Choice Cuts

by Mark Kurlansky

  From the beginning the truffle was a mystery, and to a certain extent it still is. Some of the ancients held that it was produced by spontaneous generation, and others improved on that by adding that truffles were formed where lightning had struck. Theophrastus recognized them correctly as plants, but Pliny found it difficult to believe that a plant could grow without roots. “We know for a fact,” he wrote, “that when Lartius Licinius, an official of praetorian rank, was serving as Minister of Justice at Cartagena in Spain a few years ago, he happened when biting on a truffle to come on a denarius contained inside it which bent his front teeth. This clearly shows that truffles are lumps of earthy substance balled together.” To this day there are Spaniards who believe that the truffle is a product of the Devil, partly perhaps because the ground where it is found often presents a devastated appearance, as though it had been scorched by infernal fires. They are “the jewels of poor soils,” Colette put it, absolving the Devil. Yet even in this century a malignant power has been attributed to these mushrooms, which, it is held, becomes more potent at night. A French writer advised anyone who discovered that he was traversing truffle territory at night to cross himself quickly three times for protection.

  The origin of the truffle is unknown [wrote Brillat-Savarin]. We find it, but we do not know how it is born nor how it grows. The most skillful men have busied themselves with it, they have believed that they had identified its seeds, they have promised that they would sow it at will. Vain efforts! Lying promises! Their plantings have never been followed by crops.

  The attempt to grow truffles goes back at least 175 years, during which time triumphant claims of success have been uttered from time to time—followed, invariably, by silence. One of the first came from a French peasant who, early in the nineteenth century, planted acorns from “truffle oaks” (the scrub oaks around which truffles are oftenest found) in truffle territory and attributed truffles found there ten or fifteen years later to his acorns; but nobody else has succeeded in achieving this result since. Strenuous efforts to cultivate truffles were made about 1870, when phylloxera devastated the vineyards of Périgord and the Quercy, forcing landholders to seek other sources of revenue; but an increase of the harvest at this time seems to have been the result of more intensive truffle hunting rather than of any increase in the number of truffles. Seedling oaks have been planted in the hope that they would encourage the development of satellite truffles, without significant success; and pieces of truffles or truffles themselves have been buried in what seemed propitious soil, and the ground has been soaked with water in which truffles had been steeped. “Wasted effort,” wrote Le Monde in January 1978. “The truffle is a wild and fantastic vegetable, whose underground growth escapes all observation and defies all prediction.”

  One month after this pessimistic conclusion, the French National Institute for Agronomics announced that it had produced twenty cultivated truffles which had taken three and a half years to grow after a seeding of truffle spores accompanied by the planting of oak saplings. The first, it was reported, weighed 170 grams, nearly six ounces, a good size, quality undescribed. But at the time of writing it is still not possible, and will not be possible for several years, to assert that the problem of cultivating truffles has been solved. The planting, in 1974, had been a large one—150,000 oak seedlings, covering an area of about 7500 acres in a number of plantations on land chosen because it seemed suitable for truffles: who can say that this much land might not have developed twenty truffles in three and a half years even if the oaks had never been planted and the spores never sown?—and three and a half years should theoretically have been too little time to permit a truffle to reach this size and too little time also to permit an oak sapling to contribute to its growth.

  The truffle has for centuries been celebrated with extravagant praise. The most common epithet for it is “black diamond,” perhaps originated by Brillat-Savarin, who called it “the black diamond of the kitchen”; it has also been called the “black pearl.” George Sand, in a kittenish moment, referred to the truffle as “the fairy apple.” Alexandre Dumas, who said that it “holds the first place among mushrooms,” called it, in bad Latin, the “sacro sanctorum” of gourmets. For the Marquis de Cussy it was “the underground empress,” for James de Coquet “a fragrant nugget,” and for Fulbert-Dumonteil “the divine tuber.”

