Encore Provence (24 page)

The truffle season extends roughly from the first frost to the last, and during much of that time the kitchen of Mathilde and Bernard’s farmhouse takes on a pleasantly perfumed air. The scent of truffles, ripe and powerful, greets you as you go through the door, and you may be fortunate enough to be offered one of the specialties of the house. This is the Rolls Royce of butters: alternate layers of butter and thinly sliced fresh truffles, spread on toast, sprinkled with grains of
gros sel
, the coarse gray sea salt, and accompanied by a glass or two of red wine. If that doesn’t set you up for lunch, nothing will.

Toward the end of each week during the season, you might see in the corner of the kitchen a couple of capacious
Straw baskets, their contents covered with a damp linen cloth. These are the truffles that have been gathered over the last seven days, ready to be taken to the Friday morning market at Carpentras, and this week Bernard has entrusted me with an important job. I am to be the official truffle bearer, he who carries the baskets.

We set off at seven, driving almost blind through the fleece of low clouds that often settle on the hills in winter. As we dropped down on to the Carpentras road, the sun burned through, leaving wisps of cloud no more than pale smears across a sky that was as blue as July. It was going to be one of those brilliantly clear winter days when the scenery looks as though it’s been polished.

The car smelled delicious, but slightly humid. I asked Bernard why it was necessary to keep the truffles damp, and he explained about the perils of evaporation. From the moment they are dug up and taken from the earth, truffles begin to dry out, losing moisture; even worse, losing weight, sometimes as much as ten percent. And since truffles are sold by weight, that ten percent is money, gone up, as Bernard said, into thin air.

By eight-thirty we were in Carpentras. So, it seemed, was every truffle enthusiast in the Vaucluse. There must have been a hundred of them, a clot of humanity on one side of the otherwise empty Place Aristide Bruant. The market takes place every Friday morning from November through March with, as you might expect, its headquarters in a bar. Those who had arrived early, now fortified by coffee and a nip of something stronger against the chill of the morning, were beginning to leave the bar to make the rounds of the trestle tables set up outside. Bernard did the same. I followed him with the baskets, attempting nonchalance,
as though I was used to carrying around thousands of francs covered in damp linen.

One of the many pleasant things about the Carpentras market is that it’s not confined to professionals. Anyone with a truffle to sell can try his luck with the
courtiers
—the brokers who buy for their clients in Paris or the Périgord—and I watched as one old man came sidling up to the table where a
courtier
was preparing to do business.

The old man looked from side to side before taking something wrapped in newspaper out of his pocket. He unwrapped the object, a fair-sized truffle, and presented it in cupped hands. Whether this was to conceal it from prying eyes of the competition or to enhance the aroma I wasn’t sure.

“
Allez, sentez
,” said the old man. “I found it at the bottom of the garden.”

The
courtier
bent over the truffle to inhale, then looked at the old man, his face a study in disbelief. “Sure,” he said. “While you were taking the dog for a walk.”

At that point, their negotiations were interrupted by the arrival of a gendarme, who marched through the crowd until he found a clear space in front of the tables. With a ceremonial flourish, he raised his left arm so that he could study his watch. Satisfied that the moment had officially come, he put a whistle to his mouth and blew two short blasts. “
Le marché est ouvert
,” he announced. Nine o’clock on the dot.

It was easy enough to pick out the big sellers, the
trufficulteurs
, with their bulging bags or cloth-covered baskets, and the
courtiers
at their tables. But there was no way of telling if other, anonymous buyers were making the rounds that morning. Carpentras is a well-known market,
and there is always the chance that someone has come down to buy for the three-star restaurants. Consequently, if you are approached by a man expressing interest in the contents of your basket, it is not only good manners but possibly good business to offer him a sniff.

On Bernard’s nod, I drew back the cloth and held up one of our baskets for a snappily dressed gentleman with a Parisian accent. His head almost disappeared inside the basket, and I could see his shoulders rise and fall as he took a series of deep breaths. He emerged smiling and nodding, then selected a truffle, which he began to scratch carefully with his thumbnail until the color and the tiny white veins below the surface showed through. As a general rule, the darker the truffle, the more perfumed and desirable it is, and therefore more expensive, because the price is linked to the smell. In other words, you’re paying through the nose.

