“In France, they call them Périgords—and they’re known as the diamonds of the kitchen. You probably know them as black truffles, those baseball-sized fungi that are sniffed out of the earth by pigs or dogs, get sold for thousands of dollars, and transform any meal into a luxury item. So what happens when – sacrée merde! – an obsessed Yankee learns to grow them in the scrub woods of Davy Crockett’s Tennessee?”
(Alan Richman. "Hillbilly Truffle.” GQ. August 23, 2009.)
Truffles are much more than a luxury food. These fruiting bodies of mycorrhizal fungi are essential to the health of forests and the human communities that hunt them. And now, these culinary delicacies are being grown in Appalachia. This is news to me.
Sally Schneider, writing in Saveur about the time when she was a young chef, and someone slipped a black truffle into her pocket as she worked. As the heat of her body warmed the truffle, its scent enveloped her. “It was intoxicating—a smell I knew intimately, yet had no conscious memory of, triggering a flood of elusive associations, like flashbacks into some amnesiac period of my life, or some prenatal memory.”
Truffles are not a new discovery. The first mentions of them appears in the inscriptions of the Neo-Sumerian regarding their Amorite enemy's eating habits and later in writings of Theophrastus in the fourth century BC.
Truffles have long been renowned. Famed epicure and gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in The Physiology of Taste, said: "Whosoever says 'truffle,' utters a grand word, which awakens erotic and gastronomic ideas...."
Maybe truffles are a French thing like escargot. You know, something not popularly desired and really foreign. If you are like me, never in my very limited, 71-year-old gastronomical experience have I encountered a single truffle. What have I missed? Do you know?
What Are Truffles?
Rowan Jacobsen of The Washington Post writes …
“Through scent, they bring disparate networks of organisms into relationship, allowing us to listen in on an ancient sylvan conversation. They help make forests meaningful.
“Truffles … live as masses of microscopic threads in the soil, connected to tree roots. The fungi mine water and minerals for the trees, in exchange for sugars the trees make through photosynthesis. They also shuttle resources and information between the trees in their network, strengthening the entire forest.
“Many of these fungi reproduce by making truffles, buried balls of spores. To spread these spores through the forest, truffles produce some of the most riveting and irresistible scents in the natural world. Honed by millions of years of evolution, a stunning embodiment of what one might call the creative genius of forests, those scents cause animals to drop whatever they are doing and tunnel down to eat the truffles, later spreading the spores. A perfect lure, it works on mice, squirrels, pigs, bears and many other animals, including us.”
(Rowan Jacobsen. “European truffles are absurdly expensive. American ones are affordable treasures.” The Washington Post. December 02, 2021.)
Identified with the culture of French dining, the black Perigord truffle, or tuber melanosporum, were used much earlier by the Greeks and the Romans. Ancients believed they were formed by thunderclaps, although Plutarch declared them to be mud cooked by lightning. Over the years, they have been eaten to gain strength in battle, to cure gout, and of course, as an aphrodisiac.
Although the truffle possesses a pleasant crunch when eaten, it is treasured not so much for its taste or appearance but for its aroma, which has been likened to “an old love affair, bedsheets after a night of abandon, untidy women who disdain to bathe, and all that is dark and alluring about the human body and soul.”
Alan Richman, food writer of GQ Magazine and winner of 16 James Beard Foundation Awards for journalism, says …
“In the middle of the winter growing season, they can be fruity and floral. Later, they become muskier. Tom Michaels (owner of Tennessee Truffle and thought to be the only man in America who earns a living selling black Périgord truffles that he's cultivated himself in Tennessee from trees inoculated with melanosporum fungus using a relatively new French technique) remembers handing out samples at a festival, his truffles incorporated into a mushroom-truffle cappuccino.
“Michaels says, 'When I'd be shaving a truffle that was musky, the women, their eyes would roll back. If it was the fruity kind, it was nice but not as high a level of ecstasy. When I talk to women chefs, they seem to like the earthy ones, too, the real ripe ones. I swear there is a gender thing here.'
