Truffes

Another of my Christmas presents was a jar of truffles, that is to say some slices of (black) truffles in extra special olive oil finished off with a dash of truffle flavouring. The nearest my having come to truffles in the past being the chocolate variety. Or the articles you get in weekend supplements about rustics snuffling around in woods with their truffle hunting pigs.

Yesterday we thought to try these truffles as a garnish to mashed potato, taking about a square centimetre of a slice, rather less than a millimetre thick, for the purpose. The first assay surprised by its initial pungency, then by the very strong taste of mushroom: I don't know what I had been expecting, if anything, but I was certainly not expecting mushroom, this despite a vague awareness that truffles were fungi of some sort. For the second assay, we chopped what was left of our slices on the side of our plates and stirred them into a small portion of potato, where they did rather well.

The next step was to dig our copy of 'La cuisine familiale' out of the bookcase, a French cookbook mainly consisting of 600 pages worth of recipes, two or three to the page, with very little in the way of general instructions about, for example, how to make pastry or a white sauce. All that is taken as given, so a recipe book for the cook rather than for the student. Perhaps best thought of as a French analogue to the Radiation cookbook. No date to be found in our copy, but Ebay France suggests 1962 - see above for its illustration of the very book. There are lots of variations so it must have been a popular book in its day. Mine appears to have cost me £1.75 and is priced NF 12.50 - so not a bad investment at all. Good even, by my standards.

Only a very modest number of truffles - properly truffes - in the rather sketchy index, including the chocolate variety, probably so named for their superficial resemblance to a black truffle. At least that is what I would guess from the recipe - a mixture of chocolate, sugar, butter and eggs, with the finished article rolled in a mixture of chocolate and sugar powders. A sort of chocolate of which I am fond.

Otherwise we have turkey truffle - a turkey stuffed with a truffle flavoured liver forcement - properly farce - whence our farce? - and with slivers of truffle let in under the skin - a second truffle forcemeat, truffle on toast and truffle by itself. These last being a bit odd in that you go to the bother of wrapping them up in short crust pastry to cook them, then discard the pastry. At least that is what the recipe seems to be saying.

Also odd in that their phrase for short crust pastry is 'pâte brisée', literally broken paste. Don't get a sense of where that comes from at all. But see reference 1.

Third and final oddity: why do you add truffle flavouring to truffles? I thought that truffles were themselves mainly flavouring? Is this not a bit like adding extra e-numbers to MSG, a quantity which has its own e-number?

Anyway, plenty to keep us going - if rather less than I had expected. Perhaps truffles were too expensive back in 1962 to play a big part in your regular family cooking.

PS: I have now (some time later that is), learned about a rather better source of truffology, from the US rather than France. Study of reference 2 in progress. So far what I have learned is that there is much debate and angst among foodies about truffle oil, a sort of convenience food for truffers.

Reference 1: http://www.marmiton.org/recettes/recette_pate-brisee-vite-faite_31639.aspx.

Reference 2: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/12/black-truffle-recipe-photos_n_4262394.html.