by Peter Mayle
So the starting price is 2,000 francs a kilo. With a little nudging along the way from various agents and middlemen, by the time the truffle reaches its spiritual home in the kitchens of Bocuse or Troisgros, the price will probably have doubled. Or, if you are a prosperous and confident cook, you can always drop in to Fauchon on your way home and pay 6,000 francs a kilo. (They accept cheques.)
There are several reasons why these seemingly unrealistic prices continue to be paid, and continue to rise each year. The first and most basic is that nothing in the world smells or tastes like fresh truffles except fresh truffles. One small specimen not even the size of a walnut is enough to transform the flavour of an entire dish. The aroma has been described as “divine, and slightly suspect, like everything that smells really good.” It is also astonishingly pervasive. It can find its way through folds of paper, even plastic. A whiff is all you need; to inhale a more concentrated dose is too much and could put you off all thoughts of eating, so heavy and rich-rotten is the smell. But used with discretion, the truffle is an incomparable treat, and lives up to Brillat-Savarin’s description: “a luxury of grands seigneurs and kept women.” (The nineteenth-century gastronome was presumably referring to the truffle’s reputation as an aphrodisiac, which has yet to be scientifically verified.)
Today, with all the sophisticated techniques of planned cultivation at our disposal, you would think that truffles could be grown to order, cropped like any other delicacy and sold with several zeros knocked off the price. God knows, the French are trying; you will quite often come across fields in Vaucluse that some optimist has planted with truffle oaks and ‘keep off’ notices. But the propagation of truffles seems to be a haphazard affair that is understood only by nature—thus adding to the rarity and the price—and human attempts at truffle breeding haven’t come to much. Until they do, there is only one way to get your hands on fresh truffles without spending a fortune, and that’s the old-fashioned way.
It involves timing, knowledge, patience and either a pig or a trained hound. Truffles grow a few inches under the ground, near the roots of certain oak or hazelnut trees. During the season, from November until March, they can be tracked down by nose, provided you possess sensitive enough equipment. The most effective truffle detector is the pig, which is born with a fondness for the taste, and whose sense of smell in this case is superior to the dog’s. Alas, the pig is not content to wag his tail and point when he has discovered a truffle: he wants to eat it. And, as anyone who has tried to reason with a pig on the brink of gastronomic ecstasy will tell you, he is not easily distracted. Nor is he of a size you can fend off with one hand while you rescue the truffle with the other. There are 120 pounds or more of him, rigid with porcine determination. He won’t be budged, try as you might. Given this fundamental design fault, it is not surprising that the lighter and more tractable dog has become increasingly popular.
Unlike pigs, dogs do not instinctively seek out truffles; they have to be trained for the work. So you start by taking something that the dog likes—a slice of the locally cured saucisson, for instance—and you rub it on a truffle or dip it in truffle juice so that the dog begins to associate the smell of truffles with a taste of heaven. Little by little, or by leaps and bounds if you’re lucky enough to own a particularly smart dog, he will come to share your enthusiasm for truffles until, after weeks or months, he is ready for field work. If your training has been thorough, if your dog is temperamentally suited to the task in hand, and if you know where to go, you will find yourself with a chien truffer which can point the way to the buried treasure. Then, just as he begins to scratch for it, you bribe him away with more sausage and very, very carefully uncover what you hope will be a lump of black gold. (So called by the locals because the inside of a truffle is the deepest, richest black you will ever see. A black olive, placed next to a truffle, looks pallid.)
There is a third method, for those unfortunates without a pig or a dog. Again, you have to know where to go, but this time you have to wait for the right weather conditions as well. When the sun is shining on the roots of a likely looking oak, approach cautiously and, with a stick, prod gently around the base of the tree. If a startled fly should rise vertically from the vegetation, mark the spot and dig. You might have disturbed a member of the fly family whose genetic passion is to lay its eggs on the truffle (doubtless adding a certain je ne sais quoi to the flavour). Peasants in Vaucluse like this technique because walking around with a stick is less conspicuous than walking around with a pig and secrecy can be more easily preserved. Truffle hunters, like good journalists, protect their sources.