“Indeed, the pleasure of truffles is often linked to pheromones, but I suspect they have more noteworthy virtues. Truffles are a dramatic example of a smell, taste, and appearance that should be undesirable but instead becomes the opposite. They are related psychologically to things that are nightmarish, that slough off flesh in the night. They are black, and movie-theater licorice aside, black is generally not an appealing food color.
“In truth, black truffles should give us the creeps, so alien are they to America's generally sunny dining habits. One would expect them to be categorized as bizarre, much like the oddities that freaky food-show hosts swallow, but in fact they are delectable, possessing a smell with uncommon allure.”
(Alan Richman. "Hillbilly Truffle.” GQ. August 23, 2009.)
Nature and food journalist Eugenia Bone reports that truffles are irresistible because their aroma is composed of chemicals that mimic mammalian reproductive pheromones. She says, “Eating, even sniffing, a truffle is a bit like being drugged … The truth is, the truffle itself doesn’t taste like much. It is the gas that gives truffles their flavor.
(Eugenia Bone. “Buried Treasure That Is Filled With Mystery.” The New York Times. December 24, 2012.)
The “hillbilly truffle” is said to be the next culinary star, yet it’s virtually unknown in America. Across half a dozen European countries, black truffles are a billion-dollar business, part of diner's delight at a price of upward of $6,000 per pound.
Every year, tens of thousands of hunters scour the forests, using trained dogs to sniff truffles out underground. The continent’s famous white variety grows almost exclusively in the wild forests of Italy and Eastern Europe, and the great black strain flourishes on farms in Spain and France.
(Rowan Jacobsen. “America’s Next Food Craze Is Buried in Appalachia.” Outside. January 19, 2022.)
Historical Note:
In 2016, a 4.16 pound white truffle sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $61,250. It was a bargain price. Thanks to a lot of rain, Italy had a large truffle crop in 2016 causing wholesale prices drop by 50% from two years earlier. Under any condition, however, truffles are expensive.
Over the years, the availability of black truffles has waxed and waned. Industrialization, rural exodus, two world wars, and the aging of nineteenth-century truffle fields is blamed for the current depletion of the crop. Once added lavishly to recipes, they tend now to be used cautiously. At the peak of production, near the end of the nineteenth century, about 1,000 tons of black truffles, many of them wild, were harvested in France. Now there might be as few as ten tons a year, almost all of them cultivated. They have become so expensive that almost no chef dares to be overly generous, but there was a hundred-year period, from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth, when they were abundant.
As the price of European truffles soars toward absurdity, the demand for U.S. truffles has soared.
However, the high-end industry has spawned a shadowy underworld, where tax evasion, nighttime heists, counterfeits, and sabotage are not uncommon. The schemes span continents and truffle types, but all of them boil down to scarcity and cash.Truffles are notoriously hard to farm, even in France, where Perigords originate. Now, in the rolling hills and clay soils of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, a growing number of farmers are hoping to establish southern Appalachia as the new truffle capital of the world.
Tom Michaels says that about 200 orchards are now in development in the U.S., but because it takes years before truffles appear, few are producing yet. "The next few years are the moment of truth" for the burgeoning industry,” he says.
(Alan Richman. "Hillbilly Truffle.” GQ. August 23, 2009.)
T. Can In the U.S.
The truffle – T. can, as its handful of aficionados call it – has been found in Michigan and Massachusetts, but the Appalachians seemed to be a hot spot. At first thought not to exist here, they have been discovered to be over America’s ancient eastern mountains, tethered to tree roots, waiting to be hunted. As one of the world’s rarest and most expensive foods, it grows in a wide range of conditions.
American author and journalist Rowen Jacobsen writes that truffles make mammals do foolish things. Jacobsen says, “A flying squirrel will pivot in midair at the slightest whiff, slaloming through the trees in search of the source. A pig will forgo sex and other pleasures until its lust is slaked. And a human will trade a day’s work for the tiniest taste, or plow a life’s savings into an orchard that might produce a specimen around five years later.”
(Rowan Jacobsen. “America’s Next Food Craze Is Buried in Appalachia.” Outside. January 19, 2022.)