The gentleman nodded again as he replaced the truffle. He seemed highly impressed. I waited for the cash to come out. “
Merci, messieurs
,” he said, and walked off. We never saw him again. Obviously, he was nothing more than a truffle groupie, a sniffer and a scratcher rather than a buyer. Apparently, every market has one.

In fact, Bernard has regular clients that he has dealt with for years, and we would be going to see them once the buyers and sellers had stopped circling each other for long enough to establish the day’s price. But for the moment, free of my responsibilities, I was able to roam and look and listen.

There is a furtive undercurrent to the truffle business. Sources of supply are kept secret. Demand is largely fuelled by cash, for which no receipts are given. Safeguards and guarantees don’t exist. Irregularities—sometimes
indelicately described as swindles—are not infrequent. And this year, as if to confirm the worst fears of Monsieur Farigoule, the villainous Chinese are interfering with the French market. Their secret weapon is the
Tuber himalayensis
, an oriental fungus that looks and even smells like the genuine
Tuber melanosporum
from Provence. However, there are two important differences: The Chinese impostor sells for a fraction of the price of a genuine truffle, and it tastes, so I am told, like rubber shavings.

In theory there shouldn’t be a problem. Side by side, there would be no danger of confusing the varieties. But what has happened, according to market rumor, is that certain unscrupulous businessmen have been mixing the two—a few genuine truffles among a batch of Chinese fakes—and charging top prices. If there were ever to be a popular excuse for the revival of the guillotine, this would surely be the one.

During the first half hour or so, I had noticed that buying and selling were slow. Even so, there was a good deal of muttering between the
courtiers
and the suppliers as they worked toward agreeing a price per kilo. Since there is no officially fixed price, everything is negotiable. Also, if a seller is unhappy with the Carpentras price, there is always the chance that a better deal might be possible at the Saturday market farther north in Richerenches. So it doesn’t pay to rush in. It wasn’t until the first big transactions were made that the day’s price began to settle at around twenty-seven hundred francs per kilo.

This was the signal for portable phones to come out, presumably so that the news could be relayed to every corner of the truffle world, and one could be sure that the price wouldn’t stay at twenty-seven hundred francs for
long. As truffles travel north, their value increases enormously, and by the time they reach Paris the price is likely to have doubled.

Business was beginning to pick up. I was standing by one of the
courtiers
scribbling a few notes when I became aware of a presence lurking close behind me and turned, almost bumping into the nose of a man peering over my shoulder to see what I was writing. I’m sure he thought I had some secret and valuable inside information. How disappointed he would have been, if he’d managed to decipher my English scrawl, to find nothing more than a few observations on what the well-dressed truffle dealers were wearing.

They wore thick-soled, dusty boots, bulky jackets with zippered inside pockets containing brown envelopes filled with cash, berets—one with an ingenious arrangement of ear flaps—modified yachting caps, a wide-brimmed black fedora, and long scarves worn bank-robber style, wrapped around to conceal the face up to eye level. It created a sinister effect, only spoiled when the scarves had to be lowered to uncover the nose for ritual sniffing.

Most of the men and women were middle-aged and of rural appearance, but there were a couple of noticeable exceptions, leather-clad young men with hard faces, cropped hair, and gold earrings. Bodyguards, I immediately thought as I looked for bulges under their jackets, probably armed and dangerous, obviously there to protect the wads of 500-franc notes that were being shuffled from hand to hand. After I had watched them for a few moments, it became clear that they were keeping their elderly mother company while she haggled over half a dozen tiny truffles in a muddy plastic bag.

