It is not that the white truffles, which are not white but putty-coloured, are not entirely marvellous and extraordinary. It is simply that their scent is so overpowering and all-penetrating that nothing delicate can stand up to their assault. The one creation evolved by the Piedmontese that accords perfectly with the white truffle is the famous fonduta, a dish made from the fat, rich Val d’Aosta cheese called Fontina, cut into cubes and steeped in milk for an essential minimum of twelve hours, then cooked, by those very few who have the knack, to a velvety, egg-thickened cream with an appearance entirely guileless until the rain of truffles, sliced raw in flake-fine slivers with a special type of mandoline-cutter, descends upon it. There is something about Fontina cheese, a hint of corruption and decadence in its flavour, that gives it a true affinity with the rootless, mysterious tuber dug up out of the ground.
The black truffles (Tuber melanosporum) of Périgord are, traditionally, sniffed out by pigs. In Provence and the Languedoc, dogs are trained to locate and indicate the presence of truffles by scratching the patches of ground that conceal them. In Piedmont the white truffle (Tuber magnatum) is located in the same way. In the village of Roddi, not far from Alba, there is a training establishment for truffle hounds. Most of the dogs are mongrels. Valuable property, these Bobbis and Fidos, to the farmers and peasants who go about their truffle-digging secretively by dawn light, bearing their little hatchets for extracting the treasure from the earth. No system of truffle cultivation in the technical sense has ever yet been evolved, but according to Professor Gagliardi and Doctor Persiani in their Italian book on mushrooms and truffles, truffles can be and are propagated successfully by the reburying of mature truffles and spores close to the lateral roots of oaks and beeches, and in chalky ground with a southerly aspect. In five to ten years the chosen area may or may not yield a truffle harvest. Truffle veins peter out in forty to fifty years; laying truffles down for the future seems to be a sensible precaution.
The season for the true tartufi bianchi is brief. It opens in September. During the second week of October, Alba is in full fête with banquets, speeches, visiting celebrities, and its very own truffle queen. By November the truffles are at their most potent and plentiful. By the end of January the ball is over.
In the Morra family’s Hôtel Savona in Alba, visitors staying in rooms on the side are likely to be wakened early during the truffle season. The Morra canning and truffle paste factory starts up at six in the morning. It is not so much the noise, a very moderate one as Italian noises go, that gets you out of bed, as the smell of the truffles being bashed to paste, emulsified with oil, and packed into tubes for a sandwich spread. ‘Truffle paste? Is there such a thing?’ asks a cavaliere whose little shopwindow in the main street of Alba is pasted over with newspaper clippings and announcements to the effect that he is the principe dei tartufi. Certainly, somebody is due to succeed the Morra dynasty, still regarded as kings of the Alba truffle domain, even though the Morra manner of running a hotel and restaurant (its Michelin star must be the most misplaced of any in the whole Guide) is not so much regal as reminiscent of a Hollywood gangster-farce. All the same, the Morra truffle paste not only exists but does retain something of the true scent and flavour, which tinned whole truffles rarely do.
Contradiction and confusion in all things concerning the white truffle are normal in Alba, where the most harmless questions are met with evasive answers and where, for all the information one would ever be able to extract from the truffle dealers, the things might be brought by storks or found under gooseberry bushes. In the market there is no display of the truffle merchants’ wares. The knobbly brown nuggets are not weighed out and are not even to be seen unless you are a serious customer. Some three dozen silent men in sombre suits stand in a huddle outside the perimeter of the poultry market. Only if you ask to see the truffles will one of these truffle men extract from his pocket a little paper- or cloth-wrapped parcel. You buy by nose and a sound, dry appearance.
About the storage of truffles the Albesi are comparatively communicative, if not very enlightening. ‘What is the best way to keep tartufi?’
‘You wrap them in a piece of stuff…’
Another dealer interrupts, ‘No, you keep them in a jar of rice.’