It is, as you can see, a labour-intensive, unpredictable, and rather murky business. And nowhere is the murk thicker than in the sales and distribution department. Admittedly, there hasn’t been a truffle scandal to compare with that unpleasantness in Bordeaux a few years ago, but nevertheless there is talk that not every transaction is conducted with scrupulous honesty. Any prospective customer indelicate enough to mention these mischievous rumours to a truffle man is likely to be answered by an innocent shrug of disbelief that human nature could sink so low. It is, therefore, with no verifiable facts whatsoever that I report the following alleged truffle scams.
The first, should it ever have happened, would he virtually impossible to prove. With everything edible in France, certain areas have the reputation for producing the best. Nyons produces the best olives, Dijon the best mustard, Cavaillon the best melons, Normandy the best cream, and so on. The best truffles, it is generally agreed, come from the Périgord region of south western France. Naturally, one pays more for them. But how do you know that the truffle you buy in Cahors hasn’t been dug up several hundred kilometres away in Vaucluse? Unless you know and trust your supplier, you can’t be sure. One estimate puts the figure of ‘naturalised’ truffles sold in Périgord but born elsewhere as high as fifty percent.
Then there is the mysterious phenomenon of the truffle that somehow gains weight between leaving the ground and arriving on the scales. It could be that it has been gift-wrapped in an extra coating of earth. On the other hand, it is possible that a heavier substance altogether has somehow found its way inside the truffle itself—invisible until, in mid-slice, your knife lays bare a sliver of metal.
After hearing stories like these, you may decide to leave the purchase of fresh truffles to the experts and take the safer option of buying your truffles in a can. You will sacrifice some of the flavour, but they will still taste good, and they will certainly still be expensive. What they may not be, however, is French. It has been hinted that some French cans with French labels actually contain Italian or Spanish truffles. If this is true, it must be the most profitable and least publicised act of cooperation ever between Common Market countries.
And yet, despite whispers of chicanery and prices that become more ridiculous each year, the French continue to follow their noses and dig into their pockets, occasionally with a generosity of spirit and a delight in gastronomy that is worth recording.
Here is an example.
My favourite local restaurant is, for the moment, unspoiled by the attentions of the Guide Michelin inspectors, perhaps because it is also the village bar and the headquarters of the boules club, and not sufficiently upholstered or pompous. Old men play cards in the front; clients of the restaurant eat in the back, and they eat food that in my experience is at least up to one-star standard. Prices are correct. The owner cooks; Madame, his wife, takes the orders; other members of the family help at the tables and in the kitchen. It is a comfortable neighbourhood restaurant with no apparent intention of hopping aboard the culinary merry-go-round that turns talented cooks into brand names and pleasant restaurants into temples of the expense account.
The chef is a sucker for fresh truffles. He has his suppliers, and he pays, as everyone must, in cash, without the benefit of a receipt. For him, this is a substantial and legitimate business cost that cannot be set against his profits, because there is no supporting evid
ence on paper to account for the outlay. Also, he refuses to raise his prices to a level that will offend his clientele—even when the dishes are studded with truffles. (In winter, in Provence, the clientele is local and careful. The silly money doesn’t usually come down until Easter.)
I went there to eat one cold night in December. On the serving table was a copper pan containing several thousand francs’ worth of truffles. On the menu was the chef’s fresh truffle omelette. Madame was doing her best to be philosophical about the disparity between the cost of the raw material and the price on the menu, and I asked her why her husband did it. A shrug—shoulders and eyebrows going up, corners of the mouth turning down, “Pour faire plaisir (to make people happy),” she said. I had the omelette. It was better than sublime.
