Wild food is on the menu in Wellsville
By Andrew Harris, picture of a fiddlehead from Wiki images
You may love them, or you may not even know what they are but fiddleheads are in the kitchen at the Beef Haus on Main Street Wellsville.
The chef sent a trusted forager out into forest for pounds of an annual treat, only available during a brief window each spring. In the Genesee river valley, millions, maybe billions of ostrich fern re-emerge from winter sleep. An periennel plant, these ferns are ancient plants, and have been prized by humans for thousands of years.
The Beef Haus will be serving up fiddleheads as both a side dish and entree feature this weekend. Supplies are limited so don’t wait until next week when the fiddleheads have turned into ferns!!
Wellsville just happens to be semi-famous for fiddleheads, because of one recently deceased member of the Maliseet Nation, a tribe of Algonquin from New Brunswick, Canada. Ron Tomah, also know as “The Hawk,” brought the knowledge with him when he settled in Wellsville during the 1950’s. Since then Tomah shared that knowledge with many locals and cooked many community fiddlehead dinners at the Wellsville Elks Lodge. Read more about Ron’s recent passing and my column from 2015, “Fiddleheads with the “Hawk:””
** A warning about wild foods like fiddleheads: Do not harvest or eat without proper education!! Several varieties of fern exist in our region and some can cause illness. Only one variety is safe to eat and they must be harvested carefully as not to harm the long term viability of the fern.
