Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD’s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au  and at the NLA.

The following is excerpted from Notebook, first published in A Dwelling Place, 1997, 49-60

If you’d really disordered all the senses, rationally or not—no Rimbaud.

Australia’s pitiless light—made for surrealist rites of spring.

If Goethe had workshopped Faust after holidaying in Silicon Valley, utilising interactive media technology, we still wouldn’t have a more relevant, finished or truer poem than the one we were left with.

The art of the first half of the twentieth century did not need to have its affective architecture stripped away by artists such as Tapiès and Xenakis. It remains a dynamic culture from which we still have an enormous amount to leam.

The word ‘poetic’ associates the enormity of existence with the grandeur of civilisation, that instinctive reach at the mutabilities of experience. Technique will never domesticate it and poets can’t really explain it.

A King Ludwig or a Kahnweiler will back horses others would run away from or have put down.

Prefer the blue jeans and Whitman to McDonald’s and Pound.

No need to feel queasy if rhetoric opens you up to the wound of existence. And no need to distrust that rhetoric either, the agency of eloquence out of which you try to perfect whatever you can of life and work.

The multiplicity of metaphoric imagery in poetry—paralleling the complexities revealed by quantum physics and Chaos Theory?

Celebrate, exult and mourn instead of recycling the tail-ends of modernism.

If paint is sometimes manipulated too easily, words can always be relied on to put up a fight.

There is arrhythmia in the heartbeat of patient poetry. The surgeon is preparing to graft on some emergency what?—traditional form? dismembered line? iambic pentameter? Prognosis?

To prefer Webern to Puccini, rather than the reverse, can also be seen as a failure of sensibility, whatever the Ensemble InterContemporain might think.

Perhaps traditional genres can no longer contain the Apollonian slippages and Dionysian spillages about us; yet poetry has always been able to accommodate any biological mess or technological marvel that came its way.

Read a good poem and you should find there the seeds of a Theory of Everything.

‘Wrong from the start’: who?

We don’t need any more virtual reality than that offered by a Lucian Freud painting, a history of the KKK or the view from our window.

If poetry spent a large part of its time in the twentieth century teaching people how to talk to themselves, then part of the function of poetry in the twenty-first century will be discovering ways in which we can talk with one another as well as to the other, whatever that other may be.

Not a nostalgia for world culture so much as a demand for it. Nationalism is the last refuge for writers who are content to manufacture cliches that make their readers self-satisfied and uncritical.

Is it amusing or alarming to watch rafts of people browbeaten by accusations of provincialism into thinking they’re antediluvian if they don’t get ecstatic about the junk culture churned out by our gorge and puke economies?

Pressure on the selectors, time in the blood bin, come in spinner—sporting analogies bring their own truth to Australian cultural endeavours.

Simplistic categorisations of sexuality, ethnicity or whatever—all you get out of that kind of force-feeding is a bad case of emperor’s clothes.

Poetry aspiring to the state of music? Surely not. Poetry aspires to its own expressive power, language heightened to a state of eloquence and memorability. Utilise ‘fizz, swish, gabble and verbiage’, but if that is all it reflects can your work be anything more than fashionable?

In the end, poetic raids on the inarticulate have to be articulated. Some poetry fails to make the crossover.

Though the moral viewpoint underpinning satire can be offputting, being acerbic and sardonic is another way of showing hope for and love of peoples and nations.

Palaeontologists on the lookout for fossils and bones tend to think that culture is a product predetermined by social factors. Talk about the sacred is so much mumbo jumbo for them. And this ratiocinative approach has crept into literary criticism. Any decent artist won’t be drinking from that poisoned well.

‘Two roads diverged’: memoir, biography, performance; poem, painting, composition.

Surfing the super-information highway—you will eventually be dumped. In that bruised place reach for some poetry to save you from technological intransigence.

Hip-hop, heavy metal, Bob Dylan—the poetry there coming from the sound of words and music together, not from words alone.