Note for supporters of white truffles: since the best of these come from Piedmont, since Piedmont is by a geographical mistake in Italy, and since the French are chauvinists down to the ground and beneath, the white truffle is not given the same respect here as is its black cousin.
8
Dear Old Things
It has become a minor sport. From the artfully decorated boutiques of SoHo and Greenwich Village to the flea markets of London and Paris, from upstate New York to the rolling tarmac of Los Angeles, hundreds of thousands of hopeful and acquisitive people spend their weekend afternoons sifting through the relics of other people’s houses. Indeed, so popular has the sport become that it has spawned its own ungainly verb. We go antiquing.
What is the allure of eighteenth-century chamber pots, worm-cracked and fuzzy mirrors? Do we need, in our comfortable and well equipped homes, an umbrella stand made from an elephant’s hind leg? A refectory table with a one in ten gradient? A battered saucepan that is guaranteed to wobble? A spittoon? A sconce? No, of course we don’t need them. But we snap them up—often at ridiculous prices—and congratulate ourselves on our good taste and keen eye. This ancient object, encrusted with grime, smelling of a hundred years’ of dust and in need of a complete overhaul, is a great buy.
A flourishing international industry has grown up to service our magpie instincts, shipping dressers from Wales to California, quilts from Pennsylvania to Geneva, cherubs from Italy to Manhattan—criss-crossing the Atlantic, with a few zeros added to their prices each time they change hands. And still we buy. But why?
The reason most commonly given is a tribute to man’s eternal optimism (which history has proved to be a dangerously misguided sentiment): we believe we’re getting a bargain. Other people make expensive mistakes, but not us, even though all our experience tells us that bargains are as thin on the ground as free lunches are.
And if, in the face of a friend’s disbelief at the price we paid for an Art Nouveau coat-rack, our conviction about the short-term-bargain theory should falter, we can always fall back on the long-term-investment excuse. Maybe it seems like a lot of money now, but just you wait five years. According to the dealer (a professional optimist with a fine disregard for architectural possibilities), coat-racks are ready to go through the roof.
There is always a chance that they will and that a few hundred dollars will turn into a few thousand dollars. But unless you happen to be in the business of buying and selling, that is not the real motivation. The true antique addict is an amateur in the proper sense of the word. He does it for love, as a pleasant indulgence, as a hobby that rewards him with a number of satisfactions.
The first of these is a preference for the old over the new. Naturally, the antique pine chest of drawers won’t be as functional as something that was put together last week in a factory in North Carolina; it will be a little warped, the drawers will stick, the knobs will come off. Despite all that, it has a charm that can’t be reproduced, which compensates for its eccentricities. The wood has the glow and smoothness that come from years of use. The shape is not quite regular, because it was cut and planed and finished by hand. It has a little of the maker’s personality in it, and that makes it unique.
So you decide to buy it. And this—the foreplay leading up to the purchase—is a pleasure in itself for the amateur. Putting aside for the moment his role as connoisseur of all that is old and beautiful, he becomes the hardnosed haggler, the prince of negotiators, the bargain-hunter extraordinaire—or he would, if he could understand the gibberish that is written on the price tag.
It is a tiresome habit of many antique dealers to mark their prices in code. Sometimes it is a straightforward substitution of letters for numerals, so that A equals 1, D equals 4, and so on. More often, the letters are given complicated values that make no sense at all to anyone other than the dealer, and so we find that our chest of drawers is clearly marked ‘XPT.’
What does that mean? Would he accept XOS in cash for a quick sale? Why can’t the rascal mark his prices in dollars and cents like they do at Bloomingdale’s? What is he playing at?
The game is called ‘matching the price to the customer.’ While you have been looking at the chest of drawers, the dealer has been looking at you, and you’re both considering the same question—how much?—from different points of view. Depending on how you’re dressed, how interested you seem to be in buying and how interested he is in selling, the price might fluctuate significantly. But you’re not to know that. It is one of the dealer’s little secrets.