  I did not go overboard about the truffle myself in The Food of France, where I wrote that “on those rare occasions when truffles are served relatively alone, their own taste can be detected as a rather faint licorice flavor.” The fact is that I had not then ever tasted a really first-class truffle, but I didn’t know it; and besides, I had been subjected to an experience which should have put me off truffles forever. In an unwary moment I had consented to be filmed eating truffes sous les cendres for a television short on Paris restaurants, a process which I had assumed would take about half an hour. I ate truffles-cooked-in-the-ashes for five hours without a break—the same truffles, which by the end of the session had become thoroughly tired, and so had I. I felt that I never wanted to see a truffle again.

  Several years later I was invited to the opening of a new Parisian restaurant owned by a man who was a specialist in the foods of the French southwest—truffle country. Truffles were present, beautiful truffles which should have been painted by Van Gogh—as large as tangerines, almost black, with a suggestion of purple, attractively pebbled, and glistening as though they had just been oiled. They were there to admire, not to eat: they were too precious to be lavished, free, on guests. But it happened that I was standing between the Admiral de Toulouse-Lautrec and the restaurant owner when he steeled himself to make the supreme sacrifice. I did not rate such magnificent treatment, but the admiral did—not because he was an admiral, not because he was an authentic member of the famous painter’s family, but because his wife was Mapie de Toulouse-Lautrec, the Mary Margaret McBride of France (I purposely avoid comparison with present practitioners of public gastronomy out of cowardice), who was not present. Our host unlocked one of the glass cases behind which his truffles beamed at us, removed one, and handed it to the admiral, who regarded it with misgiving. “Here,” he said, thrusting it at me. “You’re the food expert.” I bit full into it and my mouth was flooded with what was probably the most delicious taste I have ever encountered in my entire life, simultaneously rich, subtle and undescribable. I ate it all, while the other guests regarded me with loathing.

  “Rather faint licorice flavor” indeed! There was no suggestion of licorice, nor of any other fragrance I could recollect. I find it quite impossible to pass on any idea of its taste. If I say it was as sturdy as meat, I will start you off on a completely wrong track as to its savor. If I say it was as unctuous and aromatic as chocolate, I will do the same. Truffles taste like truffles, and like nothing else whatsoever; and it is a rare, rare privilege to be able to taste a fresh truffle of this quality. I never have since, though I have occasionally come across truffles which redeemed those I had reduced to chewing gum for the television camera—at Rocamadour and Sarlat, in the heart of French truffle country, and in Perugia, in the heart of Umbrian truffle country.

  The Umbrian truffles seemed to me quite rich, but they did not match the French samplings, which I assume were Périgord truffles, reputed since the end of the fifteenth century to be the best of the forty-two botanically recognized species. Périgord truffles are not restricted to the Périgord; indeed, almost none of them come from there today, for the truffle fields of that area became exhausted many years ago and were almost unanimously abandoned, as yielding too few truffles to be worth hunting for; but after its long resting period, the Périgord country seems now to be recuperating. Meanwhile the most important truffle region of France has become the Quercy, capital Cahors, just south of Périgord. (Quercy comes from the Latin quercus, “oak,” the tree with which the truffle is most frequently associated.) The truffles of this province and also of the Vaucluse, good truffle country too, as well as of
one or two other minor truffle centers, are authentic Périgord truffles, for this is not a place name, but the popular equivalent of a species name. The Périgord truffle is Tuber melanosperm, also called the black truffle—in the Périgord dialect, the truffaïro (negro soumo l’amò d’un domna, “black as a damned soul”). It is indeed black or a very dark brown on the outside; inside, the flesh (technically the gleba) is whitish to begin with, but as it ripens passes through gray to brown. The mature truffle is a dark brown inside, but not uniformly so; it gives a marbled appearance, and is threaded with very fine white veins.