While poets trying to flesh out part of the immensity and strangeness of life must expect to be misunderstood, readers shouldn’t interpret their work too literally since poetry intuits experience irrationally. Somewhere down the literary pathway writers’ and readers’ expectations eventually meet.

Poetry brings into metaphoric resonance a different kind of reality. Its dissociations leave you harvesting forms and feelings beyond the Q.E.D. world of Euclidean theorem, nearer a transcendent cyberspace.

Artists make things while critics and intellectuals interpret the things made, activities largely incompatible. Apart from writers like Coleridge and Baudelaire, very few poets are capable of pulling off that double act convincingly.

Part of life in the you beaut country is spent pretending that existence is all sunshine and roses, culture splashing about in shallows, never losing its footing.

Beckett thought Hölderlin got better when he dropped the ‘spurious magnificence’. But surely every artist should have some of that magnificence in their work.

Does being grown up mean accepting a world without absolutes? Even in the apparent dead-ends of our time there is a spiritual poetry you can give voice to, a poetry that differentiates between good and evil, that is either well or badly achieved and that doesn’t distrust language.

Strange to see people getting worked up about novels and poems published ages ago but not giving a damn about lakes of bodies, starvation and genocide.

To feel things deeply is often painful and therefore it is not surprising to find some contemporary art avoiding anything essential, where one does not have to feel much at all, merely empathise with theories and techniques, sound and fury, anaesthetised by culture rather than awakened to new perceptions.

A point on a sphere is neither ‘down under’ nor ‘up over’. ‘Down under’ is a cliched reference to Australia that has outlived its usefulness for both Eurocentrics and nationalists.

Aspirations beyond the mundane, in which one may seek to name truth, beauty or hope, will seem old hat and pretentious to those residents of Grub Street who have tried to reduce poetry to the status of a language game. There are more open-minded and perceptive readers with interested members of the general public. And, after all, doesn’t a poet want to be read by this public, those people who are the poet’s shadow-self, the so-called common readers who feel and think without theoretical blinkers attached, and whose instinct is for art that embraces the sunlight as well as the shadow.

All that contradictory sea spray and desert heat, blue sky optimism and convict-originated cynicism in the land of the Dreamtime, has made some Australians either brightened with sensibility or as forlorn as a cow’s whitened carcass, as unforgiving as an existentialist at a Maquis reunion.

Of all artists, a poet must believe in the blessings of words. Words are the centrepiece of civilisation and the poet is therefore an essential member of civilised society. And words, used well, loved well, contain within them the tragic and spiritual emblems of a divinity we sometimes rise to, beyond the denominator of the profit margin and the limitations we set on our humanity.

Build It and They Will Come: Massachusetts Universal Health Insurance

Michael Blim

Last time, I wrote about a world without the rich. Among other things, I pointed out, not too originally I thought, that the rich do as much as they can to make society work for them, the effect of which is to make things worse for everyone else. They also are pretty successful at getting everyone else to think as they do. This includes getting us to believe that they are superior beings and deserving of their money and power.

For them to be superior, the rest of us by default must be inferior. Since we do not want to believe that we are inferior, we dedicate great energies to prove we are not by aping the rich and passing along the stigma of inferiority to any other persons or groups we can. Emulating the rich, the middle classes, for instance, press their brief that they are among the more superior after the rich, and thus they deserve their cut of the money, power, and privilege that they have been able to garner. Those below them, just as the rich figure themselves, are the less or not deserving. Working class and poor people have what little they have because they don’t deserve better.

This is the common sense of American society, and other societies such as our own with enormous economic inequality. It is also good, if banal sociology.

Most people forget the premise of the argument: that the rich make society work for them in part by getting us to believe that they are more deserving of everyone else. There is the indispensable and buried – and false — premise. Every comedian knows that a joke is only as good as the absurdity of its premise. The trick is the audience accepts the premise because they expect a good joke. If the audience buys the premise, they’ll buy the bit, and the joke is funny. “So, there were these two geese standing by the drinking fountain, and one says to the other…” Think New Yorker cartoon.