The cavaliere says this is nonsense. Rice, he says, makes the truffles wet, and they must have air. (Nobody here seems to have heard of the Bolognesi method of keeping truffles dry in sawdust or wood shavings.) The cavaliere says jauntily that the ones we buy from him will last ten days. They are packed in tissue paper in four-inch-square packing cases. They have so much air that on the drive back to Turin from Alba we are nearly strangled by the smell. It is glorious, but it is dissipating itself, and the truffles are weakening with every kilometre. By the time we get them back to London in three days they will be ghosts.
The cavaliere’s ten days was a hefty overestimation, but his recommendation of the cooking at the Buoi Rossi (The Red Ox), the unmodernized Piedmontese country-town inn in the via Cavour, was worthwhile. In the quiet old courtyard, with its characteristic vista of Piedmontese arches and open loft stacked with the copper-red corncobs, we drank a bottle of red Dolcetto, a local wine and a dry and genuine one, and ate some bread and butter spread with truffles. (This is one of the best ways of eating them if you can ever persuade a Piedmontese to allow you such a simple treat.) We returned three days running for meals.
The Red Ox is not mentioned in Michelin and is a simple albergo-ristorante where honest, decent, and cheap food, which includes a genuine fonduta, is to be had. There were also delicious pears baked in their skins and sprinkled with coarse sugar, and fresh, fat fagioli alla regina, oven-cooked. The local wines are all they should be. In typical Italian fashion the padrona was unable to tell us more about her first-class vintage Barolo than that it comes from her cousin, one Enrico Borgogno, a grower in Barolo itself, and that it was, she thought, ten years old. The finer points of vintages and vintage years do not preoccupy Italian inn-keepers. Unless it is standardized and commercialized out of all recognition, two bottles of precisely the same growth are likely to resemble each other in about the same degree as the black truffle of Périgord resembles the white one of Piedmont.
The Compleat Imbiber 7, 1964
The Magpie System
An organization we could do with at Christmas time is one which would provide packing depots – boutiques perhaps they would be called – places to which all one’s miscellaneous presents could be taken, made up into seemly parcels and entrusted to the shop for postage or dispatch.
Parcel-wrapping stations in big stores are fine as far as they go but since one can hardly ask them to pack things bought in other shops, that isn’t quite far enough. I was thinking particularly about hampers of food and wine. The roof under which one would be able to buy everything one would like to put into such parcels doesn’t exist; my hampers would be based on a lot of small things; some cheap, some less so; they would be Christmas stockings really, not hampers, and one rule would be that everything should be the very best of its kind, and that means you have to go to specialist shops, like, for instance, Moore Brothers (of the Brompton Road and Notting Hill) for coffee, three or four different kinds in labelled parcels (all ready-made hampers contain fine quality tea, which is all very well for friends abroad, but silly in England; you can buy good tea anywhere; good coffee is infinitely more rare) which would include Mocha, Java, Blue Mountain. Then there would be little packets, neat and gaudy, of those spices which are not always easy to come by even in a city which not all that long ago was the centre of the entire world spice trade.
The spice importing-exporting centre appears to have moved to North America, and the English supermarketeers (and how sensible of them) have been quick to see the possibilities of American- and Canadian-packed whole spices, such as coriander seeds, allspice berries, cumin and fennel seeds, cinnamon sticks and ginger root. As a matter of fact, by buying one large packet of pickling spice you get, if you can identi
fy them, a good selection of these spices (not the cumin or fennel seeds, though) which grocers are always denying they have in stock. For a phial of fine whole saffron – even I wouldn’t need a professional packer for that – a well-found chemist is the best bet. Then, inevitably, an expedition to Soho and Roche of 14 Old Compton Street, the only shop selling the envelopes of herbs dried and packed on the stalk – wild thyme, basil, thick fennel twigs, which contain the right true essence of all the hills of Provence. And one could do worse than buy a gallon or two of their beautiful olive oil, and decant it into clear wine or liqueur bottles for presents.
*
Half the charm of the magpie system of shopping is that one comes across unexpectedly pretty and festive-looking things for so little money; in the window of the Empire Shop in Sloane Street there is a pyramid of white candy sugar in rocky lumps, so irresistibly decorative that one would like to hang them on the tree; and inside the shop, by-passing the chain-dairy goods which have somehow strayed in, are dark and dazzly genuine Indian chutneys, garnet-bright Jamaican guava jelly, English quince, Scottish rowan, and squat jars of shiny lemon curd.