Bernard decided that he was ready to sell, and we found
one of his regular contacts behind a small table at the edge of the crowd. Like the other
courtiers
, his equipment was a mixture of ancient and modern: a portable bar-scale of the kind that has been in use for a good hundred years, and an electronic pocket calculator. The truffles were examined for color, sniffed, and transferred from the baskets to a bag of cotton mesh. The bag was hung from the hook of the scale, the sliding brass balance adjusted until the level of the bar was horizontal. Bernard and the
courtier
studied it, looked at each other, nodded. The weight was agreed. The
courtier
then communed with his calculator before tapping on the keys. He showed the figures to Bernard, screening the calculator with a hand as though he were displaying a saucy photograph. More nodding. The price was agreed. A check was made out (Bernard is a paragon of legitimate practice in a murky business, and doesn’t deal in cash), and the morning’s work was done.

Now for the cabaret, Bernard said, and we pushed through the crush and into the bar. The noise was considerable, despite the secretive conversational technique that I saw being used by many of the truffle men. They seemed to be incapable of saying anything without shielding the mouth with one hand each time they spoke, presumably to foil eavesdroppers like myself. Priceless information, like the state of their liver or the weather forecast, is therefore kept from prying ears; or it would be, if they didn’t bellow behind the baffle of their hands.

The combination of country accents, half-swallowed sentences, and the ever-present barrier of the hand made conversations difficult to follow, and I managed to understand only two exchanges. The first was easier, because it was directed at me. I’d just been introduced to one of the dealers, a
gaillard
, a strapping hulk of a man with stomach
and voice to match his height. He asked what I thought of the market, and I told him I was impressed by the amount of money that was circulating. He nodded in agreement, his eyes flicked around the bar, and he loomed closer, one hand up against the corner of his mouth in case anyone else should overhear the force-ten whisper: “I’m rich, you know. I have five houses.”

Before giving me a chance to reply, he had moved on to the end of the bar to surround a small man, wrapping one great arm around his shoulders as he leaned down, hand to mouth, ready to impart further information of a highly confidential nature. I suppose it’s a habit developed over many years in a business that makes a fetish of discretion, and I wondered if it extended to his domestic life. Did he and his wife ever have a normal conversation, or was it always a succession of mutters and winks and nudges? I imagined them at the breakfast table. “
Pssst. Do you want another cup of coffee?
” “
Not so loud. The neighbors might hear.
”

The second revelation of the morning concerned a truly remarkable item of truffling equipment; something, I think, that only a French mind could have invented. It was described with graphic gestures and a certain amount of spilled wine by a dealer who claimed to have seen it in action.

The device had been made for an old man—an extremely old man—who had been born and bred near Carpentras. For his entire adult life the truffle had been his passion. He was impatient for the coming of the first frost, and his winters were spent out on the foothills of Mont Ventoux with his dog. Each Friday he would come to the market, his linen sack crammed with a week’s work. After selling his truffles, he would join the other men at
the bar only long enough to have one quick drink, always a Suze, before leaving to resume the hunt. For him, a day spent away from the pursuit of truffles was a day wasted.

Time went by, and the old man’s body eventually paid the price for a lifetime of stooping and crouching in bitter conditions, those years of exposure to the winds swooping down from Siberia that can make a man’s kidneys ache with cold. His back gave out. It had to be kept absolutely straight. Any deviation from the perpendicular was agony, and even walking was a painful effort. His truffle hunting days were over.

Nevertheless, his passion persisted, and he was lucky enough to have a friend who brought him, each Friday, to the market. It was better than nothing, certainly, but his weekly visits turned into a source of frustration. He could look at truffles. He could scratch them. He could sniff them, but—because he couldn’t bend—he could sniff only those that were placed in his hand or held under his nose. More and more, he found himself missing that thrilling headlong dive into a full basket, to be surrounded by the perfume that had been such a pleasurable part of his long life. His colleagues at the bar pondered the problem.

I was told that it was a veteran of World War II who came up with the idea, which was very loosely based on the design of the old military gas mask. It was a
museau télescopique
, or extendable snout. At one end was an abbreviated mask that covered the nose and mouth, with a wide elastic band to secure it to the head. The mask was attached to a canvas tube, pleated like the bellows of a concertina, and at the far end was the artificial nostril, an aluminum funnel. Using this ingenious extension to the nose, the old man was able to go from basket to basket, inhaling to his heart’s content while keeping his back
painlessly, comfortably straight. A triumph of practical medicine over cruel adversity. How I would love to have seen it in action.