Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh

by Unknown

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  Kathleen Scott served clapshot, an Orkney Islands specialty of turnips and potatoes mashed together, as an accompaniment. The clapshot was worthy of applause, but I was not fond of the lasagna—the mal-odorous meat overwhelmed the innocent cheese and noodles. Haggis is a foodstuff with an indomitable will to win. Even worse, the béchamel had melded with the innards to produce creamed haggis. I fear years may pass before I order lasagna again.

  I was done. On the return trip to New York, I put all thoughts of sheep pluck out of my head and dreamed of a nice sandwich of corned beef, chopped liver, raw onions, and chicken fat on rye bread, what I call sensible food.

  Bon Appétit, may 2004

  A R E W E H A V I N G F U N G U S Y E T ?

  My friends and I have arrived at the hotel-restaurant of Clément Bruno, the self-proclaimed truffle king, at 2:30 p.m., a time when the French are loath to feed the hungry. Groceries are shut down, their metal grates slammed and padlocked. Restaurateurs have stuffed menus into desk drawers, concealing them from the uncivilized who might show up after the national one-p.m. call to lunch, a kind of psychic whistle that sounds in the heads of citizens of the republic, beckoning them tableside.

  The three of us have been in a car all day, driving from Italy to this tiny village of Lorgues, in southern France. So eager were we to arrive in truffle country that we have stopped for nothing but fuel (expensive) and tolls (outrageous). We walk into the restaurant, where the midday merriment has not abated, and mention to the maître d’ that we are guests of the hotel who have booked fully 75 percent of Bruno’s four rooms for the night. I explain that we are desperately hungry and would be grateful if he could provide us with a meager bite of cheese and bread. I sound pathetic, which is a mistake. Arrogance works so much better with the French.

  He tells us, in his own way, to hit the road, mentioning a hamlet six miles down the road where we might find food. We won’t. There the greeting will be the same. We will be fortunate if the villagers do not light torches and gather in a mob at the gates, determined to keep us away.

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  As we walk out the door, I mutter something to my friends. I cannot recall the words exactly, but I know I lost my air of hand-wringing obsequiousness. I might have cursed, and curses carry beautifully in crisp winter air. The maître d’ says, “You only want cheese, yes?” I wheel around, seal the bargain. He throws in dessert.

  We drop our bags in our guest rooms, which have soft, fluffy towels and cold, stone floors. Minutes later we are seated in the restaurant, at a table overlaid with heavy damask. Surrounding us are happy locals who show no inclination to return to their dwellings or fields anytime soon. The low-ceilinged restaurant is situated in a building that appears to have belonged to an eighteenth-century farmer of irreproachable refinement. The paneling is dark, the paintings are in gilded frames.

  Even the ceiling has frescoes. That the nymphs above us are not museum quality detracts not a bit from their charm. The fireplace is ablaze, as it should be but so rarely is in restaurants today.

  On one side of us is a clearly overfed family of four. On the other is an elderly, much trimmer gathering of eight. Both groups have finished eating and commenced with the distilled spirits portion of their lunch.

  I am not surprised that everybody is so jolly. After all, I have shown up at the perfect moment: it is the season of the black truffle, the supreme denizen of the dark woods of France.

  The restaurant Bruno is the start of a brief and glorious journey for my friends and me, a journey through the heart of culinary darkness.

  Technically, a truffle is nothing more than a fungus, an underevolved denizen of one of the lowest orders of the plant family, an accidental growth that springs from dampness and soil. It is, to be unmerciful, little more than a mushroom that grows in meadows, usually under oak trees, in favored regions of France from November until March. The black truffle, more properly Tuber melanosporum, is not even as celebrated as it once was. The decline began when Tuber magnatum, the white truffle of Italy, started getting excessive publicity, the same way that the clothing designers of Italy started stealing attention from the clothing designers of France a few decades ago.

  Now it is the white truffle, which is actually a beige truffle, that F O R K I T O V E R

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  attracts customers. The white truffle is cherished for its unbridled pungency, stronger and less sweet than that of the black truffle, and its cost is approximately five times that of the black. Yet it is the French black truffle—more versatile, more beautiful, and more delicious than the white of Italy—that I consider the more wondrous food.