Don’t let it worry you because you can play the game too. Call the man over, and get a price from him. Whatever figure he mentions, brush it aside. No, no, you say. Give me the trade price. (Normally, quite a lot less.)
The dealer will look at you through narrowed eyes. Are you really another dealer, or just a robber in a well-cut suit? You give him a business card and show him your cheque book, and there it is, printed proof: ‘COOPER ANTIQUES, PERIOD FURNITURE, VIEWING BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.’
I know a man who has been doing this for years, and he has now completely refurnished his house at special trade prices, even though he’s no more a dealer than my butcher’s dog is. When I asked him if he thought that this was the kind of sharp practice that an unsporting judge might describe as fraudulent misrepresentation, he just grinned. Didn’t I know? Most antiques bounce back and forth between dealers for years before they find places in private houses. All he was doing, in his own small way, was helping to speed up the turnover of stock, giving the dealers the money to go out and buy more antiques from other dealers. The way he saw it, he was doing the entire business a service.
Even if you’re not prepared to disguise yourself as a gentleman dealer, you must still resist the impulse to pay the asking price. Make an offer, but not before making a few disparaging remarks about rickety legs, dents, scars and interesting blemishes that have accrued with the passage of centuries. The dealer expects it. In fact, he might be hurt if you didn’t point them out, because he may have spent several days in his workshop putting them on.
The process of aging an object or a piece of furniture overnight—or ‘distressing’ it—is an art in itself, and it is miraculous what a talented distresser can do with rusty nails and pumice stone and a mixture of soot and beeswax. More miraculous still is how three-legged chairs can suddenly sprout a fourth leg, marquetry with a bad case of acne can regain a smooth complexion, and tables originally constructed for midgets can grow to adult height.
Inevitably, some killjoy will try to belittle these marvels of inventive restoration. We all have at least one acquaintance who is a self-appointed expert and whose mission in life is to tell you that you have bought a fake. Shaking his head at your foolishness, he will point out in great detail what you were too dumb to see for yourself. It’s not a bad piece, he’ll say, but you could hardly call it an antique. But what the hell. Does it matter? If the piece pleases you, if the faking has been done well, who cares? You bought it to live with, not to sell. The antique know-it-all is a pest who should be locked up in the bowels of the Metropolitan Museum to study pre-Columbian bidets.
Occasionally the situation will be reversed and a genuine piece will be treat
ed with as little respect as would a sheet of plywood. I was once in a Manhattan antique shop when a decorator came in with his client. (I knew he was a decorator by the effortless way in which he spent thousands of dollars in the first ten minutes.) He paused in front of a magnificent fifteenth-century oak dining table—absolutely authentic in wonderful condition, a piece of great rarity. He heard the price without flinching. “We’ll take it,” he said, “but you’ll have to cut two feet off the end so that it will fit in the breakfast alcove.”
The dealer was in shock. I don’t like to see a man wrestle with his conscience, so I didn’t wait to see whether he sold the table or whether his principles got the better of him. Personally, I like antiques to be used rather than worshipped, but I did wonder how the table’s maker would have felt about his work being chopped up and put in a breakfast nook.
Over the years, I have been attracted to a wide variety of antiques, an admirer of all and an expert on none. I have liked Chippendale chairs, Chinese porcelain, kitchen artefacts, Lalique glass, Georgian commodes—just about everything except art, which is a separate and overpriced world of its own. Unfortunately for my aspirations as a collector, I have realised that nature did not equip me for the task. I can’t stand living with objects that I have to tiptoe round and hardly dare to touch. I like to be able to sit on chairs, eat at tables, drink from glasses, and collapse onto beds without feeling that I am committing sacrilege or risking breakage and financial ruin. I now live with furniture and objects that are either virtually indestructible or easily replaceable. Old, perhaps, but sturdy. I avoid fragility.
