BLACK GOLD: Tuber melanosporum

In France, the country with which they are most associated, truffles enjoy a mythical reverence. Renowned gourmand Jean-Anthelme Brillat Savarin (1755–1826) praised the truffle as ‘the jewel of French cooking; prized for its unique flavour and intoxicating aroma’ and writer Alexandre Dumas (1802–70) hailed it as ‘gastronome’s holy of holies’. Ancient Greeks and Romans attributed benefits both aphrodisiac and therapeutic.

All this over a peculiar little fungus that grows underground. Yet the truffle remains a hugely expensive – not to mention popular – delicacy and culinary fascination. Centuries of tradition surround truffle-buying etiquette: buyers at a market cannot touch a truffle; they are permitted only to look and to smell. Such is the seductive delicacy of the fungi.

French folklore suggests that truffles are born of summer claps of thunder, and around the end of the nineteenth century, France was producing as much as 1000 tons of truffles annually. Over the next hundred years, however, its output fell dramatically, and wartime destruction, acid rain and the development of traditional truffle land for food production reduced the country’s annual truffle harvest to 30 to 60 tons. All such tribulation pushed truffle prices well into the thousands of dollars per kilogram.

Before their harvest was a commercially lucrative enterprise, it was a simple passion for truffles that led to their proliferation through the forests of Europe. All animals, it seems, love truffles and, once sniffed out, the truffles would be dug up and eaten by pigs, snails, deer and rodents. By defecating somewhere else, the animal would effectively inoculate a new area with truffle spores.

French farmers also tried planting acorns in the hole from which a truffle had just been taken, in the hope that the elusive T. melanosporum fungus would attach itself to the roots of the sapling of the oak or hazelnut tree. Oak and hazelnut trees are the two main species known to host the Tuber melanosporum and the truffles are found near, but not attached to, the root systems of the trees, generally about 100 millimetres below ground level.

Relying on this method of proliferation, however, proved too uncertain and since the 1970s scientists have been working on ways to artificially produce the truffle.