  The second best truffle, in common opinion, is T. magnatum, the white truffle of northern Italy, which grows especially in the region of Alba (the Umbrian truffle mentioned above was black, not white). Its flesh is described poetically in the Italian Rinaldi-Tyndalo mushroom encyclopedia as “rosy white, then silver amethystine,” and, like the Périgord truffle, it appears to be marbled. The odor is described as like a mixture of garlic and cheese, and almost everybody agrees that it has a faint taste of garlic (there is a good deal of sulfur in truffles, including Périgord truffles, which is principally what accounts for the flavor of garlic). I did not myself note a garlic taste on the only occasion when I have eaten white truffles, and though it is usually reported that their taste is stronger than that of black truffles, it seemed to me to be rather too thin to justify the praise lavished on that species; but after having so badly underestimated the black truffle on the basis of insufficient experience, I am not going to base any opinion on the strength of a single sampling. I shall assume that the white truffles I met were not the best representatives of their type. White truffles, unlike black truffles, are never cooked. They are usually sliced thin and sprinkled over whatever dish they are to adorn; if it is a hot dish, they are added to it at the last moment, after the cooking is over.

  In France, where there are between fifteen and twenty thousand professional truffle gatherers, all small operators, there are, besides the Périgord truffle, other black, brown, gray, violet and white truffles of several species, ranging in flavor from “extreme succulence to pale banality”—most of them closer to the banal side. One rarely hears specific mention of the other kinds. I have come across references to an Italian variety, black outside and white inside, described as “without much flavor.” Of the gray truffle, Dumas wrote that it was “almost as delicate as the white truffle” of northern Italy, but Colette described it as “almost insipid.” I do not know the species of Alsatian truffles, of which there are in any case not many, but an eighteenth-century historian of cooking wrote that though they were inferior to Périgord truffles, “they have nevertheless their own special perfume and their own charm.”

  The truffle is pretty much unsung in English literature, for it seems to have short-changed English-speaking countries. The only edible variety in the British Isles is T. aestivus, the summer truffle, dark brown or black, with an aromatic odor but not much taste. Found oftener in association with beeches than with oaks, it is the best Britain can do. (There is also a winter truffle, T. brumale, dark and fragrant, which I suspect may be the kind I encountered in Umbria.) The situation is even sadder in the United States, where there are perhaps as many as thirty varieties of truffles, none of which make particularly good eating. Every once in a while somebody discovers truffles there and glimpses fortune ahead, only to suffer disappointment. This happens oftenest in Oregon and California, but the truffles there are neither numerous enough nor good enough to be worth gathering; they have also appeared occasionally in Tennessee, North Carolina and Vermont.

  A number of writers nowadays think Juvenal went overboard in his praise of Libyan truffles. According to Brillat-Savarin, those tubers had whitish or reddish flesh, in contrast to the brownish flesh of all the best truffles of today, with the exception of the Italian white truffle. Was the tuber he was talking about really a truffle? The truffle is normally a mushroom of the temperate zone; there seem to be no truffles in Africa today (there is reported to be a white truffle in Morocco, but I have not been able to pin it down). What does appear in Africa, and specifically in Libya, is a tuber of the genus Terfezia, hence not a truffle, though for want of a better name it is sometimes called “truffle” in English, and sometimes the “desert truffle” in French, but usually terfas. It looks something like a truffle, and exists in black and red varieties. I suspect that this may also be the “truffle” found in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana. If there is a real truffle in Africa, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization has not heard about it.

  “How do you prefer your truffles?” an anxious hostess who was preparing to take the risk of inviting him to dinner asked the famous gourmet Curnonsky. “In great quantity, madame,” he replied. “In great quantity.” This may have taken her aback, but it was the right answer. If you want to be able really to taste a truffle, you need enough of it to provide a fair sample. “Truffles are a luxury,” James de Coquet wrote, “and the first requirement of luxury is that you should not have to economize. A capon with no truffles at all is better than one which has been truffled, but not enough.” A character in a book of the nineteenth-century gastronomic writer Charles Monselet cried, “I don’t want truffles cut into little pieces, so scarce that you have to scrape the insides of your chicken to find a few shavings; no, I want avalanches of truffles, I want too much of them.”