The problem with the belief in the deserving rich and the undeserving poor is that it is factually false, and when it is used to deny persons the fundamental necessities of life, it is pernicious.

Working class and poor people live in an American society that begrudges them basic necessities. To cover the malice entailed by this stance, the society following the cue of the rich and the institutions they control argue that working class and poor people are fundamentally undeserving. The rich and others who consider themselves superior conclude that these same working class and poor people are so deluded or incapable that they don’t look after their own interests. They don’t seize upon opportunities for betterment. They trap themselves in a cycle of poor education, low salaries, no savings, no benefits, and poor housing.

So, what is one to make of the fact that when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts offers anyone who cannot afford health insurance subsidized premiums and access to basic health care, the program becomes over-subscribed with persons who want to improve their health status and avoid financial ruin? Why have they grabbed the Commonwealth’s helping hand in such numbers and with such enthusiasm?

The Commonwealth originally hoped to enroll 136 thousand people in the new program that comes into force at the end of this year. It now estimates that at least 180 thousand persons will enroll by next June – a 32% more than the Commonwealth had expected. As one state senator remarked: “It’s a good problem to have – people are getting insured and hopefully getting care.” (Boston Globe, 11/18/07, 1)

Massachusetts, as the Globe reports, has committed itself to subsidizing insurance for persons who do not receive coverage on the job and who earn less than 300% of the federal poverty level. This means that a person earning less than $31,000 is eligible for subsidy. The state pays for the total health insurance build for very low income residents.

Over-subscription has the state agency responsible for the program worried about funding and cost increases, which is to be expected.

But there are several points that should be underscored.

First, if we build it, they will come. Massachusetts is providing universal access to health insurance, and by doing so, to health care itself. Everyone is eligible for help if they need it. People responded immediately and participated far above expectations because they were convinced that the program would meet one of their most fundamental needs.

Second, the Commonwealth wanted the program to succeed. So, it did what any other vendor with a product would do: it hired an ad agency that got the word out to people in need. You can apply on line. You can link to insurance providers for enrollment. You can do it all by phone too.

Third, the new law contains “incentives.” Every Massachusetts citizen must have health insurance. The key is that the Commonwealth enables citizens to meet the insurance requirement by connecting them with insurance plans that could meet their needs. People are offered assistance in sorting out insurance plans, benefits, and their ability to pay.

Fourth, because the Commonwealth recognizes universal access to health care is a paramount responsibility of government, no stigma is attached to participation. Quite the opposite: it is your civic duty in Massachusetts to participate, and you are rewarded – not denigrated – for doing so.

There will be no head shaking and muttering in the emergency room as when people on Medicaid seek treatment. No eye rolling as when a grocery store customer pays with a Food Stamps credit card. No implicit condemnation passed on persons for living in public housing or being on income support.

Honoring people’s rights, treating people with dignity, AND providing them access to the human necessity of health care liberates one crucial part of people’s lives from the blame game of a class-biased society whose motto is that if you are not rich, you are lacking something. In the case of working class and poor people, they are adjudged to lack the good sense to secure their necessities, to take advantage of opportunities, and to seek better lives. Working class and poor people by virtue of their infirmities and collective inferiority are told over and over again that they get what they deserve — fewer resources and poorer life chances.

In Massachusetts as regards health care, everyone regardless of privilege has the hope of getting what s/he deserves – health care and a better chance of a decent and fulfilling life.

Changes of this sort, as fundamental to human happiness as they are, will not bring forth in a burst “a world without the rich,” the subject of my last column. I will have more to say about how to make that world in the future.

But there can be small blessings along the way – as I hope Massachusetts can provide in the coming years for all of its citizens.

Finally, thanks to all of you who wrote in about the “world without the rich” column several weeks ago. You added immensely to the discussion for which I am just glad to have so briefly started.