  Every year, about the time that the wealthy close up their Hamptons beach houses, the white truffle arrives in Manhattan and plays to packed houses in deluxe Italian restaurants. At that moment the cost of expense-account lunches rises by 50 percent as captains stand over bowls of eggy pasta and creamy risotto, shaving away. The white truffle is only eaten in one manner, raw and thinly sliced. It is not pretty, but it has an uncommon smell.

  A few months later, almost unnoticed, the first black truffles reach the marketplace. Uncooked, the black truffle is a beauty. It glitters like mica, and the white veins are the equivalent of the marbling in a prime steak. When heat is applied, it turns coal black. The black truffle is part condiment, part vegetable, part indulgence. If the white truffle is a slat-tern with immoderate lipstick, the black truffle is a Ph.D. in a naughty dress. The black truffle is an essential component of haute French cuisine. When chopped up and put into a stew or a fricassee, the simplest of its uses, it provides nuances that elevate a dish from rustic to regal.

  The aroma of the white truffle is a bombshell, bedsheets left unmade by lovers who ate garlic the night before. The black truffle intoxicates; it is an after-hours party at a formal dance. The only advice black-truffle eaters must heed is to be wary of near-fakes, either the basically use-less Tuber brumale, the cubic zirconia of truffles, commonplace in France; or the hated Tuber indicum, which is harvested in China.

  Our prearrranged truffle plans did not include the small lunch I have wheedled from the maître d’. We have reserved a table at Bruno for our evening meal, which will mark the start of a truffle-eating extravaganza that will take us to Monaco and throughout the south of France. For lunch, I am content to eat and drink anything. The wine list at Bruno is a disaster, an homage to off-vintages, but perhaps that 2 6 2

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  is appropriate—truffles only grow well in damp seasons, precisely when grapes are at their worst. Nevertheless, I select a perfect late-afternoon cheese wine, a white Graves with a pleasing bite of Sauvignon Blanc.

  Instead of cheese, the waiter brings a surprise: a green salad with shaved black truffle slivers all over it. I particularly admire the tasty ends of the truffles that have broken off accidentally and been tossed into the salad; they look like chips of black diamonds, glittery and hard-edged, and they have crunch. Those bits are like the burnt ends of barbecued ribs. Then comes the cheese, which is soft and made of goat’s milk, which is no surprise, since we are in Provence, and that has black truffles over it, too. The finale is vanilla ice cream with truffled caramel sauce. Perhaps you would think, as I did, that fungus would not be a suitable complement for caramelized sugar, but the sauce is intense, earthy, and profound. Ben and Jerry take note: the ultimate mix-in has been found.

  The French, as I’ve indicated, can be unyielding, but they can also be unpredictable and generous. The bill for each of our extravagant lunches is $17, tax and tip included. I have no reason to complain.

  My room in the Hôtel de Paris looms over the legendary Monaco casino.

  I stand on the balcony, fantasizing, as anyone who has seen Alfred Hitch-cock movies might. If I had the right mountaineering equipment, I could leap to the roof of the casino, rappel down the walls, swing through an open window, and s
tart emptying safes. Maybe not me, but perhaps a more nimble individual who doesn’t eat constantly.

  It is the day after dinner at Bruno, a meal that did not live up to the uncomplicated perfection of lunch. The fault lay not with the truffles but with the uses that the chef made of them. A barge-sized block of potato topped with shaved truffles came in a truffled cream sauce; no matter how you dress up a potato, you still end up with a spud. The primary virtue of this dish was its euphonious name—crème de truffes et truffes. (Truffe is supposedly a word for potato in archaic French.) The chef inserted truffles in a savory, slow-cooked shoulder of lamb.

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  Although the cooking was expert, the truffles were ineffectual, overwhelmed by the intense lambiness of the meat.

