Omelette and a Glass of Wine (45 page)

1.
Prospect Books, 45 Lamont Road, London, s.w.10.

Trufflesville Regis

On Saturday morning the entire main shopping thoroughfare of the Piedmontese market town of Alba in the Italian province of Cuneo is closed to traffic. The stalls are set up in the middle of the street, and the awnings stretch right across it from pavement to pavement. Coming from the big piazza Savona you pass first stall upon stall of clothes, bales of cloth, household wares, plastics, and, on the ground, huge copper polenta pots. The vegetable, fruit, and cheese stalls fill the vast piazza at the far end of the street and ramble right round and to the back of the great red
duomo.
(There are some very remarkable carved and inlaid choir stalls in Alba’s cathedral. The artist, Bernardo Cidonio, has created magnificent fruitwood panels showing the local landscapes, castles and towers, architectural vistas, and still-lifes of the fruit and even of the cooking pots of the region. These treasures, dating from 1501, unheralded by guidebooks, shouldn’t be missed.)

At this season in Alba there are beautiful pears and apples, and especially interesting red and yellow peppers, in shape rather like the outsize squashy tomatoes of Provence, very fleshy and sweet, a speciality of the neighbourhood. What we have really come to Alba to see and eat, though, are white truffles, and these are to be found in the poultry, egg, and mushroom market held in yet another enormous piazza (Alba seems to be all piazzas, churches, red towers, and white truffles), and will not start, they say, until nine-thirty. In the meantime there are baskets of prime mushrooms to look at and to smell, chestnut and ochre-coloured
funghi porcini
, the cèpes or
Boletus edulis
common in the wooded country of Piedmont, and some fine specimens of the beautiful red-headed
Amanita caesarea
, the young of which are enclosed in an egg-shaped white cocoon, or volva, which has earned them their name of
funghi uovali
, egg mushrooms – although in Piedmont, where everything possible is kingly, the
Amanita caesarea
are
funghi reali
, royal mushrooms. They are the
oronges
considered by some French fungi-fanciers as well as by the Piedmontese to be the best of all mushrooms.

In Piedmont the royal mushroom is most commonly eaten as an hors-d’œuvre, sliced raw and very fine, prepared only when you order it. Since few Piedmontese restaurateurs supply printed menus, expecting their clients to be familiar with the specialities, it is well
for tourists to know that they won’t get fungi unless they ask for them. The basket will then be brought to your table, you pick out the ones you fancy, making as much fuss as possible about the freshness and size, instruct the waiter as to their preparation
(funghi porcini
are best grilled), and they are charged according to weight.

As far as the beautiful salad of tangerine-bordered, white-and-cream cross-sections of
funghi reali
is concerned, normally it is seasoned only with salt, olive oil, and lemon juice, but at this season you have to be pretty quick off the mark to prevent the Piedmontese in general and the Albesi in particular from destroying this exquisite and delicate mushroom with a shower of
tartufi bianchi.

It is not that the white truffles, which are not white but putty-coloured, are not entirely marvellous and extraordinary. It is simply that their scent is so overpowering and all-penetrating that nothing delicate can stand up to their assault. The one creation evolved by the Piedmontese that accords perfectly with the white truffle is the famous
fonduta
, a dish made from the fat, rich Val d’Aosta cheese called Fontina, cut into cubes and steeped in milk for an essential minimum of twelve hours, then cooked, by those very few who have the knack, to a velvety, egg-thickened cream with an appearance entirely guileless until the rain of truffles, sliced raw in flake-fine slivers with a special type of
mandoline-cutter
, descends upon it. There is something about Fontina cheese, a hint of corruption and decadence in its flavour, that gives it a true affinity with the rootless, mysterious tuber dug up out of the ground.