This post is dedicated to Asad Raza, the first 3QD foodie to ask me about truffles.

Elatia Harris

The two images above come from distant eras when that rare and coveted underground fungus, the truffle, was in more abundant supply than at present. The gatherer on the left, in the Tacuinum Sanitatis, a medieval herbal treatise at the Bibliotheque Rouen (thanks to BibliOdyssey), seems to have happened upon a trove of squash ball-sized truffles, positioned conveniently above ground. More realistically, the 19th century diggers on the right, aided by poodles, search among the roots of an oak, where a black truffle — the ultimate prize of French gastronomy — may occasionally be found about six inches below the surface. (Readers interested in a 4000-year overview of human/truffle relations, including the truffle’s extensively documented use as a love food, are referred to my earlier 3QD article.)

Since the truffle harvest of today is down more than twenty-fold from 100 years ago, down incalculably from the time of the Tacuinum Sanitatis, the hunt is nothing like so easy as it appears in either scene above, and is conducted according to very different rules. Typically, hunters go out before dawn accompanied not by humans but by trained dogs or pigs — who cannot tell what they know about the spot, or come back to it on their own when the hunter is no longer about. With the exception of the legendary truffle-hunting virgins of Perigord, who ceased to flourish in the early 20th century, a human has not quite the nose for finding truffles, however violently she desires to eat them.

I used to see tiny tins of conserved truffles — about the diameter of napkin rings, under lock and key at fancy grocers — long before I saw a fresh one, and am deeply delighted to report that I lost no time eating the first fresh one I ever saw.  Read about what that felt like here. Fresh or conserved, there are about 60 varieties of black and white truffles in Europe. Most of them, you want to watch out for — they are mildly pleasant at best, occasionally nasty and always pricey. The only truffles of earth-moving gastronomic interest are T. Melanosporum, the black truffle of Perigord that is never far away when you’re nearing the summit of French cuisine, and T. Magnatum, the white truffle of Alba that adds such mystery and wildness to the simple but luxurious ways of northern Italian cooking. Look hard at the photos, for it’s truffle season again, and by the end of this article, you will know how to choose and prepare one for yourself.

Civetta and Kiki

First, however, meet the four-footed finders.

There is no truffle dog in the sense of a breed dedicated to that pursuit. Any trainable dog will do.  Looked at a certain way, truffling is but an exercise in advanced obedience training, since dogs are not naturally attracted to truffles but can be worked up into a passion to obey. Nevertheless, some breeds show a faster aptitude than others.  Since the 1700’€™s, poodles have excelled at the training, as detailed by Doebel in his Jaegerpractica, 1746.  Whatever its breed, the dog must be praised feelingly when it does find a truffle, rewarded not only with a display of love but with a bit of cheese. For much in the way of a natural orientation to the outdoors is taken from the truffle dog; to effect its unswerving focus on truffles, it has been systematically desensitized to squirrels and birds and other distractions that make up a full life for a hunting dog.

The Lagotto Romagnolo, a water dog that is a poodle cousin, is the truffle dog of choice in Piedmont and in the white truffle country of Tuscany, around San Miniato. A curly-haired, medium-sized dog of unusual avidity and good nature, the Lagotto is best embodied by Civetta (cheeVETTah), the current All-Italy champion truffle dog whose face may recall, to some dog lovers, that of an enraptured German Renaissance madonna.

A truffling pig like Kiki — the fourth pig owned by the famous Marthe Delon of Perigord to be so named — may only with care be compared to Civetta or any truffle dog. Pigs need no training to find truffles.  In fact, humans probably owe the discovery of truffles to pigs rooting around for them, and almost certainly first started to go after them in imitation of pigs. Mme. Delon has gone on record saying that she rewards Kiki — actually, all her Kikis — with truffle-scented suppers, but never with the real thing. And soon, it will be time for Kiki IV to join her namesakes on the family table as ham — the ultimate fate of most truffling pigs.