  Tonight I will eat at Le Louis XV, the Michelin three-star restaurant of Alain Ducasse, located on the ground floor of the hotel. In the days ahead I plan to have a dinner at La Beaugraviere, an unstarred country restaurant whose chef-owner, Guy Jullien, is famed for the simplicity and extravagance of his truffle preparations; lunch with Hervé Poron, owner of the Plantin truffle company; and dinner at the three-star Restaurant Troisgros, made dizzyingly famous by the brothers Jean and Pierre Troisgros and now run by Michel, the son of Pierre. Naturally, I will participate in a truffle hunt. To visit Provence during truffle season and not see them unearthed is like traveling to Burgundy during the harvest season and not seeing grapes being picked. The great culinary rituals cannot be ignored.

  Dinner at Le Louis XV begins with an amuse-bouche of raw winter vegetables with a truffle sauce that incorporates Barolo wine vinegar and parmesan cheese. It takes me a moment to recall that Le Louis XV is not a French restaurant; it is a Mediterranean restaurant very near the Italian border. This dish hints at the style of the chef de cuisine, Franck Cerutti, who uses the black truffle more as a condiment than an ingredient.

  Roasted scallops arrive with slivers of black truffles and sit atop a black-truffle puree made with anchovies and capers. A black-truffle risotto is prepared with a black-truffle jus and discs of black truffles so perfectly round I’m reminded of casino chips (or perhaps I’m still obsessing about my imaginary escapade). The next dish demonstrates this restaurant’s absolute mastery of vegetables: it’s merely fennel, zucchini, artichokes, baby leeks, turnips, and beans in a sauce made with balsamic vinegar, black truffles, and olive oil, but the vegetables have been uplifted. They are a source of ecstasy, not earnestness. This sequence of dishes has proved to me that the black truffle is the world’s second-greatest condiment, outdone only by salt.

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  with truffles. I can’t say it’s superior to the goat cheese and truffles at lunch the previous day. Like Bruno, Ducasse adds truffles to a caramel sauce, and here the three-star pedigree shows, for while Bruno’s was merely delicious, this smoother, richer version makes me light-headed with pleasure, to say nothing of deeply philosophical. As the meal ends, I ask my friends why black truffles were put on this earth. The answer we arrive at is that they give small dogs something to do.

  The truffle hunter, the youngest of nine children, is nearing retirement.

  I have driven from Monaco up into Provence to meet with him and his truffle-hunting dog, and he is not especially happy to make my acquaintance. He has made his living as a farmer, or at least he has tried to, and I am just another journalist fascinated by truffles who cares nothing of the plight of workingmen like him who can no longer make a decent living.

  He harvests grapes that are sent to a cooperative and made into an inexpensive red. He grows lavender, the crop that embodies the spirit of Provence. He has a few fruit trees. He stopped growing tomatoes because prices were too low. He asks that I not use his name, since truffle hunters try not to make themselves known to revenue-collectors.

  Taxes and truffles don’t mix. At least his truffle-hunting dog, Rita, is wildly pleased to see me. “You need a lively dog, not shy, not tentative,” he says.

  As we walk out onto his property, he points to a hole in the ground that Rita did not dig and says, “Yesterday, somebody stole my truffles.” I am surprised when he says he knows the identity of the poacher, a local man who has not been caught in the act. “He comes at night and does not keep it a secret,” he says. “He makes a hundred thousand euros [about $120,000]. If we catch him, we will take off his clothes, tie him to a tree, and leave him for four or five days. We did this to somebody already. If he is naked, he has a harder time calling for help.” I nod appreciatively at the terror this punishment must impose.

  Secretly, I am thinking that I would consent to being tied naked to a tree for four days if I got $120,000, tax-free.

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  Truffles appear in mysterious ways. They are the phantoms of the plant kingdom. They thrive in and around the roots of oak trees, although the thirty-year-old oaks that the truffle hunter planted on his property to encourage the growth of truffles do not resemble the stately oaks of American woodlands. These are gnarled and misshapen. Druids might be living in them. Black truffles of exemplary quality once grew in profusion throughout the countryside of Périgord and Provence, but now this so-called wild production is mostly gone. Nobody has learned how to cultivate first-rate truffles, but planting oak trees on land where they once thrived somehow causes truffles to return within ten years.

