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A Dog's Life...
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Parisian pooches
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Love
Root
Is the truffle an aphrodisiac? The fungus's
fame for funneling the passions resulted largely from its shape.
According to the Doctrine of Signatures, a plant's appearance betokened
its medicinal attributes: truffles, with their knobby, roundish
form, would give strength and stamina to a man's private parts.
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The black truffle's penetrating aroma is
also said to ooze promises of sexual delight. Epicureans liken the
scent to that of the tousled sheets of a brothel bed. Bio chemists,
drawing on a less exotic frame of reference, have identified the
pheromone in truffles as the same type that makes male pigs alluring
to sows.
Legend has it that the first being on the
planet to devour truffles was a female wild boar. A farmer watched
the sow dig up and eat the presumably poisonous underground fungi
and waited patiently for her to die. Instead, she flew into a fit
of passion and attracted so many lovesick suitors that the species
began to proliferate in hot haste. Hoping to become fruitful and
multiply, the story goes, the farmer sampled the magical tuber.
His previously childless marriage reportedly gave rise to a brood
of 13.
Indeed, long before human beings discovered
truffles, wild pigs -- from which domestic swine are descended --
played a role in the life cycle of the fungi.
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Pigs still love truffles.
Today, truffle gatherer Daniel Chaume uses a 250 kilo sow to
find the mushrooms. At the foot of a young oak, Magali noses
the ground with her eager snout.
© Stéphane Herbert |
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Misguided female boars would dig them up in fits of lust and scatter
their spores throughout the forest. The irresistible pheromone,
known as androstenol, is produced in the testicles and secreted
in the saliva of the boar. This chemical sexual attractant transports
the inamorata into a fever of unbridled passion. Interestingly,
androstenol is also present in women's urine and secreted by men's
armpit glands.
Whether truffles really have amatory powers
is open to question. The poet's conviction that a whiff of the fungi
will make you sizzle as a lover is balanced by the scientist's suspicion
that they do the trick only for sows. -- S.U.
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Perfect
Partnership
Tuber melanosporum is the product of a
mysterious marriage between a subterranean mushroom and the roots
of a tree. The truffle itself is the fruiting body of a fungal colony
and usually grows beneath the drip line of the outermost branches
of hazels and oaks. Because it cannot produce its own food, the
fungus unites with a tree's hairlike rootlets to develop symbiotic
organs, called mycorrhizae, through which it feeds on carbohydrates
and other nutrients photosynthesized in the tree canopy.
In turn, the mycorrhizae emit hyphae, gossamer
threads that extend in great webs through the soil, seeking moisture
and minerals, including the vital nutrient phosphorus, which they
share with the tree roots. At the same time, the hyphae spread the
mycorrhizal infection to neighboring roots, forming a protective
shelf around them against disease-causing organisms and infusing
the soil with antibiotics. This subterranean activity is revealed
by scorched earth, or "terre brûléee," the
near absence of surface vegetation.
Tuber melanosporum is a polygamist, inasmuch
as its symbiotic marriage extends to truffles flies, wild boars,
and many small mammals, all of which are lured by its fragrance
to dine and participate in the diffusion of spores. The irony is
that while these "pests" are the bane of the farmer and
forager, they are also links in the chain of interdependency that
gives truffles life. -- S.U.
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Truffles
Through the Ages
For as long as truffles have been collected --
nearly 4,000 years -- they have held us in their spell. Their extravagant
history as inducers of romance and as the pinnacle of haute cuisine
began when the ancients attributed them with magical powers. Not
knowing what to make of them, sages identified truffles as calluses
of the earth, the product of lightening striking the ground, the
children of the gods, or things that grew from the spit of witches.
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Babylonian royals were partial to truffles
wrapped in papyrus and roasted in ashes. The chefs of Egyptian pharaohs
embellished dishes with them. They won rave reviews from the likes
of Pythagoras and Theophrastus.
But trufflemania really took off when the
Greeks introduced them tot he Romans, Cicero, Pliny, and Plutarch
classified them as aphrodisiacs, inspiring their country men, characteristically,
to take pleasures to extremes.
The fall of Roman civilization prompted
the tubers' near oblivion from historical records for 1,000 years.
In the Middle Ages, monks were prohibited from eating truffles for
fear they would forget their calling and get "hot under the
frock" for medieval maidens.
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Truffles are still
used in some of the richest dishes imaginable such as this
ice cream à la truffe by chef Pierree Core of the famous
Aubere de la Truffe in the village of Sorges.
© Stéphane Herbert
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The long embargo on the forbidden fungi ceased with the Renaissance.
François I surrendered to their charms and made them a favorite
delicacy at sumptuous banquets at Fontainebleau. Louis XIV commissioned
the first research devoted to cultivating them. But not until the
early 1800s, when Brillat-Savarin spread the word that truffles
should be cooked for their own gastronomical merits, did they get
the attention they deserved.
The dawn of the golden age of the truffle
-- when annual production reached almost 2,000 tons in the late
19th century and Périgoridans gorged on the tubers as if
they were turnips-soon faded to dusk. World War I took the lives
of so many peasants that survivors had to turn their attention from
truffles to staple crops. By World War II, yearly harvests had plunged
to 400 tons. A postwar exodus from the country side left most truffières
derelict. Production hit bottom in the 1960s.
Many abandoned truffières have since
been reclaimed by a new generation of farmers and returned to their
former fertility. The discovery that tree roots infected with fungal
spores can produce truffles has made artificial cultivation, for
better or for worse, a reality. -- S.U.
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Breaking
Ground:
Truffles Around the World
The black diamond of Périgord is
now mined in soils all over the world. Farmer Franklin Garland of
Hillsborough, North Carolina, first planted mycorrihized hazels
and oaks in virtual Périgordian soil in the early 1980s.
After years of patience, he started harvesting truffles in 1993
-- "just like the ones grown in France," he says. He is
now the western hemisphere's first commercially successful trufficulteur.
New Zealand is also home to a nascent truffle
industry. Sine 1987, some 20 locations with climates and soils similar
to Périgord's have been cultivated between Alexandra, in
Central Otago, and Ohiwa, in the Bay of Plenty.
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France is still on
top when it comes to culinary use of truffles. At the famous
Auberge de la Trufffe in Sorges, Jean Marc, maitre d'hotel,
rushes to serve a delectable truffle omlette.
© Stéphane Herbert
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If New Zealand doesn't break the French stranglehold on black truffles,
perhaps Spain will. The tuber now grows throughout the country's northeast,
where the world's largest truffière is found in Naveleno, in
the province of Soria. The food company Arotz planted 330,000 mychorrhized
oaks there on 600 hectares of land a generation ago. Early estimates
suggest that this single farm could someday double global production
of Tuber melanosporum. -- S.U.
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