There are truffle hunters in the South of France who prefer hunting with dogs to hunting with pigs — it’€™s really a personal matter, and either beast is regarded as hugely valuable. The female of the species is in both cases the better finder.  And I have not read that at the end of a successful hunt it is necessary to make much of the sow, showering her with love and gratitude to keep her going. She has, after all, obeyed her instincts, not her master.

Is Now the Time for My Truffle?

Every year about this time, intense curiosity about the taste of a fresh truffle can propel a foodie into a zone of true bewilderment.  How to tell whether you have trained your eye on the right kind? Who to buy it from? How to optimize your possession of it?

First and worst of all, it is necessary to confront the brute fact of cost: buying a truffle the size of a medium dog’s nose is no less expensive than buying a horribly good wine. We’ll break it out later, but think high two digits just to deal yourself in. Like that bottle of wine that lets you murmur, Oh! So this is what it is — oh!, like that sunset on Santorini, the true truffle is epiphanial, one of those things that leaves you not as you were before. If you believe this kind of experience is sometimes free and sometimes very costly, but always worth it, then you will enjoy taking your preparedness for the truffle up a notch by reading the interview below.

Meet Greg Troughton

Imagine my delight when right in my backyard I met a professional foodie, Greg Troughton, who knew more about truffles — and many other food items — than I did. 

Greg grew up in New England, which he loves for its history, landscape and  culinary offers.  He has a BS in Biochemistry, and spent his years in school working in restaurants. After a stint in biotech, the food industry called to him, and he does often approach food from a scientific perspective.  Five years in restaurant kitchens gave way to Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge, where he concentrated on local produce and specialty imports.  He has lived and traveled in Europe, and is currently at Whole Foods Market.  In February, he begins work on an MBA, with a focus on the food industry, in particular the market for local producers and food supply chain management.  He and his wife, Annie, live in Newton, MA, with their large mutt and shy cat.  For the last couple of years Greg has been the go-to guy for truffles in my neighborhood, cheek by jowl to Harvard.

In talking with Greg, I wanted a fresh perspective on some of the truffle lore I’ve been gathering since the night of my first encounter with T. Melanosporum. At that long ago time, truffles tended to be paired with lobster — oh, it’s not wrong — or foie gras, or chopped into a sauce madere.  Today there are truffle treatments both simpler and more interesting than those.  And, as scarcity and price increase, there is more truffle fraud. So it’s especially important now to be an informed consumer who knows just how far a truffle will go. Although Greg and I do not touch on history’s most formidable truffle-fanciers, I’ve included visuals of eight of them, from Khufu to Proust.

ELATIA HARRIS: Provided you constructed the right dinner around a truffle, how would you describe the difference a truffle could make?

GREG TROUGHTON: At a base level truffles impart a complexity of flavor to food that is so rarely experienced in everyday eating.  Add to that the long history of the hunt, the exotic terroir and the expense of truffles, and you stage an unusual element of excitement at dinner. 

EH: Tell me a little more about terroir.

GT: An expression of place, this term has come to reflect not only the land on which the food was grown or raised, but the culture and history behind the food.

EH: Then you can taste terroir? Do certain truffles taste like where they’€™re from in that way?

GT: Magnatum pico, often known as the white “Alba” truffle, and Melanosporum, often known as the black “Perigord” truffle, are not exclusively gathered in those places. What is really important is that the truffle you are purchasing is of the true Latin variety.  Northwest Spain, southern France, Italy — Magnatum and Melanosporum can be found all over these regions. “Alba” and “Perigord” have become marketing jargon.

EH: So, for example, the Tuscans and the Piedmontese warring over who has the true white truffle is kind of pointless if both regions produce T. Magnatum.  I’ve read about Carlo Vittadini, the Milanese physician who classified truffles into almost 60 varieties in the mid-1800’s.  When he called something a T. Magnatum, that’s a specific morphological type, and nothing to do with a market. How do you know you’€™re getting that?

