A Pig in Provence (12 page)

Within the last twenty years or so, truffle farming has grown significantly, because INRA, the Institut national de la recherche agronomique, developed the technology to successfully inoculate oak, hazelnut, and other seedling trees with the spores of Tuber
melanosporum.
The seedlings are planted in groves, just like olives, and are cultivated. After approximately eight years, the trees begin yielding an annual crop of black truffles. A higher percentage of truffle-bearing trees is produced using inoculated seedlings than by the traditional method of planting acorns gathered in the wild from truffle-bearing trees, a highly popular technique during the nineteenth century.

In the nineteenth century, Périgord became known for black truffles, which soon came to be called Périgord truffles. During the apogee of truffle production at the end of the nineteenth century, black truffles from Provence and elsewhere were sent to the brokers in Périgord, who then shipped the “Périgord truffles,” now synonymous with luxury, to Paris and the capitals of
the world. The name has stuck, even though 80 percent of the recorded truffle harvest today comes from Provence.

I didn’t learn about truffles when Donald, Ethel, and I lived in Provence. Nor did I ever hear much about them when we spent our summer vacations there. It wasn’t until Jim, my second husband, and I went to Provence one winter to do research for a book that I discovered a whole new culinary adventure awaited me.

My editor had told me I couldn’t write about food in Provence without including truffles. However, I had almost no experience of them. I had never found one, only read about them, and the several times I had eaten them (they were preserved) I found them tasteless. My mission that winter was to find people to take me truffle hunting, to talk to people about truffles, and to eat as many fresh truffles as I could. I soon discovered that the truffle world is a secret, private one, far more so than the mushroom world.

Truffles are big business and can sell for upward of six hundred dollars a kilo, or around two pounds. Foragers hunt them on their own land or communal land, or lease private land for the truffle season, guard it against poachers, and keep, as much as possible, the amount of truffles they unearth and sell secret so they won’t be taxed. Truffling is a clandestine affair, and I know of poachers who have been severely beaten when caught red-handed.

The object of their desire is the black truffle,
Tuber melanosporum,
called
rabasse
in Provençal. It looks like a lump of coal or a large dog’s nose, dark and rough to the touch. It is roundish, irregular, and bumpy. It can be as small as the tip of your little finger, or as large as a grapefruit, but most of those I have seen since my initiation into the world of truffles lie somewhere in between. When freshly dug, still encased in mud and dirt, they could pass for darkish dirt clods. Cut open, a ripe truffle dis
plays solid, dense flesh, veined gray and white. But more than the shape or color, it is the perfume that sets these fungi apart from all others: pungent, earthy, almost animal. Once I experienced this heady perfume during that first winter research trip, I became happily, gratefully, addicted.

It began with an old truffle hunter we were given an introduction to, M. Capretti. Jim and I went to visit him at his house. As we sat with him and his wife in their comfortable, well-appointed dining room, sipping coffee and eating
croquants,
the almond- flavored hard cookies that can be found in most
boulangeries,
he told us a story about how his grandfather took him truffle hunting as a young boy.

“My grandfather was too old to work in the vineyard and fields anymore. He took care of the
potager,
the vegetable garden, and me. My mother died when I was born. I went everywhere with my grandfather. He was a big man, even with his stooped shoulders. Bigger than most of the men around. Not like me.” He laughed, because he was very small, barely taller than five feet.

“His nose was big, his hands were big, and his feet were big, but he was never clumsy. You couldn’t even hear his step in the forest, it was so light.”

“How old were you?” I asked.

“Oh, I must have been ten. Let’s see, that would have been around 1925, after the war. My grandfather and father were both in it. Lucky to survive. Most of their friends from around here didn’t. You can see their names engraved on the monument out there in the square. Laugier, Borne, Minarvois, Scaffone—I knew all their sons. They were my age. Not many of them left either now. Killed in the next war. We were with the partisans, the men from here. Most of us anyway.”

His wife smiled proudly and got up from the polished wood table with its crocheted centerpiece and healthy African violet and went to the gleaming sideboard. She returned with a silver-framed photograph of half a dozen men standing with guns, their hats pulled low against the sun.

“We all slept in there.” He pointed to the stone hut in the background. “Except whoever was on guard duty. Found some truffle trees in that forest, too. Never went back there, though.”

After talking a little more about the war—I told him that my grandfather was killed in World War I and was buried in a Canadian military cemetery in France near Cambrai—the subject turned back to truffles.

“My grandfather showed me how to look for the
brûlés,
the circles around the base of the oak trees where all the grass is dead. Something happens when the truffles are growing that kills the grass. That first day we didn’t take the
cochon,
the pig. He always hunted with a pig, just like I still do.”

I let him continue.

“‘Jo Jo’—that’s what my grandfather called me—’I’m going to show you how to find truffles with no pig, no dog, no nothing. Just your wits. If you can find them, you can sell them. Then you will always have money. This is part of your inheritance, this knowledge, but you must work for it.’

“That day he showed me how to break off a branch of Aleppo pine—there’re lots of those in our forests—then tear off all but the top needles to make a switch. We hovered over one of the
brûlés
and my grandfather gently brushed the ground with the tip of the switch. ‘Ah, aha,’ he said, ‘look! There they are. See those flies? That means there’re truffles here.’ “

The truffle fly,
Suillia gigantea,
drawn like a magnet to the perfume of the truffles, lays its eggs in the truffled ground, providing a clue for the pigless, dogless hunter.

M. Capretti sat back and smiled. “Ah, those were happy days.”

“How did you dig them up?”

“My grandfather had a tool he used, like a screwdriver. He pushed it gently into the ground until he hit the truffle. They’re pretty hard. Then, he loosened the soil around it and pulled it out. It was a big one, too.” He got up and went into the kitchen.

