The Man Who Ate Everything (32 page)

We stayed the night in Cesare’s snug little guest house. It was snowing lightly the next morning, and we kept inside, gathering strength for our evening adventures. Cesare had persuaded his friend Bernardo, a retired farmer and a
trifulau
(a professional truffle hunter) since age ten, to take us along on this evening’s truffle hunt.

By late afternoon, the weather cleared, revealing a vista for miles around—steep green misty hills rising in the middle distance to low mountains and in the far distance, on two sides, the snow-covered Alps, a sparkling pink-lavender in the sunset, a spectacle that makes you gasp. Soon Cesare appeared, bringing us a large, flat package wrapped in butcher’s paper and an excellent bottle of Italian champagne. “For the
trifulau,”
he laughed as he unwrapped the paper, disclosing a platter of warm
crostini—
crisp slices of grilled bread brushed with butter and showered with thin slices of white truffle. Their musky pungent perfume filled the room. Then their musky pungent taste filled our mouths. Rossini called them the Mozart of fungi.

Cesare speaks in a mixture of Italian and the Langhe dialect, closer to Provencal than to Italian. There are only twenty-one letters in the Italian alphabet, yet I am proficient in no more than
half of them. But as luck would have it, my wife and I had met up with Eugenio Pozzolini, a native Tuscan who manages the importing arm of Dean & DeLuca in New York. Eugenio was traveling through the Piedmont in pursuit of new treats for the people of America to enjoy. He was a fine and selfless translator.

On a dirt road outside town, we found Bernardo and his dog, Lola, and they led us down the slope of a hill and into a hazelnut orchard. From October through January the best white truffles in the world grow under this earth, in the Langhe hills to the south of Alba and the Roero hills just to the north, on the subterranean roots of oak, linden, willow, and hazelnut trees. The pattern and color on the inside of the truffle tell you which kind of tree was its “mother.” (Pink streaks, for example, indicate the root of an oak.) On the outside most
tartufi bianchi d’Alba
are smooth and light tan and strongly perfumed. Farther north in the Piedmont, in the area around Asti, truffles grow gnarled and pitted because the earth there is densely packed, and the truffles must struggle for room to grow. “Those truffles grow up angry,” Bernardo explained. What did he think about truffles from Tuscany and Umbria? “They are one step up from potatoes.”

We walked slowly from tree to tree. The twilight sky was now a luminous blue, and tiny lights appeared in the houses and churches on the hills around us. Bernardo talked softly to Lola, like the gentlest father trying to instill discipline and concentration. She was just eleven months old, playful and impulsive, and lacked the dedication of her mother, whom Bernardo had left behind. This was Lola’s first truffle season, but at only three months she could recognize their scent. When Lola is experienced and adept, she will be worth four thousand dollars. But Bernardo would never sell her. Bernardo directed her toward particular trees, urged her to pause before moving on to the next, and called her back when she bounded away from us into the middle of the orchard.

Lola began to dig at the base of a hazelnut tree, and Bernardo hurried over, gently pulling Lola back from the shallow hole she
had dug and brushing away some dirt with his hands. He found nothing, and let Lola go at it again for a few seconds. Then he scratched the earth with the small metal
sapin
he carried on his belt and discovered the top of a white truffle. Very carefully he reached around it and pulled it out. My pulse rate soared.

Our first truffle was small, about an inch across, but smooth and well formed, and its perfume filled the air. Bernardo gave Lola a biscuit and replaced the earth, smoothed the surface, and scattered some dry leaves over it. If the tree’s roots were protected and the earth was cared for, a truffle would mature in this same spot exactly one year from now by the lunar calendar, Bernardo told us. Besides, an exposed hole would alert other
trifulau
to Bernardo’s secret spot.

We passed the truffle from nose to nose. Instantly the truffle feasts of recent days passed before our eyes: white truffles on green noodles moistened with
fonduta;
a mousse of white truffles and guinea hen liver; cold loin of rabbit sprinkled with white truffles; an asparagus flan in a pool of truffled cream; polenta layered with white truffles, raw egg yolk, and the local
rubbiolo di murazzano
cheese; risotto of nettles and strawberries with slivers of white truffle; and hand-rolled, hand-cut tagliarini
(tajarin
in the Langhe dialect) made only of egg yolks and flour, tossed in melted butter, flavored with fresh sage, and covered with paper-thin slices of white truffles. This last is the simplest and incontrovertibly the best way to enjoy white truffles, and it is served in virtually every restaurant in the Piedmont, from the humblest to the most ambitious.

