Eric went fishing last night and came home with a handful of fiddleheads he picked alongside the Battenkill. And I thought I had missed the boat on this year’s fiddlehead crop.
I realized last night the reason why the water that I used to steam the fiddleheads when I cooked them the other night turned rust: The fiddleheads have a thin husk around them, which is a rusty color. Even though I tried to remove most of these husks from the fiddleheads before I steamed them, I could tell there were pieces of husk within the coiled ferns. The color from these husks must have leached out into the cooking liquid while the baby ferns were steaming.