“Like this one.” He held up a lumpy black truffle the size of a large grapefruit. I had never seen one that big in real life, only in photographs.

“May I hold it?”

He wagged his finger at me.
“Ah, non.
This one is already sold to a restaurant. I don’t want anything to happen to it. Good price too. It weighs half a kilo, so that’s twelve hundred francs.” At that time that was more than two hundred dollars.

After returning the truffle to its hiding place, he said, “Truffles have been good to me. I’ve never had any other job or occupation, just truffles. In fact, when my father died and left me the farm and vineyard, I pulled out all the grapes and planted oak trees instead. I could always buy wine—I didn’t need to make it—better to have truffles.”

Our visit ended with a trip to one of his
truffières,
or truffle plantations. M. Capretti buttoned a hand-knit woolen vest on over his plaid shirt and pulled a brown felt hat over his curly gray hair, all of which made him look, with his rosy apple cheeks and bright little eyes, like a hobbit. We then walked a couple of doors down from his house to a stone garage. He turned a heavy key in the lock and swung the doors open to reveal, alongside a shiny white Renault van, a fenced pen holding a snorting pig.

“Just bought the Renault last year. Brand-new it is.” He laughed, patting it.

“Truffles have been good to me.” The van was parked with the rear door facing the pig’s pen. He opened the door and propped a wooden ramp against the bed, which had a thick layer of fresh hay.

“Cou cou, cou cou, ma belle,”
M. Capretti chimed as we turned to the pig. “Yes, my girl, time to go out for treats. Yes, indeed.” He slipped her something from his pocket as he opened the gate of her pen. He clucked as she pranced up the ramp on her pointed feet, following his hand, which held another treat.

Long and lean with rosy skin showing beneath white bristles, his pig reminded me of Lucretia, the sow that Donald and I had bought so many years before. I hadn’t known about truffles then. I wondered if there had been truffles in the forest near our goat barn and if Lucretia would have been able to sniff them out.

In the old days, people used to take their pigs into the forest to feed on fallen acorns, and I was told that the talented pigs would find truffles and root them up. The hunter-gatherer needed to be close at hand, just as he does today, or the pig would eat the entire find.

M. Capretti, like other pig users, kept his pig on a leash. The leash is quickly jerked the minute the pig “marks,” or scents, a truffle. At that moment the pig lunges forward, forty to a hundred kilos or more of muscle, depending upon the age of the pig, straining to get at the truffle, rip it out of the ground with its powerful snout, and eat it. The wily handler pops him a dog biscuit instead, turning the animal’s head with one hand, while reaching into the ground to lift out the truffle with the other. M. Capretti slipped the prize so quickly and discreetly into his
pouch that I couldn’t see it, even though I was right next to him. Some hunters put a ring in the pig’s nose to prevent it from digging, but M. Capretti said he felt that was cruel and showed laziness on the part of the owner.

“You need to be skillful. If you’re skillful, no need to hurt the pig. She’s your friend.”

When I asked him if he ever used a dog instead of a pig, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Oh, sometimes.” In his opinion it was better to have the pig. That way, in a year or two, you’d have hams and
pâté
as well as truffles. However, pigs are rarely used for truffle hunting in Provence today, due, I suspect, to their size and the difficulty of moving them around, as well as the need to supply them food, lodging, and housekeeping all year.

Dogs are mostly preferred now, and the breed of dog is not important—almost any kind can be trained to find truffles. It is more about the dog’s intelligence and relationship to its master than about breed. I’ve gone hunting with dachshunds, Bernese mountain dogs, springer spaniels, and mutts, and seen many more breeds performing at truffle trials, contests where hunters pit their dogs against one another to see whose dog can find the secret, buried truffles the fastest.

When I asked one old Provençal about how he trained his dogs, he shrugged.
“Ma foi.
It’s easy. You give him a smell of truffle, let him know it, to get used to the smell. I put a truffle in a sock, tie it in, then toss it, let him go get it, and reward him with a biscuit. Then I hide the sock, all different places. When he brings back the sock all the time, I start burying the truffle so he knows to smell it under the earth. Then, in the
truffière
or in the forest, he will look for it. Of course, the dog has to have a good palate to begin with.”

I’m not so sure about that, because the dogs, unlike the pigs, don’t try to dig up the truffle once they’ve marked it. Instead, they sit there, waiting for their treat, more interested in being rewarded by their master for their good work than in eating the truffle.

On returning to M. Capretti’s house, we started to say our good-byes, but he stopped us. “Wait a minute,” he said, hurrying up his stairs. He came back with a glass canning jar with five eggs in it. He flipped the metal ring on the jar to open it, pulled a few truffles out of his pouch, and put them in the jar, fitting them among the eggs before refastening the ring.

“These are eggs from my chickens, good eggs. You keep them and the truffles together in the jar. The smell of the truffles goes into the eggs. In two days, even three, break the eggs into a bowl, clean the truffles, and grate them into the eggs. Let stand a little, add some sea salt, and then cook the eggs in butter to make your
oeufs brouillés.
Ahhh.” He kissed the tip of his fingers with a smack. “Sublime.
Vous verrez.”

We did as we were told, and whenever we’re in Provence during truffle season, we make our traditional
brouillé,
eating it with thin toasts and a glass of local red wine, bathing in the powerful, sensual aroma of every bite. We grate truffles over mashed potatoes, sliver them over salads, slice them onto grilled bread, and drizzle olive oil over them, along with a sprinkling of sea salt. We try to attend one of the many community truffle feasts held during January and February, often put on by local chapters of the Confrérie de la Truffe du Mort Ventoux et du Combat Venaissin, an association of truffle lovers. At the feasts, we, like the hundreds of other people there, tuck into four, five, even six courses, all featuring truffles.