  Robert J. Courtine, a contemporary French gastronomic writer, inveighs perhaps a little too vehemently against the use of bits and snippets of truffle to ornament various dishes, in which their taste is often imperceptible. He admits the use of small pieces of truffle only for Périgueux sauce, a marvelous confection as made by my mother-in-law, a native of the Périgord, but you are not likely to find its equal in restaurants—she takes two days to produce it. On one occasion Courtine conceded grudgingly that pieces of truffle might be permissible in the classic Lyons specialty, chicken in half-mourning, where the mourning note is provided by black truffles, or in pheasant Suvarov, where they are an essential ingredient of the dish, not a mere decoration; but he continued to object to the classic combination of truffle in foie gras. It may have been his influence which caused a Paris restaurant to serve a slab of pure untruffled foie gras, with a whole fresh truffle on the side, a dish for kings—wealthy kings. In the days of the truffle’s glory, the proportion of truffles to foie gras was such that it was remarked that instead of truffled foie gras this preparation should have been called “foie-gras’d truffles.” Nowadays such a lavish use of truffles would price this marriage off the menu, for expensive as foie gras may be, truffles, volume for volume or weight for weight, are much more so. Another dish I have not seen on a menu for a long time, even in the most expensive restaurants, is the one Charles Chaplin used as a symbol of snobbery in A Woman of Paris—truffles cooked in champagne.

  Truffles are never likely to descend to a price within reach of the average consumer, for the demand increases and the supply diminishes each year. In 1892, described as “the year of grace” by Périgord truffle gatherers, 2000 tons of truffles were harvested in France. Just before World War I the figure had dropped to 300 tons, by the 1950s to 100, in 1971 to 85, and it now varies between 25 and 150 tons annually, depending chiefly on the weather. France is the world’s most important producer of truffles, and enjoys a virtual monopoly of them, for it buys most of the surplus truffles of Italy and Spain, the only other truffle-exporting countries. The French demand alone is greater than the French supply; but France exports about one-third of her superior truffles, making do herself with the less prestigious varieties she buys from the others. Even if the present attempts at the artificial planting of truffles succeed, their price is not likely to drop very much, for what has always made truffles expensive is the cost of gathering them. It is a hit-or-miss affair at best: “Truffles is not farming, it’s luck,” one producer told John Hess. Since the truffle grows underground, the first problem is to find it, and the second to ease it up gently in
order not to disturb the mycelium and prevent it from giving birth to more truffles. This means expenditure of care and time in an era when time is becoming more and more costly, and the employment of hand labor in an era when hand labor also is becoming more and more costly.

  For the detection of the tubers, truffle hunters have used sows, dogs, goats (in Sardinia), bear cubs (in Russia, or so I am told), the water-witch’s wand (with indifferent success) and the know-how of the skilled observer. Under the last heading, it is not difficult to recognize probable truffle ground because of its scorched-earth appearance, but as this may cover a circle with a radius of 150 feet or more around the nourishing tree, trying to locate the exact spots at which the tubers, walnut-sized or larger, are hiding remains a puzzle. However, though most truffles grow well below the surface, often as deep as a foot, a large one buried less deeply sometimes cracks the soil, where a trained eye can detect its presence. An easier sign for the experienced truffle hunter to read is the presence of flies, of which several species try to lay their eggs in truffles—particularly one which looks like a small wasp, and another which is blue. If a swarm of them hovers over a certain spot, there is probably a truffle beneath it. Some truffle hunters claim to have a sense of smell sufficiently acute to locate truffles, but it is more common to have recourse to animals better endowed olfactorily by nature; even if a man were their equal he would be handicapped over pigs and dogs by wearing his nose higher from the ground, unless he elected to crawl over the terrain on hands and knees.