GT: Find a distributor who understands that the quality lies in the variety, not just the locale, and you’re on the right track.

EH: Assuming you can examine a fresh truffle up close and personal before you buy it, what should you be looking for?  Or, should I say, sniffing for? First white, then black…

GT: Freshness is key.  I want to see my vender bring out an airtight sealed mason jar and I want to see the truffles wrapped in dry paper towel — not stored in rice.  The truffles should be dry and free of many holes.  Broken sides are fine — sometimes that is where the truffle was cut.  White truffles should be creamy to slightly yellowish brown depending on the tree from under which they were harvested.  Some of the most popular are oak, linden and chestnut.  But most important is smell.  Again, depending on the tree, each will have a distinct aroma.  Naturally it takes a long time to distinguish among particular “trees,” but you should try to smell a few.  As a vender I work with my suppliers to provide customers with a “€œbest guess.”  As a buyer, if a seller were to offer this information, it tells me they have done their homework.  All white truffles are extremely heady — open a jar in a crowded store and you will sure get some stares.  You’€™ll know then who’€™s a fan and who’s not.  White truffles from under oak trees are more dominant in aroma, while the linden and chestnut are subtler.  White truffles are more perishable than blacks and go soft faster.   Again, freshness is key.  Black truffles are more difficult to discern.  Find those that are firm with few holes and give a pleasing aroma.  I like my black truffles to smell complex — chocolate, spice, a slightly headiness. I steer clear of those that have a stringent or chemical smell.  Make sure your vender lets you handle them and smell them right up to your nose€ — after all, if a four-legged beast can dig these up, I’€™m sure your nose isn’€™t the health hazard!

EH: If you’re not going to use the truffle the night of the day you buy it, how do you keep it in tip-top condition for a while?

GT: It should really be eaten ASAP, but it can last a while under the right conditions — I’€™ve seen truffles go 2 weeks.  Store them in an airtight container, wrapped individually in paper towel, in the fridge.  Change the towel every day or two.  Add a few farm eggs to the container and because of the porous nature of eggshells you’ll get truffle-flavored eggs as a bonus.

EH: What are some of the best uses for the white truffle? Can it ever be overwhelmed?

GT: White truffles are generally kings when it comes to dominant flavors. Think eggs, simple soups, some game. My perfect truffle dinners, black or white, are big, winter food. Given their utter in-your-face aroma I prefer to pair white truffles with more subtle flavors — an egg course is great. Simply scrambled farm eggs with white truffle is divine.  Soups of parsnip and potatoes are great pairings as well.  White truffles also go well with foie gras — two big flavor champs battling it out I guess, but it’€™s a lot to handle. You either love it or hate it. 

EH: I saw an Orson Welles look-alike in Rome having white truffles grated over a slab of rare roast beef.  It seemed like a better idea to grate them over pasta — once I’d had that, I couldn’t think about anything else for a week. I also had them in a salad with a rather lemony vinaigrette — very tender lettuces, sauteed artichoke bottoms, and lots of chives. Astonishing.

GT: Food and the meal experience in particular are subjective to person, place, history and, importantly, to present company. The very idea that dinner will be served with such a rare, historical and pricey accoutrement lends a note of the astonishing to the event. A white truffle is going be astonishing whatever you grate it on.

EH: But simpler is better?

GT: I think so. And remember — don’t cook it. Just let whatever you’€™re adding it to warm it gently.

EH: Now what about the black truffle?

GT: While the white truffle is the billboard star, the black truffle plays the supporting role, but without that role the show wouldn’t be such a hit. It depends what you are in the mood for. I like black truffles paired with roasted meats, potatoes, game, some rich seafood like scallops.  Black truffles can enhance the meatiness and roasted flavor of meats — they are aromatic and bold while at the same time complimentary to other flavors.  Some of my acquaintances who are more intimately involved in the trade say that while they are less expensive, true connoisseurs prefer black truffles to white.  You decide. On the plate, truffles are all nose — a steaming short rib with black truffles gives off an intoxicating, heady aroma. Black truffles shaved over sizzling meat is perfect.

