The Perfect Meal (10 page)

F
ew mushrooms have a strong flavor. On holiday in the Dordogne, after a day foraging in the woods, I ran our finds past the local pharmacist. After examining each one, he placed three to one side.

“So these are poisonous,” I said, cautiously poking one of the three.

“No,” said the pharmacist. “
These
are the edible ones.”

“Then these”—I indicated the brimming basket—“are all toxic?”

“No, they’re harmless. You
could
eat them. They just don’t taste of anything.”

This is true of most fungi. The art of cooking them is to maximize what little flavor they have. My best mushroom recipe came about by accident. Trying to duplicate a
ragoût forestier
we’d eaten in a country restaurant, I fried some girolles and
cèpes
in butter with salt, pepper, and crushed garlic.

Initially, the result was disappointing. As the juices ran together, it formed the same gluey sauce I hated in Australian mushrooms. Fortunately, a phone call distracted me. I turned down the heat to answer it. When I returned, most of the liquid had boiled away, allowing the butter absorbed by the mushrooms to run back out into the pan, leaving the mushrooms coated with a savory glaze that concentrated their forest flavors. A handful of chopped parsley and some fresh black pepper turned the dish into a perfect accompaniment for grilled meat. It was also delicious folded into an omelette, while the same recipe using girolles alone gave flavor and contrast to steamed or grilled fish.

I might have remained constant to the rough fellowship of
champignons forestiers
had it not been for my trips to Italy for the TV series.

In Florence, the production manager and his assistant met me off the overnight train. At 10:00 a.m., it was too late for breakfast, too early for lunch, but, this being Italy, also far too early to start work.

“You like
tartufo
?” the assistant asked.

The only “tartufo” I knew was a frozen dessert, a ball of vanilla ice cream encrusted with chocolate sprinkles. Did the Italians really eat ice cream for morning tea? Well, when in Rome (or at least Florence), do as the Romans do.

“Of course,” I lied.

But Procacci, the shop on via de Tornabuoni to which they took me, was no ice-cream parlor. All varnished wood, terrazzo floor, and display cases of curved glass, it hovered between café and upmarket cake shop. As we sat down at a tiny table, the production assistant brought us a plate of bite-size buns.

“
Panini tartufati
,” she said.

So
tartufo
was Italian for “truffle.” That chocolate-coated ice cream had been a clumsy attempt to duplicate the look of a
truffe noire
.

I bit into the soft white bread, spread with butter creamed with white truffles, and was instantly seduced. When Marie-Dominique joined me on the project, Procacci became our favorite Florentine hangout. On the night train back to Paris, we habitually took the same picnic supper—a dozen of its
panini tartufati
, with a bottle of champagne. The meal always ended with mild dissatisfaction. Next time, we told ourselves, we’d buy an extra half-dozen, and really gorge. We were converts to the creed of Colette: “If I can’t have too many truffles,” she said, “I don’t want any at all.”

E
ven the best chefs use truffles sparingly, mostly because of their price. Black or white, they sell for around $100 an ounce. The cost reflects the fact that, unlike most mushrooms, they can’t be cultivated. They grow wild, and only around the roots of oaks—a tree less common in France than Britain. Lately, some French cultivators have tried “farming” truffles, planting an oak grove, fertilizing the roots with spores, and waiting a year in the hope of a crop. For the time being, however, most trufflers hunt them with animals.

Our feeble sense of smell can’t detect them underground, but badgers, boars, certain dogs, and a particular kind of fly have no such problem. Hunters train dogs to scent the truffle and hope to get there before the hound has rooted it out and wolfed it down for itself. Some tried to train pigs to do the same job, but after a few fingers were lost tussling with voracious porkers, dogs became more popular.

For a few weeks one autumn, the most expensive fruit and vegetable seller in the Marché Saint-Germain displayed a sealed jar next to the cash register. Inside, resting on rice, to absorb the moisture, sat three black truffles.

“How much?” I asked, trying not to salivate.

“Three hundred and fifty euros a kilo,” said the owner. I decided to sleep on it.

By chance, the following weekend took us into Périgord, not far from Carpentras, France’s truffle capital. In a small town, we browsed the weekly produce market, thinly supplied as the last green vegetables and summer fruits disappeared in the autumn chill.