Indeed, to think no further than how to make up hampers of jams and jellies, marmalade and honey would still be to have and to give plenty of entertainment.
Dark French heather honey from the Landes is one which I know to be especially aromatic, and there must be some fifty more different kinds of honey at least to be bought in London. Fortnum’s seem to have the most dazzling choice; there can be found (if you dodge the gift packs, the china beehives, the peasant pottery) honey from Hungary and Guatemala, California and Canada and Dalmatia, from Buckfast and Jamaica, from Mexico, Sicily, Greece, Scotland, Italy, Ireland and Spain; and every aromatic flower of which one has ever heard has apparently fed those bees; lime flowers and rosemary, acacia, wild thyme, white clover, orange blossom and lemon and wild roses. With all their colours and different degrees of opacity or translucence, some creamy as white cornelian and some clear and golden as Château d’Yquem and some bronze as butterscotch, they have the allure which Christmas presents ought to have. Three Kings’ presents perhaps. Just the quality which things in ready-made-up hampers hardly ever possess.
*
Those bottles of indeterminate sherry and port, Christmas puddings and tins of tea and fancy biscuits are survivals from the days when such things were distributed by Ladies Bountiful to old retainers, retired nannies and governesses and coachmen who would probably much rather have had a couple of bottles of gin. Well, wouldn’t you? And really one would have to have quite a grievance against somebody before one felt impelled to give them a hamper – this is one from the list of a great West End store a year or two ago – containing one tin each of chicken, ox-tongue, steak, cocktail sausages, shrimps, ham, crab, dressed lobster and steak pie, plus one box of assorted cheese, and all costing 63 s. Then there was the writer of a handout I once received from a public relations firm flogging Italian tomato products whose Christmas hamper idea was for two tins of tomato juice packed in a beribboned wicker basket, price about 21s. as I remember, which would make, they ventured to suggest, a gift acceptable to ‘elderly people or neighbours’. As Christmas approaches, people (and neighbours, too, I dare say) do tend to rather morbid ideas about others. But that bad?
*
I’m not sure about the precise technical distinction between mushrooms and champignons, but Fortnum’s hampers this year have come out in a rash of tinned champignon butter and champignon bisque; and here and there in the parcels directed at overseas customers are ready-made crêpes Suzette brought over from the United States; perhaps pancakes travel exceptionally well, and if they don’t, they are, at any rate in Fortnumese, ‘Conversation Pieces of memorable quality.’ Harrods’ man seems to have been bemused by dates in glove boxes and something called Bakon Krisp; Self-ridges are bent on spreading the joyful tidings that you can buy shoestring potatoes in tins; Barkers’ cheese hampers would be rather sensible, except that Prize Dairy Stilton and Assorted Cheese Portions seem to make such unlikely basketfellows.
Inconsistency is characteristic of all Christmas hampers, but at least Christopher’s, the wine merchants of 94 Jermyn Street, is one firm which has eliminated it from their Christmas lists this year. A case containing a bottle of Manzanilla and two tins of Spanish green olives stuffed with anchovies, all for 25s., makes sense; so does a bottle of Sercial Madeira and two large jars of turtle soup for £2, and a bottle of champagne, plus a tin of foie gras for two, at 45 s., or a bottle of Club port and a jar of Stilton for 44s., are better value by a good deal than the contents of most store-chosen hampers, and since Messrs Christopher’s also sell first-pressing Provence olive oil and Barton and Guestiers fine white wine vinegar, it shouldn’t be beyond the ingenuity of their directors to devise a salad-making or kitchen case which would be cheap and imaginative.
The Spectator, 23 November, 1962
Traditional Christmas Dishes
How the food of a past age tasted seems to us almost impossible to imagine. We know roughly what our ancestors’ kitchens were like, what sort of pots they cooked in and what fuel they used. We have their cookery books and recipes and ample evidence of how their meals were composed. All this still doesn’t convey to us what the food tasted like to them.
