Fiddleheads play a big part in local cuisine and economy

SCARBOROUGH, Maine -- On a sunny morning recently, Rick Tibbets is hunched over the muddy banks of the Scarborough River filling his T-shirt with fiddlehead ferns. In dark glasses, jeans, and beat-up hiking boots, the 48-year-old Tibbets is macho and muscular. Winters, he works as a line cook, but as soon as the forsythia buds, he's out in the woods, picking this wild harvest, which he sells to restaurants along the Maine coast.

Fiddleheads, the coiled fronds of ostrich ferns, pop their bright green heads out of the ground around the same time that dandelions begin to flower. They look like the scroll on the head of a violin, hence the name, with a papery chaff in the circles and a taste like the best asparagus you've ever eaten. Fiddles grow best in fertile soil -- usually along the banks of rivers and streams -- and once up, they grow fast, sometimes half a foot a day, until that sad moment when the fronds start to unfurl and they are no longer edible.

Tibbets has been at this for 30 years; he turns his efforts to wild mushrooms in the late spring. He is almost always foraging on private property and says that he has become good about making friends with landowners. Divorced with an 11-year-old son and a 9-year-old daughter, Tibbets foraged nearly every day last summer with his children, camping out many nights. His son saved enough money to buy a mountain bike. ''I tell them that when they're 16 or 17 years old, all of their friends will be working as dishwashers for minimum wage, but that they'll be making a hundred bucks or more for 2 or 3 hours of poking around the woods."

Foragers make up to $300 a day, which is why they head out every spring. In Farmington, a couple of hours north of Tibbets's foraging grounds, Eleanor and Lawrence Jackson are spending the day bent down along Temple Stream. They make enough money fiddleheading to pay their property taxes.

Jackson is a feisty 68-year-old mother of six (and grandmother of 10), who plows through the woods with zeal, red 5-gallon buckets flashing in the sun. Her fingertips are cracked and covered with tape from so much picking.

Her husband, Lawrence, 73, a retired farmer and lumberman, with big knobby hands and kind brown eyes, is her companion out here. Three years ago he had a stroke and can't see well, but he's glad to tag along. She digs into a big patch and yells to him, ''Look at 'em all, Larry.

''You're out here with two crazy people," she says. ''My grandkids even call me the crazy grandmother." When the picking is good, the Jacksons harvest 100 pounds of fiddles each day, but not for the money, says Eleanor Jackson. ''If you do it just to earn money, you won't be at it very long. It's a back killer, you know. You've really got to love being out here."

At the end of the day the Jacksons hop in their little black pickup, plush dice swinging from the rearview mirror, and drive down the road to drop their fiddleheads at the WS Wells & Sons cannery in Wilton. Wells, established in 1894, is the only fiddlehead cannery in the country. Now run by Butch Wells -- the great-great-grandson of the founder -- the company depends on local pickers.

During fiddlehead season, Wells waits for the harvesters in a lawn chair set in a sunny spot on the loading dock. Pickers come all day long and into the night. Wells says that a lot of the guys are picking just enough for a 12-pack of beer or a pack of cigarettes. ''It is hard work though," he says. ''Every fiddlehead picker that gets out of their car gets out a little bit slowly, and they all walk a little bit funny."

Locals earn $1 per pound (fresh fiddleheads sell for about $4 to $11 per pound). Wells processes 50,000 pounds a year -- some boxed fresh for markets and restaurants, the rest packed in cans.

At his own table, Wells prefers fresh fiddleheads, which he blanches, then sautes with ramps (wild leeks), fresh garlic, and hot peppers. He serves them over rice with grilled chicken. In the winter he uses the canned fiddleheads for creamy fiddlehead soup.

Eleanor and Lawrence Jackson keep a little of their harvest to cook with butter, salt, and pepper, and blanch a few pounds to freeze for the winter, but otherwise sell their crop. After they drop off their bounty, Lawrence says, ''I'll tell you something funny about fiddleheads. They get heavier as you're walking out of the woods -- and lighter as soon as you get them on the scale to be weighed."

Fiddleheads are available until late May or early June at Hannaford Supermarkets, 55 Russell St., Waltham, 781-893-6776, and 475 Hancock St., North Quincy, 617-769-0088; A. Russo and Sons, 560 Pleasant St., Watertown, 617-923-1500; Verrill Farm, 11 Wheeler Road, Concord, 978-369-4494.