In Australian country towns, the railway station or town hall often carries prominently the date 1888. Building something new in the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, her fiftieth year on the throne, had been a way of Australians reminding themselves they were really still British.

But my maternal grandparents were Swedish and German, so my cultural roots were partly in continental Europe, not Britain. In coming to Europe, I felt for the first time that not only the people but the landscape and buildings were speaking “my” language. Over the cultural abyss between Australia and the rest of the world, I sensed an invisible bridge linking me to the knowledge Europeans acquire at birth.

Still a stranger, even after twenty years in France, I walked that bridge gingerly, trying not to look down into the depths of my ignorance. It was easier in the countryside, in villages, and particularly in churches. A compact chapel of the Middle Ages, set on a headland above the Atlantic, with a vineyard on one side and a graveyard on the other, offered more evidence of my place in the world than the most elaborate cathedral of red sandstone baking in the Australian sun.

For the first time, I felt an affinity with not only the Catholicism in which I was raised but the earlier faiths on which it rested: the rituals of earth magic, of sacrifice and divination that, oddly, resonated at times with those of the Australian aboriginals. The gods never move as far away from one another as we move away from them.

All this crossed my mind in that market. The last seller in line offered the least stock. His table was small and almost bare: just an ancient brass scale, with tiny iron weights, and a few flat metal dishes. Why did he appear so familiar—alone, dignified, and erect behind his table? Of course. He was the image of a figure from the tarot,
Le Bateleur
—the Magician. Always shown at a table, he displays symbols of three tarot suits—cups, coins, and swords—while holding a rod to signify the fourth, wands, the source of the stage illusionist’s magic wand.

Each small dish on his table held a single gnarled black nugget.

Truffles.

I pointed to one the size of a golf ball and asked the price. Solemnly he weighed it on his scale.

“
Seize euros
.”

Sixteen euros? Ridiculously cheap. I reached into my pocket, aware that an ancient tradition was being reaffirmed.

T
he truffle is the plutonium of vegetation, humming with its own kind of radioactivity. Place a truffle next to butter, in a bottle of oil, or in a bowl of eggs, and its taste invades them all, enriching and perfuming.

My truffle lasted for months. One piece, slivered, went into a bottle of oil, not olive—the fruitiness of which can fight the truffle’s flavor—but the less assertive grape-seed. I placed another piece in a crock of unsalted butter, well sealed to stop the flavor from penetrating to every corner of the refrigerator. The rest went into a screw-topped jar with a dozen eggs. Few breakfasts are more delicious than two truffled eggs, soft-boiled, with toast spread with truffled butter.

Truffle and beef is a natural marriage. I copied a dish from La Petite Cour, one of my favorite local eating places. They slice deeply into a
pavé
of rare beef in four places and, just before grilling, place a slice of raw foie gras in each crevice. It’s served with tiny boiled potatoes in their skins and a salad dressed with truffle oil. And for a carpaccio that celebrates the pleasures of rare beef, I plunge a piece of filet into boiling oil, leave it there for a minute, then lift it out. The heat seals the meat, leaving the interior almost raw. After the meat had rested for half an hour, I slice it thinly, lay it on roquette (arugula) leaves, sprinkle it with fresh black pepper and
fleur de sel
, garnish with shavings of parmesan, then drizzle with truffle oil.

Cooking with truffles made me even more enthusiastic about their unique qualities, in particular their almost chemical perfume, utterly distinctive, with the power to augment most flavors but not overpower them. After centuries of failing to describe that scent, gourmets stepped back and let scientists try. They came up with surprising, if dismaying, findings.

Apparently, dogs and pigs think truffles smell like semen, which excites them sexually. And dogs locate them, initially, not from the scent of the truffles themselves but from the lingering stink of truffle in their own excrement or that of other dogs, deposited in previous years near those trees where they’d scarfed up the forbidden goodies. The odor is so powerful it can survive sun, rain, snow, and even the canine digestive system.

Someone once called me a “truffle hound” for my skill in ferreting out old books. It doesn’t seem quite such a compliment now.

