants can cause gastrointestinal distress such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal pain. For this reason, health authorities say fiddleheads require 15 minutes of boiling in salted water or at least 10 minutes of steaming to render them safe to eat (or ready to continue cooking some other way, such as sautéing or baking into a quiche).

It’s common to blanch vegetables for just 1 to 3 minutes, which sets bright colors and can improve textures. So for experienced cooks, a 15-minute pre-boil sounds like fiddlehead murder.

RANGE OF RECOMMENDATIONS

“I think 15 minutes would kill them to death,” said Michelle Morrison, chef de cuisine at Gather in Yarmouth. She added that because fiddleheads are plucked from marshy areas and along rivers where harmful bacteria might be present, a pre-boil is an important precaution, though she keeps it to about a six-minute blanch.

“You want to keep their color green, and like any vegetable you don’t want to make it mushy and take all the nutrients and flavor out of them as well,” Morrison said.

“A fiddlehead that’s been cooked for 12 to 15 minutes in boiling water is probably mush, and one of the great qualities of the fiddleheads is the crispness of the vegetable,” agreed Peter Rudolph, executive chef for Ocean Restaurant at Cape Arundel Inn and Resort.

“I’ve never been advised to cook them for so long,” said Woodford Food & Beverage Chef Courtney Loreg, conceding that while she hasn’t cooked them in some years, she worked with fiddleheads in season when she was a sous chef at Fore Street. “I’ve always treated them like any other fresh green vegetable, like if you want it to stay green, you blanch it quickly in boiling salted water and you shock it (in an ice bath), then you go from there.”

And despite considering them “scary” in a way, Turin – who typically blanches green veggies for under a minute – also keeps his fiddlehead boiling to about five minutes. “I don’t think I’ve ever cooked a fiddlehead for 15 minutes,” he said.

The biggest challenge, Turin continued, “is that we’re all naturally attuned to the idea that we want to cook green vegetables as little as possible. But in order to make fiddleheads safe to eat, you really have to cook them a lot. And then they have kind of an ugly olive green color and we’re turned off. We’ve come to associate that color with grandmother’s overcooked broccoli.”

To make matters more confusing, fiddlehead recipes and guidance in cooking and lifestyle magazines differ widely: Saveur and Food & Wine magazines recommend boiling fiddleheads for a minimum of 5 minutes, while recent recipes from Yankee magazine call for 10 minutes.

The broad spectrum of advice for proper fiddlehead preparation is enough to cause stomach upset in itself. How did handling such a simple, time-tested ingredient become so fraught?

UNKNOWN CULPRIT

Kate McCarty, food systems professional at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension in Falmouth, pointed to a 1994 outbreak of foodborne illness in New York State and Canada caused by fiddleheads that led the CDC and Health Canada to adopt their 15-minute boiling benchmark. The outbreak included several incidents affecting more than 75 people in May and June of that year.

In many of the 1994 poisoning cases, the affected people had eaten fiddleheads that were either raw, had only been sautéed — not blanched first — for about 2 minutes, or were microwaved for 8 minutes on low power.

In other words, undercooking seemed the likely culprit. Consider that the same harvester who sold fiddleheads to a restaurant in Steuben County, New York — where almost 40 people were sickened by sautéed fiddleheads that hadn’t been blanched – also sold the baby ferns that same week to a nearby restaurant where they were boiled for 10 minutes. In the second restaurant, not a single patron reported illness.

Nearly 30 years later and food scientists still don’t know what precise toxin fiddleheads may contain, if any.

“There are many different plants that we run into at the Poison Center and we usually know what chemical in the plant causes toxicity,” said Chris Wilkosz, certified specialist in poison information at the Northern New England Poison Center. “It’s not quite clear in this case, if I’m being honest. By and large, it’s considered to be an unidentified toxin.”

McCarty said experts aren’t positive a particular toxin is responsible. The contamination danger of fiddleheads may be “more about the conditions in which they’re grown. Because they’re harvested wild, they might be next to a contaminated water source, for instance. So it’s about destroying any bacteria that might be on the vegetables, more so than something in the vegetable that you’re deactivating.”

Wilkosz added that some people sickened in the 1994 outbreak may have been eating lookalike fiddleheads that didn’t come from ostrich ferns, but from another type of fern like bracken, for instance.

Regardless of the precise chemical culprit, undercooked fiddlehead sickness hasn’t been an acute problem in Maine.