EH: At L’Astrance, Pascal Barbot does a celery soup with black truffle puree and Parmesan foam.  I haven’t tried making foam yet.  And Alain Passard does slow-poached Breton lobster with sauce vin jaune, smoked potatoes and shaved black truffles.  But I’€™m getting carried away.

GT: Would you have wanted those things your first time with a truffle?

EH: Um, no. And the emphasis here is on what you could make with truffles for yourself and your friends that wouldn’€™t be so complex you couldn’t have fun, too.  As long as we’re menu-planning, are there some wine recommendations for dishes involving truffles? Let’s talk about this on the plane of the ideal, and then on the plane of the approachable, OK?

GT: I have a very basic approach here — if it grows together it goes together.  Get wines from the region and make them dish-appropriate.  White truffles are generally from Piedmont, so think big — like Barolo.  With black truffles, being sourced from France to North west Spain, I usually like burgundy and some Rhone wines.  Some Bordeaux can over do it with the truffles.  Ask your truffle vender where these particular truffle come from.  Can they tell you, or did they come from a distributor? This would mean they’€™ve been out of the ground longer and are less fresh.  Because I buy directly from one family, they can tell me per delivery where they sourced the truffles. With some vagueness that I won’t ever understand — like I can actually quit my job and responsibilities and go to Europe to pillage their secret site. Then, take this information to your trusted wine guru and get a wine from the same region.

EH: I’ve seen truffle-slicers in restaurants in Italy — if you can’t get your hands on one of those, what should you do?  And how should you do it?

GT: Truffles should be sliced ultra-paper-thin. If you try it with a knife and get thick pieces you are wasting money.  Truffle slicers are nice, but expensive and singular in their use.  I use a Japanese mandolin, the same tool with an adjustable blade that you use to slice potatoes thin. They are cheap, good all around tools that should be found in any kitchen supply store.  Just get simple one with a sharp adjustable blade. You don’t need 20 attachments.

EH: I see truffles priced by the ounce.  How far does an ounce of truffles go — used in some of the ways we’ve been discussing?

GT: An ounce goes a very long way. You could truffle one course for 10-12 friends with a whole ounce.  My advice is to get 4-6 friends and truffle two courses.  Better yet, store the truffle for a day with eggs and get three courses out of it.  You can spend only $75 to $100 and get the real thing for a bunch of people.

EH: Let’s talk about some of the considerations that influence price.

GT: My take here is that given all the recent press, the food world producers have seen a real potential in a growing market of young foodies. This has been great for artisan producers — it has allowed small vineyards to grow and market their products, it has supported long-standing traditions of wine making and truffle hunting.  But it does have its down side.  On the truffle end, the introduction of inoculated  trees to natural habitats, currently supporting dwindling supplies of Melanosporum and Magnatum pico has led to new crossbreeds of truffles that out-compete for nutrients and space.  So the truffle market has been flooded with inferior grade truffles that are identical in appearance Melanosporum and Magnatum pico being passed off as such to unknowing consumers looking to experience truffles at a slightly lesser cost.  Who am I to judge when it comes to spending a premium for, let’s face it, a rather ugly looking mushroom rooted by a pig or dog under some tree in a far away country?  But, as with champagne and caviar, I advocate the less is more strategy — you don’€™t need to have every course truffled. Get the real thing once in a season on one dish. You can get other varieties of truffles that grow naturally in season during the summer — they are lighter in aroma and simpler in complexity of flavor. As the saying goes, they are what they are.  My personal tastes for truffles revolve around winter nights, red wine, fireplaces, good friends, slowly simmered cuts of meat, and potatoes.  I’€™m not a summer truffle guy.  So I get the real thing when I can, usually once a year. Best to get it from someone you trust — at $1600-$3200 a pound, mistakes are not allowed!  Opt to cook at home instead of going out — you’ll see what you’ve been missing, and you’re sure to come out on top.

