Young bracken fern with shoots perfect for harvest.
As long as I’ve been writing about wild foods–and that is many decades–I’ve read about eating the just-emerging shoots of ferns, a great delicacy. But since practically all of my foraging has been in the desert, I’ve never had a chance to gather this mountain treat. Then last year, we became part owners of a cabin on Mt. Lemmon, next to Tucson, at 8,000 feet. The hill behind the cabin is covered with FERNS due to a fire on the mountain about 15 years ago. As soon as I saw them last summer, I began plotting my gathering experience.
First, I had to figure out if my ferns were edible. I turned to John Slattery’s book Southwest Foraging, and he assured his readers that only one kind of fern grows in Southern Arizona, the bracken fern, and that it is edible. He did advise cooking it in two changes of water to deal with “carcinogenic substances.”
We’ve had a unusually cool spring in Southern Arizona, so cool that we didn’t get up to our cabin until late May. But spring was very slow coming that high (it had snowed earlier in May), and the ferns were just coming up. I was in luck. I only picked a handful because I wasn’t sure I’d even like them and I didn’t want to waste any.
However, a rinse, the two changes of cooking water, and a quick saute in butter and lemon juice provided a little snack with a slightly nutty taste just as delicious as promised. There will be no second chance this year, it’s a fleeting season. By the time we get to the mountain cabin again the ferns will be unfurled. But I will for sure be up there next year in May and this time I will gather more!
Cleaned young ferns ready for cooking.
Shoots nicely cooked with butter and lemon juice and ready for eating.
Update: I did my original gathering and cooking in the third week of May. We returned to the cabin the first week of June and there were still ferns just emerging and the tops of others further along were still furled and tender. I had forgotten to take butter and lemon juice, so I cooked the tips in olive oil and drizzled a tiny bit of balsamic vinegar over them. Great! So depending on the year, the fern season at 8,000 feet runs for maybe a month.
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Carolyn Niethammer writes about edible wild plants of the desert Southwest. You can see her books at http://www.cniethammer.com. In the fall of 2020 her book on why Tucson was named a UNESCO World City of Gastronomy will be released by the University of Arizona Press. In it she details the last 10,000 years of culinary history of the Santa Cruz Valley and why the inhabitants of the area are still eating the same things after all these years!
Savor the Southwest: 
Hi Carolyn, I’m wondering if this is the same plant my mother referred to as fiddle figs. She was from Los Angeles.
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Hmmm…some are called fiddlehead ferns because they look like the top end of a violin (fiddle). There is another species that grows in the East, also edible. I think that kind looks more like a fiddle, but I’ve only seen them in pictures.
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You know, that is one thing that I have no interest in trying. There are plenty of other species to collect here. We certainly have plenty of ferns. They just do not seem at all appetizing to me.
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I was hesitant, too. That’s why I only picked a few. But they are delicious with no weird bitter under-flavor you get with some wild foods.
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I think the fuzz would annoy me.
When I was in school, we used to cook young floral shoots of Yucca whipplei as asparagus. It was weird, but good. I do not think it would have been as good if it did not look like asparagus thought.
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Funny-looking ferns, but hey, popular for 6,000 years hereabouts. It’s foraging time.
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