  The harvesting is still done by animals with an extraordinary sense of smell. Traditionally, this was the pig, but now it is a dog. “I have heard of a man near Nice who still uses a pig,” says the truffle hunter, “but the problem with a pig is that I cannot imagine throwing a hundred-and-fifty-kilo [330-pound] pig in the back of your truck. It is very interesting, but I have never seen a pig hunt.” Rita, who is three years old and may weigh thirty pounds, is an underweight black-and-white mutt deliberately underfed to keep her enthusiastic about digging for truffles—not that she gets to eat them.

  Her reward is a crust of bread. Truffle hunters who have neither pigs nor dogs have been known to hunt by the rays of the sun. They look for a telltale glint off the wings of fleas or gnats that hover above the ground where truffles grow. The truffle hunter says a man hunting by the twinkle of fleas will uncover one-third the truffles of a dog like Rita. When she smells one, or the truffle hunter follows his instincts and tells her where to dig, she becomes a miniature steam shovel. When she gets to within an inch of the prize, she stops.

  Rita and the truffle hunter seem to find truffles with ease, although none are of great size. The largest weighs about three ounces and will sell for $25 at the back door of the restaurant La Beaugraviere, out of sight of the taxman. I try telling the truffle hunter that he seems to be doing well. He picks up a few hundred dollars in an afternoon while strolling through the woods with his dog, an exercise I think of as digging for dollars. He says it is not poor people like him who become 2 6 6

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  rich from truffles but the middlemen and the restaurants of Paris.

  He tells me a story about a widow. (These sorts of unhappy tales invariably have widows in them.) A local woman discovered a truffle weighing almost three pounds, sold it to a local négociant for $350, and he immediately resold it for nearly $1,200. He says to me, “I cultivate them and I sell them to people like Mr. Jullien, who sells it to you to eat.

  Why should there be four or five other people . . .”— he pauses in mid-sentence to gather his dislike of middlemen—“who also eat off this truffle. You are not robbed when you go to Mr. Jullien.” La Beaugraviere resembles no other French restaurant I’ve ever seen.

  It seems to have been designed by a New Mexico architect specializing in pueblos who inexplicably found work in Provence. The walls are off-orange, the fireplace oversize and rustic, the tablecloths folksy, and the pain
tings garish interpretations of the black truffle. The menu has a picture of a truffle hunter and his pig on it. Even the truffle hunter has warned me to expect nothing from the decor. “It does not compete with the food,” he says.

  The dining room is reached by walking through the kitchen, where I see federally protected game birds awaiting the roasting pan. They have been brought in by some customers, who order a jeroboam (almost a gallon) of 1989 Beaucastel Châteauneuf-du-Pape. They are dressed in sweatshirts and jeans, and they have hung their waterproof jackets over the backs of their chairs. Clearly, it is not only the dining room decor that does not compete with the food.

  The glory of La Beaugraviere is truffle overload. A meal prepared by Jullien is a throwback to a long-ago time when black truffles grew everywhere and farmers tossed them into their pots along with the onions and carrots. Sea scallops are cut in two and presented with a chunk of truffle between slices, chopped truffles over the top, and more chopped truffles in a Swiss chard puree underneath. Indeed, it is truffles three ways. Black-truffle risotto has me wild with anticipation, because I prefer it to the famous risotto made with white truffles, but the chef seems overwhelmed—his dining room is packed with cus-F O R K I T O V E R

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  tomers determined to eat as many black truffles as they can as quickly as possible. The boardinghouse ambience does not lend itself to refined food preparation. The risotto is overcooked. Finally, he offers his pièce de résistance: under a puff-pastry crown is foie gras and a whole truffle the size of a golf ball.

  Rhapsodies are written about such indulgences, for this is the culinary equivalent of a date with a nymphomaniac. Yet, I must admit, chew-ing a whole black truffle is like gnawing on a radish. It is more sinful than pleasurable, like looking up the skirt of a girl you don’t really like.