EH: Would your life be diminished if you didn’t know the taste of these things? 

GT: No, it would not.  It would just be different.  My grandparents have lived long, rich lives, and have never tasted such things and probably never will, but I’d be eternally happy to experience the fulfillment and pleasures that they have enjoyed.  That said, food is my thing.  I make my living in the industry and I enjoy it after work — it’€™s what gets me up in the morning.  So, if I didn’t know the taste of true truffles, caviar, foie gras, real French Brie, fresh bread, New England corn, local strawberries and on an on, I’€™d be doing my career and my life’s journey a disservice.  While many of these items are expensive, they don’t have to be exclusive to the wealthy.  As an example, when I got out of professional cooking, after about a year or so, I got a phone call from my old chef asking me if I’€™d be willing to do a shift that night for a meat cook who had to leave for a personal matter.   Anyone who has worked in a high end restaurant knows that working the busy station on the line during a Saturday night is hard enough, but after a year out of the business, that’€™s plain stupid.  Overcooking a VIP steak and having the entire service come to a crashing halt doesn’€™t make you a popular guy, especially when you’ve abandoned the profession for greener pastures.  With this in mind I was about to decline the offer when the chef made it a bit more enticing — I wouldn’t be getting paid in dollars, but my 10 hours of backbreaking, under-appreciated, adrenaline-addled, high heat cooking would be rewarded with a freshly dug 1 oz white truffle.  I was in that kitchen setting up my station in 20 minutes.  The point is — make some friends in the food industry, take some wine and cheese classes.  Bring a six-pack to your local gourmet food guys — they will remember you and maybe, just maybe let you in on the good stuff.

EH: Great! I’€™m waiting a few weeks till T. Melanosporum is here, however. That’€™ll give me some time to plan.  Also, I don’t want people turning me down, and getting the right 6 people on any given night is worse than air traffic control. What should I be thinking when I go shopping?

GT: Know what you want, how much you want to spend and what dishes you will be serving.  Talk with your local grocer, be it at a large store or a small gourmet operation.  Trust is key and trust comes with a personal relationship.  In my time I have seen very few if any intentional rip offs — just people who don’t necessarily have all the facts.  Watch how they store the truffles — how many do they have?  Do they “€œalways”€ have them? That’€™s a bad sign, because it usually means extra inventory.  Stay away from mail order — would you mail order fresh fish?  A personal, trusting relationship with your grocer is the key to getting any quality product.

EH: OK, let’€™s make it happen. Thanks!

WEB RESOURCES FOR THIS ARTICLE

Staying Informed

New York Times RSS feed on truffles

Never miss another world-historical truffle story again. Register with NYT.com (free), key “truffles” into the search box. The topic page will come up, with compendious news about truffles, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. Go to the bottom right, where you will be invited to click on the truffle feed. Do so, and monitor developments from your homepage or reader.

http://www.nyt.com

Food blogger extraordinaire Pim of Chez Pim goes to Perigord

http://chezpim.typepad.com/blogs/2007/03/marthe_delon_th.html

Pim encounters the Truffle Don in Italy

http://chezpim.typepad.com/blogs/2005/11/the_truffle_don.html

My earlier 3QD truffle article, “Shrooming in Late Capitalism: The Way of the Truffle”

http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/02/shrooming_in_la.html

Cooking Vacations in France, with Truffles

Patricia Wells

http://www.patriciawells.com/cooking/truffle-class-schedule.htm

Cooking with Friends

http://www.cookingwithfriends.com/the_news/the_truffle_hunt/the_truffle_hunt.html

US Truffle Venders I Personally Know and Trust

Formaggio Kitchen (Cambridge and Boston, MA and Essex Street, NYC)

http://www.formaggiokitchen.com

http://www.southendformaggio.com

Whole Foods (locations throughout USA)

http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com