The reproduction of dishes cooked precisely according to the recipes of a hundred or two hundred years ago is a fairly pointless undertaking, not only because our tastes, our methods of cookery and our equipment have so toally changed but because even the identical ingredients would no longer taste the same. Period clothes for the stage inevitably bear the stamp of contemporary fashion, however much trouble the designers and the cutters have taken over the authentic detail. So it is with food. And I always feel a bit dubious when I read about traditional English puddings and pies, cakes and creams, pickles, hams, cheeses and preserves being made ‘precisely according to a 300-year-old recipe’. Even were this really so, I can’t help thinking our ancestors would have considerable difficulty in recognizing them. Chemical feeding stuffs and new systems of breeding and fattening animals for market, vegetables and fruit grown in artificially fertilized soil, the pasteurizing of milk and cream, the production of eggs from battery hens, the refining of salt and flour, the substitution of beet sugar for cane, the preservation of fish by modern methods, and even the chlorination of water – in what way these developments have caused our food to deteriorate or to improve is not under discussion here, but certainly they have changed the nature of almost every single ingredient which comes into our kitchens.
In La Cuisine de Tous les Mois, a cookery book published in the nineties by Philéas Gilbert, a great teaching chef and one of Escoffier’s collaborators, is to be found the following very relevant observation. ‘Cookery,’ says Gilbert, ‘is as old as the world, but it must also remain, always, as modern as fashion.’ And as Christmas is the season when rather more improbable talk than usual goes on about what is called ‘traditional English fare’ I have tried to take Philéas Gilbert’s hint and to produce recipes which, while based on the old ones, are modern in treatment. It is a system which works so long as the spirit of the recipes is preserved, for then we do get some sense of a continuing tradition into our cookery, avoiding the farcical effect produced by ‘traditional’ recipes made up almost entirely of synthetic or substitute ingredients. I have not forgotten that recipe sent out a few years ago by a publicity firm and said by them to have been dropped by Richard the Third’s cook on the field of Bosworth. (A careless crowd, Richard and his followers.) By a fascinating coincidence this recipe called for the use of a highly advertised brand of modern vegetable cooking lard.
On the other hand, methods, quantities, and, especially, seasonings, have to be modernized, or all we get is a sort of folk-weave cooking perilously close to that hilarious land of which Miss Joyce Grenfell is queen, with the American advertisements of the British Travel Association for hand-maidens.
SPICED BEEF FOR CH
RISTMAS
This recipe has perhaps a somewhat unrealistic sound, but it is a lovely one; it is not exactly a recipe of kitchenette cookery, but those who have the space and the patience will find it well worth doing once in a while. Beef dry-pickled with spices, very different in flavour from the brine-pickled beef of the butchers, used to be a regular Christmas dish in a great many English country houses and farms. This is more a Christmas dish than any other time of the year,’ says John Simpson, cook to the Marquis of Buckingham, in his Complete System of Cookery (1806), ‘not but it may be done any time, and is equally good.’ He calls it rather grandly Bœuf de Chasse, but under the names of Hunting Beef or Beef à l’Ecarlate, or simply Spiced Beef, various forms of the recipe have certainly been known for at least three hundred years.
In former times huge rounds of beef weighing upwards of 20 lb. were required to lie in pickle for 3 to 4 weeks. Today, a modest 5 to 12 lb. piece will be ready for cooking after 10 to 14 days. Here are two prescriptions for the spices for varying quantities of meat. The presence of juniper berries among the pickling spices makes the recipe somewhat unusual. They appear in old recipes from Yorkshire, Cumberland, Wales and Sussex – those areas, in fact, where junipers grow wild on the hills. They can be bought from grocers who specialize in spices, such as Selfridges, and Coopers of Brompton Road.
Fora 10 to 12 lb. joint For a 5 to to 6 lb. joint
5 to 6 oz. light brown Barbados or other cane sugar 3 oz.
1 oz. saltpetre (to be bought from chemist’s) ½ oz.
6 oz. coarse kitchen salt 4 oz.
2 oz. black peppercorns 1 oz.
2 oz. juniper berries 1 oz.
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine Page 33