Eight

First Catch Your Lamprey

Hello, suckers!

Texas Guinan

B
uying courgette (zucchini) flowers in the market on rue de Seine, I was surprised when the French woman next in line asked how I cooked them. They turn up so seldom in Paris, and for such a short season, that she’d never seen one. But halfway through my explanation—dip them in a tempura batter mixed with grated parmesan, then deep-fry till crisp—she’d lost interest. If I’d said they went straight into a salad, she might have approved, but Japanese batter and Italian cheese? You could almost see her nose wrinkling.
More foreign rubbish . . .

Given the nation’s conservatism about food, how was it, after more than twenty years living in France, that I still hadn’t eaten a lamprey? This eel-like fish was once a great delicacy. In the Middle Ages, a pope is said to have paid twenty gold pieces for a fat specimen. Yet, in more than two decades in France, I had never eaten one or seen it on any menu. If any dish was “lost,” this was surely it.

And where better to feature such an exotic, richly traditional yet forgotten dish than in my perfect banquet?

“Have you ever eaten lamprey?” I asked Marie-Dominique.

“What is it?”

“A sort of fish. Like an eel.”

“Oh,
lamproies
.” She grimaced. “No!
Elles sont dégoûtantes!
They live on blood.”

It’s true—the lamprey is a vampire. Its “mouth” is a cluster of seven serrated suckers with which it attaches itself to a larger fish and drains its juices. A component in its saliva, like that in a vampire bat, prevents its host’s blood from coagulating. In Roman times, lampreys were kept in ponds and, according to legend, sometimes fattened on human blood. Supposedly, a slave who broke a valuable plate could be fed to the lampreys. I suspect this tale flatters the fish’s sucking ability. All the same, it didn’t make one keener to try them out.

Recipes for lampreys turn up often in old cookbooks. In one particularly elaborate medieval method, each “mouth” was plugged with a clove, and the largest with a whole nutmeg—equivalent to roasting a chicken with a whole black truffle in every orifice. The Italians served them with rice in a risotto, and the French in red wine sauce thickened with the lampreys’ own blood. King Henry I of England ate so many lampreys during a visit to Normandy in 1135 that he famously died of “a surfeit.” A taste for lampreys, albeit “potted” (cooked and preserved in butter), also saw off the poet Alexander Pope.

Lampreys were believed to send women into a sexual frenzy like the one that possessed the mythological nymph Callisto, a handmaiden of Diana, goddess of the hunt. A dish of lampreys made her so hot that Zeus disguised himself as the goddess to lure her into the woods, then, after they’d made love, turned her, in a rather ungentlemanly way, into a bear. Writing in the early 1700s, the British poet John Gay suggested she’d have done better on a vegetarian diet.

The shepherdess, who lives on salad,

To cool her youth controls her palate;

Should Dian’s maids turn liqu’rish livers,

And of huge lampreys rob the rivers,

Then all beside each glade and visto,

You’d see nymphs lying like Callisto.

King Henry I liked his lampreys sugared and baked in a crust. When the crust was opened, the syrup, mixed with wine and spices, was ladled onto slices of bread and topped with coin-size slices of lamprey meat.

Fortunately, just as I was about to abandon my search for this elusive creature, I stumbled across a short film on YouTube. It documented how lampreys made a rather desultory attack on some swimmers crossing Lake Champlain, on the Canadian border. I recognized the voice of the film’s narrator as an old friend, the Texas-born actor Bill Hootkins. Bill’s insinuating bass-baritone made him a favorite for jobs like this and for audio books; his version of the complete
Moby Dick
remains a classic. Though he had small roles in dozens of films, his screen immortality rests on a few moments as the pilot Porkins in
Star Wars
, a fact he found acutely embarrassing.

He regarded his personal best as playing Alfred Hitchcock in the play
Hitchcock Blonde
. Bill was perfect casting, since, like the great director, he loved to eat. In London in the late 1970s, I audited his course on Chinese Cuisine. The “course” consisted of sitting down once a week to a banquet, each time in a different restaurant. To audit, one pulled up an extra chair. Bill spent the evening darting back and forth from the kitchen, noisily supervising each dish in fluent Mandarin.