Pigs are known as the perfect hunters of truffles, but in truth they got the job because they were the primary farm animal attracted to the dark smells. Says Michaels, "A 300-pound pig will go through an orchard like a rototiller, digging up everything. Truffle pigs are out of control, and they go home when they decide they want to go home."
Later came dogs – they were easier to pick up and heave into the back of a truck, and they were less interested in eating than in the joy of the hunt.
(Alan Richman. "Hillbilly Truffle.” GQ. August 23, 2009.)
Dante, is a Lagotto Romagnolo trained in the art of truffle-hunting. According to Dante’s owner Charles Lefevre, a mycologist (a mushroom expert) who specializes in the cultivation of truffles, truffle dogs serve as quality control, “They choose which truffles are ready, and the reason that matters is the truffle needs to be mature and ripe in order to have its culinary value.”
Truffles picked before their time are less flavorful and less valuable than ones found at peak ripeness. With rarer truffle varieties fetching up to $2,000 per pound, dogs like Dante help maintain a lucrative truffle market. But it’s not all about the money. For dogs with their super-sensitive noses and eager-to-please attitudes, truffle hunting can be a fun and fulfilling pastime.
Any trainable dog with a decent nose can learn to find truffles. In an interview with The New York Times, dog trainer Elizabeth Kalik explains: “Scent training is one of the easiest things you can do with a dog, because of the natural proclivity.” Her company, NW Truffle Dogs, has trained everything from Pomeranian to pit bull and a fair number of mixed-breed rescue dogs.
Between the two world wars, almost all of the truffle dogs of Romagna and the adjacent areas were Lagotto Romagnolo.
Lagotto Romagnolos like Dante are the most popular truffle-hunting dog in Europe. They’re an ancient water retriever breed, but in modern generations, they’ve been selectively bred for their noses, and are the official truffle-hunting dog of Italy.
But Lagotto Romagnolos aren’t the only dogs who can sniff out a ripe underground mushroom. Breeds known for their noses are particularly gifted at finding truffles.
Some popular truffle-hunting breeds include:
Lagotto Romagnolo
Springer Spaniel
Beagles and other hounds
Labrador retriever
Standard poodle
Belgian malinois
(Elisabeth Geier. “Truffle-Hunting Dogs Find Treasures Worth $2000 a Pound. Could Your Dog Join the Hunt?” Dog People. 2022.)
To close, I'll leave you a quote or two about this smelly but so-called “heavenly” food. If you choose to go truffle-hunting, good luck. Get yourself a truffle dog and head for the woods. But first find out if these fungi even grow in the conditions in which you explore. Better not count your fortune before you dig.
“I have wept three times in my life. Once when my first opera failed. Once again, the first time I heard Paganini play the violin. And once when a truffled turkey fell overboard at a boating picnic.”
– Gioachino Rossini, Italian composer (1792-1868)
"The most learned men have been questioned as to the nature of this tuber, and after two thousand years of argument and discussion their answer is the same as it was on the first day: we do not know. The truffles themselves have been interrogated, and have answered simply: eat us and praise the Lord."
– Alexandre Dumas, novelist and playwright (1802-1870)
Savoy Truffle
Song by The Beatles (White Album)
Creme tangerine and
Montelimar
A ginger sling with a pineapple heart
Coffee
dessert, yes, you know it's good news
But you'll have to have
them all pulled out
After the Savoy truffle
Cool cherry cream and a
nice apple tart
I feel your taste all the time we're apart
Coconut
fudge really blows down those blues
But you'll have to have
them all pulled out
After the Savoy truffle
You might not feel it
now
But when the pain cuts through
You're going to know and
how
The sweat is going to fill your head
When it becomes too
much
You're going to shout aloud
But you'll have to have
them all pulled out
After the Savoy truffle
You know that what you
eat you are
But what is sweet now, turns so sour
We all know
Ob-La-Di-Bla-Da
But can you show me, where you are?
Creme tangerine and
Montelimar
A ginger sling with a pineapple heart
Coffee
dessert, yes, you know it's good news
But you'll have to have
them all pulled out
After the Savoy truffle
Yes, you'll have to
have them all pulled out
After the Savoy truffle
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