The Untold Truth Of Truffles

The truffle may be a mainstay of haute cuisine today, but the first recorded instance of truffle-eaters had a less glamorous image. The Amorites were a nomadic group of grazers originating in northern Syria who scandalized the settled peoples of Mesopotamia with their lifestyle, including the digging up (and eating) of truffles.

The Amorites eventually settled into a kingdom, but never stopped craving truffles. One clay tablet from the period recorded a minor spat between an Amorite king and the governor of a truffle-producing district, in which the king accused the governor of sending bad truffles and keeping the good ones for himself, and the governor protesting he had simply sent what he had received from the harvesters (who I think were probably the ones hoarding the good stuff).

The truffles eaten by the Amorites were desert truffles, distinct from the European forest truffle but important throughout Middle Eastern history. The 4th century Babylonian Talmud contains passages discussing whether truffles emerged spontaneously from the soil or from the air itself. An 11th century Persian physician recommended them as a panacea for vomiting, weakness and wounds, and a 12thcentury Jewish physician included them in a list of foodstuffs promoting longevity. Today, desert truffles are roasted over evening fires by Bedouins, and served with camel milk in a soup in Saudi Arabia.

The medieval church had problems with the humble truffle for their reputation as an aphrodisiac. Truffles also clashed with the medieval theory of the humors, which held that foodstuffs which grew from the ground were undesirable. Truffles were seen as a food for peasants at best and "witch's fare" at worst. Such attitudes even existed outside the Christian world: in Muslim Spain, truffles were considered the food of the dissolute and thus proscribed from being sold near mosques.

The truffle enjoyed a turn-around during the period of the Avignon papacy, when the black truffle was introduced to papal court banquets and later spread to other elite tables. For the 14th century, white truffles became a important gift exchanged between Italian nobles. This set the stage for a high profile for European truffles which has persisted from the Renaissance to the modern day.

In the early 20th century, the white truffles of Alba lacked the international reputation of French black truffles. This began to change with efforts of Giacomo Morra, the owner of the Hotel Savona and founder of Tartufi Morra, the first company to commercially market white truffles. In 1949, Morra launched a promotional campaign based on sending the "best truffle of the year" to celebrity athletes, actors and politicians: Rita Hayworth in 1949, President Harry Truman in 1951, Winston Churchill in 1953, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio in 1954, Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie in 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower in 1959, and Pope Paul VI in 1965. Monroe for one was pleased, writing in a letter, "My darling Mr. Morra. I have never tasted anything so tasty and exciting."

The campaign was a clear success, and by the late 1950s hundreds of thousands of boxes of Alba truffles were being exported worldwide to high-end restaurants and legations of the Italian government. In 1945 at the Fiera Nazionale Tartufo Bianco d'Alba, or Alba Truffle Fair, white truffles cost around $3 for two pounds. In 2016, a 4.16 pound white truffle was sold at Sotheby's auction house for $61,250, though they usually run between $1,500 and $2,500 a pound.

In 2010, a shortage of black truffles in southern France led to a wave of related crime: truffle plantation raids, armed robbery of truffle traders, and the theft of truffle trees and truffle hunting dogs. Perhaps the most notorious incident occurred in the village of Grignan in the Rhone Valley when truffle producer Laurent Rambaud shot a man dead with a pump-action shotgun after discovering him on his property stealing his truffles. The victim, Ernest Pardo, had a prior history of truffle thefts. Rambaud claimed he thought the man was armed, though it turned out the intruder was only carrying a truffle trowel. When Rambaud was arrested for murder, local farmers protested against the arrest, referencing the increasing tensions caused by truffle-related crime in the region. Rambaud was ultimately sentenced to eight years in prison for unpremeditated murder.

French federation of truffle producers president Jean-Charles Savignac told the Independent, "This is the first time that anyone has been killed but there have been scores of other incidents when there have been scuffles or shots fired in the air. Maybe now, the authorities will start to take this problem more seriously."

Similar situations have been reported in truffle-producing regions of Italy, particularly the kidnapping of truffle-hunting dogs which can take up to four years to train. In one incident, a trained truffle dog was stolen and only returned after a ransom of one million Italian lire had been paid.

In the 1990s, chefs started using so-called truffle oil in their recipes, advertising the presence of truffle on their menus with pride. Trouble was, much of the truffle oil used didn't originate from the soil but from the lab. These products were usually the product of mixing olive oil with the organic chemical 2,4-dithiapentane, which is only the most prominent of many aromatic compounds which give truffles their distinct flavor. Many chefs either had no idea the truffle oil they were using was a chemical fake, or were happy to lie to their customers.

While fake truffle oil was temptingly cheap and convenient, it had the downside of having only a superficial, one-note resemblance to real truffles. This caused some to insist they didn't like truffles, often due to the fact they had never had the real deal. In the words of Serious Eats' Ed Levine, "Comparing truffle oil to real truffles is like comparing sniffing dirty underwear to having sex." By the early 21st century, the tide had turned against fake truffle oil, notably in 2011 when Gordon Ramsey lambasted a Master Chef contestant who put it on eggs, calling it "one of the most pungent, ridiculous ingredients ever known to chef. I can't believe you've just done that. I think you just put your apron up in flames."

The smell of good truffles has been historically hard to describe, with comparisons ranging from mold to sweet body odor to sulphurous garlic. The fact is, it isn't really the fungus itself that is all that tasty, but rather the gas it gives off, part of which is produced by the fungi themselves and part of which is produced by bacteria and microbes living within. One major component is the molecule androstenone, described as having an aroma somewhere between sandalwood, vanilla and urine. Androstenone is also produced by randy male pigs, which is why female pigs make such good truffle hunters.

While most truffle scent elements are generated by both the fungus and their microbe colonizers, such as sulphurous Dimethyl sulphide, chocolate-and-whiskey-like 3-methyl-1-butanol and grassy hexanal, some rarer elements may be purely the product of bacteria. To truly determine how much of the truffle's attractive stink is innate and how much originates from bacteria would require researchers to raise microbe-free truffles in laboratory conditions. Sadly, this is currently beyond the capabilities of modern science.

In 1999, mushroom hunter Tom Michaels began to try his hand at cultivating Perigord black truffles in eastern Tennessee, a risky venture given the six to ten years it takes go from initial spore inoculation to the production of saleable truffles and the fact that multiple expensive attempts to cultivate truffles in the United States had floundered since the 1970s. However by 2007, Michaels had his first success. He described the moment to GQ magazine: "I was blowing leaves, doing orchard maintenance, and I almost stepped on a little blister in the ground. It was roundish, black, sitting at the surface. I had looked at my trees, didn't think they were doing so well. I figured, 'Wait until next year.' This was under my foot. I almost crushed it. It was epiphany. It was eureka. And I almost crushed it."

Michaels sold the fruits of his experiment to local chefs and soon joined forces with Blackberry Farm's restaurants to exploit the truffles, even importing a trained truffle dog from Italy to help with the project. While the yield of Tennessee truffles varies according to the weather conditions each year, the American truffle hunters have an advantage over importers of French truffles: they don't have to worry about the adulterating presence of musk truffles, an inferior cousin of Tuber melanosporum often mixed in with true Perigords to make a few extra bucks.