Trifulau
work mostly after dark, and it is easier to see a white dog in the late autumn moonlight than a black one. When you harvest truffles in the daytime, other
trifulau
will discover your secret places. “I do my best work between two and six in the morning, several kilometers’ walk from here,” Bernardo said. “But I would never take anyone with me.”

We found two more small truffles in the hazelnut orchard and then descended into a muddy gorge and the woods beyond
it. The sky was dark now, and when the autumn mists floated over the moon, the only light came from Bernardo’s flashlight. Lola discovered three more truffles in the woods, small and smooth.

As we headed back to Bernardo’s house, he reminisced about his largest truffle, eighteen ounces in weight, the size of a grapefruit, and worth over a thousand dollars at today’s prices. Ten years ago, Bernardo gave up truffle hunting because he had become possessed by it. He would leave home in the late afternoon, and after a day and a half in the cold damp woods and two packs of cigarettes, he would return home sick and exhausted. Like many others, he had become a truffle junkie—and one day he simply gave it up, except as a moderate and controlled activity to supplement his tiny government pension. “My dream,” Bernardo told us, “is to see, together in one place, all the truffles I have found in my lifetime.”

Cesare’s restaurant was closed that night, and he took us out for an evening of eating and drinking with his friends, including Matteo, a retired
trifulau
who was famous for finding more white truffles than his dog. “You can
see
them,” he told us. “In open ground they push up the earth above them, and when the sun is warm, the earth will crack. At night you can feel the bump with the soles of your feet if you wear thin slippers. The grass above a truffle will turn limp and brown when the truffle disturbs its roots. And if you strike the ground with the end of a stick, you can hear the hollow sound of a truffle underneath. But you must be able to distinguish that sound from the sound of a rock or the thick root of a tree.”

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 after the meal, and the bill is adjusted accordingly, at $70 an ounce. The truffle wholesalers in Alba charge between $40 and $50 an ounce for respectable specimens. Beware of stores in the United States that charge less than $60 an ounce for fresh white truffles. If these were genuine
tartufi bianchi d’Alba,
the shop would lose money on every one it sells.

For the next hour Cesare frantically jogged around the parking lot, pulling each
trifulau
off into a corner and collecting as many white truffles as he could before the commercial buyers arrived. His clothes and his van were permeated with the scent of truffles. At seven o’clock the sun was just visible through the mists, and the shops around the market began to open. We stopped in a bar for thirty seconds of coffee and warmth and rushed out again to buy more truffles. The rest of the Ceva market slowly came alive with stalls for game and mushrooms, produce, and dry goods, and Cesare finally turned his attention to huge sacks of walnuts and hazelnuts and flat wooden crates of fresh porcini.

When we returned to Albaretto della Torre for breakfast, Cesare cleaned and weighed his purchases. He had bought 4.6 kilograms of white truffles, about 10 percent of them too small to use in anything but pates and sauces. In the past four hours Cesare had worked as feverishly as any commodities trader on the floor of the Chicago exchange. He looked a wreck.

When we left the next morning, our arms filled with Silvana’s jam and a gigantic white truffle sealed in a jar of rice, Cesare invited me back to Albaretto to learn the traditional dishes of the Langhe and some of his inventions as well. The secret of his cookies in the hazelnut branches, though, would remain his alone. “I had a fever for two days after inventing that dish,” Cesare told me.

It was springtime when I returned to Cesare’s remote hilltop. Rows of hazelnut and fruit trees blossomed along the roads, and a patchwork of ancient vines covered the slopes. But Cesare’s life is in the kitchen, and for most of the following week mine was, too, except when I moved to the dining room to eat what we had cooked. Cesare’s young cousin, Bianca, who is proficient in English (and whose father was a famous
trifulau),
kept us company, interceding whenever my confusion became evident or when Cesare lapsed into the Langhe dialect. “I am a man of Provence,” Cesare inexplicably announces when he has lots to drink. He has successfully refused to learn one word of English. Cesare began our first morning by collecting the eggs from his hens and a goose, who live behind the restaurant. Back in the kitchen, two of the eggs became my breakfast, along with bread, chestnut-and-thyme honey, and a dark marmalade of sour cherries that Silvana puts up at the beginning of summer. For the next four hours, Cesare was a whirlwind. Fourteen rich Milanese were driving to Albaretto for lunch, and Cesare single-handedly prepared six courses and the broths and sauces that accompanied them, moving urgently between the chopping table, the cold box, and the pots on the crowded stove. Cesare’s final chore before his guests arrived was to cook a lavish bowl of spaghetti with tomato
sauce for a Saint Bernard called Freida, one of his four dog
s—
Freida is a vegetarian.