< Previous30 NORTHEAST clear, resonant, and long-lasting on the tongue. A sense of the standing of this wonderful berry can be had from the Rayner Brothers Inc.’s 1942 Berry Book, “The flavor is exceptionally rich, full bodied and very sweet.” W. F. Allen’s 1950 Book of Berries elaborated by quoting customer S. E. Hurdle: “If there is anything tastier than the Fairfax it must grow in celestial regions.” Allen further observed, “Since its introduction in 1933, Fairfax has set a new standard in quality. . . . This superb quality ex- plains why we receive more enthusiastic letters about Fairfax from those to whom we sell plants than about any other variety. . . . For the roadside markets, Fairfax is the most popular berry in the country. . . . You’ve never tasted the best if you’ve never tasted Fairfax!” Rayner describes the berry’s successful trajectory from home garden to commercial market: “Fairfax is the most popular home garden berry, which plus unusual firmness, large size, and productiveness give it high commercial value. Fairfax is now one of the major early varieties, is being successfully grown as far South as North Carolina, and in all Central and Northern States . . . [and] has an exceptionally long fruiting season.” Rayner noted that the variety was also free from leaf spot and scorch and doesn’t diminish foliage when fruiting, a strong note for general plant health. In the mid-20th century there was a contest of strawberry aesthetics between those who favored the lighter, pinker sort—the Dorset was the paragon of this category—and those who favored darker, redder berries—for which the Fairfax was the model. The judgment in favor of lighter strawberries was, in part, founded on the fact that strawberries darkened once they had passed maturity. But the Fairfax scrambled this old criterion for rejection. Since the advent of the Fairfax, dark red has been the ideal of most crop strawberry breeders. Unfortunately, the Fairfax was phased out of widespread cultivation in the 1970s and 1980s when monocropping required cultivars with extremely high disease resistance and a berry so firm it could bounce without bruising in long transportation. “Fairfax strawberry plants are not [as] fully disease resistant as some modern cultivars are . . . .” wrote Erik at StrawberryPlant.org. “[They] have a softer and delicious texture, but this makes them more prone to bruising and damage during the picking/packing/shipping steps. Berries that don’t ship well don’t sell well at grocery stores. So, with the changing demands of commerce, Fairfax strawberry plants fell out of favor with growers in favor of more robust, but often less flavorful, cultivars.” “You’ve never tasted the best if you’ve never tasted Fairfax!” 4P_SF_AOT.indd 304P_SF_AOT.indd 3012/12/22 11:39 AM12/12/22 11:39 AMNORTHEAST 31 The organization of a national market for berries and the concentration of the business into the hands of very few companies hastened the near extinction of the Fairfax after the 1980s. A home gardener could no longer buy a plant from a nursery in 2000, but that changed when Mike Wellik, a grower from Middletown, Delaware, noticed his favorite strawberry had vanished. Wellik thought it bizarre that the best-tasting strawberry that American genetics produced was bordering on extinction. “The flavor [of] Fairfax is phenomenal. I have never tasted any hybrid like it. That’s why I keep it around! . . . Fairfax flavor is very mild [and] sweet and should be the standard that everyone compares to when breeding new stock.” Securing plant material from the USDA Clonal Germplasm Repository, Wellik brought the plant back, supplying pots of rooted Fairfax strawberries to growers. Arthritis forced Wellik to suspend sales in 2018, but before he did, he put plant material into enough growers’ hands and gardens to keep the beloved variety alive today. DARK RED is Not DECAY W. F. Allen’s 1942 Book of Berries addressed Fairfax’s unusual color in a market of lighter berries: “Fairfax started as a variety under a cloud because of the tendency of the berries to turn dark on holding. The Fairfax cloud was quickly found to have a silver lining as Fairfax went to work. And as consumers learned about varieties, the rich dark red of Fairfax became a symbol of quality—not of decay. On any market where consumers are close enough to the producer to come back to him, they not only demand those dark berries, Fairfax, but are willing to pay a premium to get them.” 4P_SF_AOT.indd 314P_SF_AOT.indd 3112/12/22 11:39 AM12/12/22 11:39 AM32 NORTHEAST Before the fiddlehead became celebrated in New England produce stands each spring, Indigenous people had long been harvesting and eating the furled fronds of young Ostrich ferns, or sometimes Cinnamon ferns. The name fiddlehead has applied to both. The Ostrich fern is native to the North- eastern US. Indigenous communities in every re- gion of the country were deeply knowledgeable about and resourceful with wild and native foods. A few country people in Maine and New Hampshire who had observed the Abenaki forage for the fern brackens ate the wild greens in the 19th century. In 1897 the W. S. Wells and Son cannery in Wilton, Maine, became the first commercial supplier offering canned fiddleheads to a very local New England clientele. Until the 1970s, the vast majority of New Englanders had never even heard of the vegetable. Canadians had to teach them about it. The citizens of New Brunswick, Canada, embraced this essential piece of the First Peoples’ diet in the region and proclaimed that fiddleheads and salmon were as poetic an evocation of spring as FIDDLEHEADSFIDDLEHEADS US ORIGIN OR MOST PREVALENT IN New England CHARACTERISTICS Delicate, tender, imparting a flavor between asparagus and spinach USDA PLANT HARDINESS ZONES 5b–6a CLOSE RELATIVE Cinnamon fern fiddleheads NOTABLE PRODUCER NorCliff Farms 4P_SF_AOT.indd 324P_SF_AOT.indd 3212/12/22 11:39 AM12/12/22 11:39 AMNext >