The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [114]
Matteo’s best dog walked into the room and smiled as Matteo continued, “A white truffle takes between forty-four and eighty-eight days to grow, after which it ripens in the space of four hours. If not discovered, it will continue to live for only twelve days when the earth is very wet or up to thirty-five days when the earth is dry. Then it becomes waterlogged and spongy and loses its appeal. If you pick it before it matures, it will never develop its perfume, and you will have destroyed the root, the mother, and no truffle will grow there next year.
“During the four hours of ripening a truffle gives off three distinct aromas—the first is sour and musky like the bottom of a barrel, then a fungus smell like fresh porcini, and finally the stupendous perfume of the white truffle. If you pick a truffle at any time in these four hours, it will continue to ripen because it is a living thing. But if you wait until the third perfume, another trifulau may discover it first. Many dogs can detect the last perfume, but only one dog in a thousand can smell the first aroma.”
We showed him our six tiny truffles. “My beautiful dog would never have bothered with those.” Matteo laughed. The heaviest truffle Matteo ever found weighed twenty-three ounces. “It was so large that it pushed its way up through the earth,” Matteo says, “and I tripped over it.”
Cesare announced that at five-thirty the next morning he would take us to the truffle market in Ceva, a half hour’s drive south. Evening stretched into early morning with the aid of many bottles of Barolo and Barbaresco, glasses of grappa distilled from the pomace of these grapes, and a deep draft from a roadside spring possessing diuretic properties. Cesare’s friends sang ballads about the young women of the Langhe and teased us when we grew anxious about getting a few hours’ sleep before the truffle market.
A few hours later we had become truffle traders. We arrived at Ceva just past six and parked in a large paved market area, deserted except for fifteen trifulau, who stood in groups of two or three in the cold dawn. Somewhere on each of them you could detect the bulge of truffles, in the pockets of their tweed jackets or tucked under their heavy sweaters.
Cesare needed five kilograms of truffles for his restaurant in the coming week, and he brought seven or eight million lire in cash, about five or six thousand dollars. Other towns have more famous markets, like the one in Alba, but they attract tourists who pay too much and unscrupulous sellers who bring in truffles from Umbria and Tuscany or even Bulgaria and Romania and perfume each batch with one genuine tartufo bianco d’Alba. The market in Alba is fine for setting the price of local white truffles, but the market in Ceva is Cesare’s favorite for stocking up.
As we walked toward one group of trifulau, they scattered to the farthest corners of the market, thinking that Cesare had brought revenue agents with him. When Cesare reassured them that we were just Americans, they opened their brown-paper packages and held them up for sniffing. Cesare paid 420,000 lire for a 400-gram batch, or $23 an ounce, a very good price. Restaurants in the Piedmont typically add $16 to your bill for each dish containing truffles. One fine restaurant has a small table by the entrance to the dining room holding a scale, a pile of ten large white truffles under a glass dome—perhaps $2,000 worth—and a carefully lettered sign: TARTUFI BIANCHI. 3200 LIRE PER GRAMMA. Every table chooses its very own truffle, which is weighed before and