The Northern New England Poison Center averages five calls per year from people in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont regarding fiddlehead food poisoning, according to Wilkosz. Compare that to about 40 calls a year from same region regarding possible illness from foraged mushrooms. And a Maine CDC spokesperson said her organization’s health inspection and epidemiology teams don’t have any data of incidents of fiddlehead poisoning and can’t recall any outbreaks reported to their agency.

But the long recommended boiling time didn’t start with the 1994 outbreak. Don Lindgren, owner of Rabelais in Biddeford and a noted authority on historic cookbooks and culinary publications, pointed out that in a 1941 New York Times article, writer Jane Holt wrote, “Maine cooks… favor the fiddlehead boiled in lightly salted water until just tender enough to pierce with a fork (12 to 15 minutes of boiling).”

Still, it could be argued that wasn’t taken as a precaution, but because American palates at that time hadn’t yet developed a taste for al dente vegetables. Lindgren noted that in a 1967 piece, legendary New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne calls for boiling fiddleheads 3 or 4 minutes, just long enough to make them “tender but crisp.”

Wilkosz allowed that while 15 minutes may seem like overkill, his organization and other public health groups tend to take a necessarily conservative approach to fiddlehead prep. “Seeing as we work at the Poison Center, we usually recommend erring on the side of caution.”

KEEP THE COOKING SIMPLE

Public safety experts and chefs can agree on other aspects of fiddlehead preparation, though, like the need to thoroughly wash and rinse them before cooking.

“Washing the fiddleheads before you start preparing them is a very good idea,” Loreg said. “Dirt is a bad thing.”

Fresh fiddleheads – whether picked from the woods or bought from a market – should be thoroughly washed until the dried, brown papery skins that partly cover them have fallen off, then rinsed until the water runs clean.

Rudolph said it’s also important to buy from reputable fiddlehead vendors and to use them soon after purchasing. “Like with foraged mushrooms, if you wait several days to cook them, you’re allowing the toxins and bacteria to do their work,” he said.

Authorities also urge avoiding fiddleheads that aren’t tightly coiled, those that are starting to unfurl, as the more mature specimens may also be more toxic.

As for cooking these early spring gems, the minimalist approach is generally considered best. Many cooks like to saute blanched fiddleheads in butter with garlic, which Morrison may do at Gather this season, adding a little pancetta or bacon for a salty umami punch.

Turin sometimes serves them at David’s Restaurant in Portland and David’s 388 in South Portland with garlic caper butter, which he likened to a piccata dish. But to Turin’s palate, and he’s not alone, fiddleheads can have a faintly muddy taste.

“They can taste a little swampy. They need strong flavors to go with them,” he said.

For those who agree, he also recommends dipping cooked fiddleheads in mayo seasoned with sriracha hot sauce and lime juice, or coating them in a sauce made from equal parts of soy sauce, hoisin and red pepper jelly or Thai sweet chile sauce.

Rudolph compared the verdant, lightly nutty flavor of fiddleheads to a mixture of artichoke, broccoli and asparagus. He said at Ocean this season he plans to offer a dish of fiddleheads sauteed with fava beans, salsify and fennel alongside branzino and topped with a saffron-ginger beurre blanc.

He’s not sure how long Ocean will be able to offer the dish this year, since only Mother Nature knows how long fiddlehead season will last, but he’s not overly concerned.

“I have a shiny coin mentality,” Rudolph said. “The fiddleheads are new and exciting. But the second that the next exciting seasonal vegetable becomes available, I’m going to start forgetting about fiddleheads. I don’t like to hang on to things too long: The magic of these ingredients is in the moment.”

Fiddlehead Dijon

Recipe from the University of Maine Cooperative Extension.

Serves 6

1 ½ pounds fresh fiddleheads
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 cup nonfat buttermilk
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
3/4 teaspoon lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon dried tarragon
1/4 teaspoon pepper

Clean and wash the fiddleheads thoroughly. Place the fiddleheads in a vegetable steamer over boiling water. Cover and steam for 12 minutes or until tender, but still crisp. Set aside, and keep warm.

Combine the cornstarch and buttermilk in a small saucepan, and stir well. Cook over medium heat until thickened and bubbly, stirring constantly. Remove from heat; stir in mustard, lemon juice, tarragon and pepper.

Arrange the fiddleheads on a serving platter. Spoon the sauce over the fiddleheads. Serve immediately.

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