Akur-chi-bhaji and the Ancient Mysteries of Ferns

Boundary walls in Goa are usually made of local laterite. This is iron rich compacted earth that hardens on exposure to air, but still contains lots of crevices. When the monsoons arrive, these soak up rain and sprout delicate little plants, like maidenhair ferns. By August, most walls are shaggy green.

Ferns are particularly suited for this because they don’t produce seeds, but spores, which are expelled from the fronds as the plant matures. Most drift away, but some settle into the walls, lying dormant till the rains return. For centuries, the way ferns reproduced was a mystery, since the leaves grew so easily and everywhere, yet with no visible flowers or fruit. People believed ferns’ ‘invisible seeds’ had magical powers. “We have the receipt of fern seed: We walk invisible” boasts a criminal character in Shakespeare’s play Henry IV.

Ferns still hold real mysteries. In the 1950s, CA Ninan, a famous pteridologist (fern botanist), who passed away last year, discovered that Ophioglossum reticulatum, a fern found in Palakkad district, whose snaking leaf gave it the name of adder’s tongue fern, possessed around 1,400 chromosomes. “To put this number into perspective, humans have 46 chromosomes (in 23 pairs), corn has 20, spinach has 12, mosquitoes have six…. no other known organism on this planet has anywhere close to these many chromosomes,” write Fay-Wei Li and Jacob S Suissa in Ferns: Lessons in Survival from the World’s Most Adaptable Plants.


The adder’s tongue is extreme, but ferns often have abundant chromosomes, and it isn’t clear why. It may be their antiquity. Ferns were among the first successful land plants, emerging in the middle Devonian period, 390 million years ago, and over time, could have just accumulated chromosomes. Most probably serve no purpose, but some might enable the extreme adaptability of ferns, which grow everywhere from the tropics to near Arctic conditions. They are found in forests and jungles, lakes and deserts and one salt-tolerant species survives on coastal rocks

We rarely think of ferns as food, but many are edible. They tend to have bitter or mildly vegetal tastes and some contain potentially toxic compounds that must be removed through cooking. Many plants that we eat today were like this in their original wild forms, and it is has taken centuries of selective breeding to give them their current form. Gardeners have figured out how to propagate ferns by dividing plants or growing them from rhizomes, but the absence of fruits and seeds could have been why early farmers never selectively bred ferns.

In Japan, a starch from fern rhizomes is used to make a sweet called warabimochi. Other ferns have rhizomes that taste sweet themselves, with a herbal taste like liquorice. The most commonly consumed parts of ferns are the tender young shoots that unfurl from a tight spiral, giving them the look of the curved top of a violin’s handle. This is why these shoots are called fiddleheads, and while many recipes specify fiddlehead ferns, there is no specific fern of that name. Fiddlehead is a general term for fern shoots and their elegant spirals are perhaps the most appealing reason to cook them.

They are a popular for aged vegetable in the hills, like Uttarakhand, where they are called lingda and are often pickled. Rohini Rana, in Memories on a Platter, recalls how they are loved in Nepal and suggests frying them in a tempura batter. Eastern India knows them as Assam’s dhekia xaak or Bengal’s dheki shaag, and in Coorg they are a monsoon delicacy called thermé thoppu. The slightly more mature shoots of the golden mangrove fern are also harvested in the monsoon in Goa. They are strikingly attractive, with slender green stalks shading to red-gold. Akur-chi-bhaji, as it is called, can be tasty, especially when cooked with small mangrove shrimp. It reminds us why we should value ferns, an ancient lineage of plants that still hold mysteries for us today.