The black truffles (
Tuber melanosporum
) of Périgord are, traditionally, sniffed out by pigs. In Provence and the Languedoc, dogs are trained to locate and indicate the presence of truffles by scratching the patches of ground that conceal them. In Piedmont the white truffle (
Tuber magnatum
) is located in the same way. In the village of Roddi, not far from Alba, there is a training establishment for truffle hounds. Most of the dogs are mongrels. Valuable property, these Bobbis and Fidos, to the farmers and peasants who go about their truffle-digging secretively by dawn light, bearing their little hatchets for extracting the treasure from the earth. No system of truffle cultivation in the technical sense has ever yet been evolved, but according to Professor Gagliardi and Doctor Persiani in their Italian book on mushrooms and truffles, truffles can be and are propagated successfully by the reburying of mature truffles and spores close to the lateral roots of oaks and beeches, and in chalky ground with a southerly aspect. In five to ten years the chosen area
may or may not yield a truffle harvest. Truffle veins peter out in forty to fifty years; laying truffles down for the future seems to be a sensible precaution.

The season for the true
tartufi bianchi
is brief. It opens in September. During the second week of October, Alba is in full fête with banquets, speeches, visiting celebrities, and its very own truffle queen. By November the truffles are at their most potent and plentiful. By the end of January the ball is over.

In the Morra family’s Hôtel Savona in Alba, visitors staying in rooms on the side are likely to be wakened early during the truffle season. The Morra canning and truffle paste factory starts up at six in the morning. It is not so much the noise, a very moderate one as Italian noises go, that gets you out of bed, as the smell of the truffles being bashed to paste, emulsified with oil, and packed into tubes for a sandwich spread. ‘Truffle paste? Is there such a thing?’ asks a
cavaliere
whose little shopwindow in the main street of Alba is pasted over with newspaper clippings and announcements to the effect that he is the
principe dei tartufi.
Certainly, somebody is due to succeed the Morra dynasty, still regarded as kings of the Alba truffle domain, even though the Morra manner of running a hotel and restaurant (its Michelin star must be the most misplaced of any in the whole Guide) is not so much regal as reminiscent of a Hollywood gangster-farce. All the same, the Morra truffle paste not only exists but does retain something of the true scent and flavour, which tinned whole truffles rarely do.

Contradiction and confusion in all things concerning the white truffle are normal in Alba, where the most harmless questions are met with evasive answers and where, for all the information one would ever be able to extract from the truffle dealers, the things might be brought by storks or found under gooseberry bushes. In the market there is no display of the truffle merchants’ wares. The knobbly brown nuggets are not weighed out and are not even to be seen unless you are a serious customer. Some three dozen silent men in sombre suits stand in a huddle outside the perimeter of the poultry market. Only if you ask to see the truffles will one of these truffle men extract from his pocket a little paper- or cloth-wrapped parcel. You buy by nose and a sound, dry appearance.

About the storage of truffles the Albesi are comparatively communicative, if not very enlightening. ‘What is the best way to keep
tartufi?
’

‘You wrap them in a piece of stuff…’

Another dealer interrupts, ‘No, you keep them in a jar of rice.’

The
cavaliere
says this is nonsense. Rice, he says, makes the truffles wet, and they must have air. (Nobody here seems to have heard of the Bolognesi method of keeping truffles dry in sawdust or wood shavings.) The
cavaliere
says jauntily that the ones we buy from him will last ten days. They are packed in tissue paper in four-inch-square packing cases. They have so much air that on the drive back to Turin from Alba we are nearly strangled by the smell. It is glorious, but it is dissipating itself, and the truffles are weakening with every kilometre. By the time we get them back to London in three days they will be ghosts.

The
cavaliere’s
ten days was a hefty overestimation, but his recommendation of the cooking at the Buoi Rossi (The Red Ox), the unmodernized Piedmontese country-town inn in the via Cavour, was worthwhile. In the quiet old courtyard, with its characteristic vista of Piedmontese arches and open loft stacked with the copper-red corncobs, we drank a bottle of red Dolcetto, a local wine and a dry and genuine one, and ate some bread and butter spread with truffles. (This is one of the best ways of eating them if you can ever persuade a Piedmontese to allow you such a simple treat.) We returned three days running for meals.

The Red Ox is not mentioned in Michelin and is a simple
albergo-ristorante
where honest, decent, and cheap food, which includes a genuine
fonduta
, is to be had. There were also delicious pears baked in their skins and sprinkled with coarse sugar, and fresh, fat
fagioli alla regina
, oven-cooked. The local wines are all they should be. In typical Italian fashion the
padrona
was unable to tell us more about her first-class vintage Barolo than that it comes from her cousin, one Enrico Borgogno, a grower in Barolo itself, and that it was, she thought, ten years old. The finer points of vintages and vintage years do not preoccupy Italian inn-keepers. Unless it is standardized and commercialized out of all recognition, two bottles of precisely the same growth are likely to resemble each other in about the same degree as the black truffle of Périgord resembles the white one of Piedmont.

The Compleat Imbiber
7, 1964

The Magpie System

An organization we could do with at Christmas time is one which would provide packing depots – boutiques perhaps they would be called – places to which all one’s miscellaneous presents could be taken, made up into seemly parcels and entrusted to the shop for postage or dispatch.

Parcel-wrapping stations in big stores are fine as far as they go but since one can hardly ask them to pack things bought in other shops, that isn’t quite far enough. I was thinking particularly about hampers of food and wine. The roof under which one would be able to buy
everything
one would like to put into such parcels doesn’t exist; my hampers would be based on a lot of small things; some cheap, some less so; they would be Christmas stockings really, not hampers, and one rule would be that everything should be the very best of its kind, and that means you have to go to specialist shops, like, for instance, Moore Brothers (of the Brompton Road and Notting Hill) for coffee, three or four different kinds in labelled parcels (all ready-made hampers contain fine quality tea, which is all very well for friends abroad, but silly in England; you can buy good tea anywhere; good coffee is infinitely more rare) which would include Mocha, Java, Blue Mountain. Then there would be little packets, neat
and
gaudy, of those spices which are not always easy to come by even in a city which not all that long ago was the centre of the entire world spice trade.

The spice importing-exporting centre appears to have moved to North America, and the English supermarketeers (and how sensible of them) have been quick to see the possibilities of American- and Canadian-packed whole spices, such as coriander seeds, allspice berries, cumin and fennel seeds, cinnamon sticks and ginger root. As a matter of fact, by buying one large packet of pickling spice you get, if you can identify them, a good selection of these spices (not the cumin or fennel seeds, though) which grocers are always denying they have in stock. For a phial of fine whole saffron – even I wouldn’t need a professional packer for that – a well-found chemist is the best bet. Then, inevitably, an expedition to Soho and Roche of 14 Old Compton Street, the only shop selling the envelopes of herbs dried and packed on the stalk – wild thyme, basil, thick fennel twigs, which contain the right true essence of all the hills of Provence. And
one could do worse than buy a gallon or two of their beautiful olive oil, and decant it into clear wine or liqueur bottles for presents.

*

Half the charm of the magpie system of shopping is that one comes across unexpectedly pretty and festive-looking things for so little money; in the window of the Empire Shop in Sloane Street there is a pyramid of white candy sugar in rocky lumps, so irresistibly decorative that one would like to hang them on the tree; and inside the shop, by-passing the chain-dairy goods which have somehow strayed in, are dark and dazzly genuine Indian chutneys, garnet-bright Jamaican guava jelly, English quince, Scottish rowan, and squat jars of shiny lemon curd.

Indeed, to think no further than how to make up hampers of jams and jellies, marmalade and honey would still be to have and to give plenty of entertainment.

Dark French heather honey from the Landes is one which I know to be especially aromatic, and there must be some fifty more different kinds of honey at least to be bought in London. Fortnum’s seem to have the most dazzling choice; there can be found (if you dodge the gift packs, the china beehives, the peasant pottery) honey from Hungary and Guatemala, California and Canada and Dalmatia, from Buckfast and Jamaica, from Mexico, Sicily, Greece, Scotland, Italy, Ireland and Spain; and every aromatic flower of which one has ever heard has apparently fed those bees; lime flowers and rosemary, acacia, wild thyme, white clover, orange blossom and lemon and wild roses. With all their colours and different degrees of opacity or translucence, some creamy as white cornelian and some clear and golden as Château d’Yquem and some bronze as butterscotch, they have the allure which Christmas presents ought to have. Three Kings’ presents perhaps. Just the quality which things in ready-made-up hampers hardly ever possess.