Blue Trout and Black Truffles by Joseph Wechsberg

Author:Joseph Wechsberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 1985-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

* Copyright 1907 by Chappell & Co., Ltd., London. Copyright renewed. Used here by permission.

Ah, la nature fait bien des choses!

MONSIEUR BARBIER

BLACK TRUFFLES

TRUFFLES—the luscious, piquant spots in the goose liver. Dug up by pigs. Brillat-Savarin called them the “black diamonds of the haute cuisiner.” What are they, exactly? Mushrooms? A sort of potato? Colored carrots? Or simply something the manufacturers put in foie gras, to make it more appealing and expensive?

I found out some of the answers on a trip through the southeast of France when I happened to pass through Périgueux, which calls itself “the truffle capital of the world.” Even people coolly disposed toward this costly and hard-to-digest delicacy could find no fault with stopping over at Périgueux, a town of genuine charm where past and present are pleasantly blended. In Puy Saint-Front, the old part of the town, you can sit in a small sidewalk café looking out on relics of prehistoric civilization and Roman walls. The patron, filling your Dubonnet glass to the brim without spilling a single drop, tells you, quite casually, that those hills over there were once occupied by Neolithic man and this town was later the ancient Vesunna. The town’s miniature boulevards are bordered by Gothic chapels, Renaissance houses, baroque doorways, and twentieth-century chestnut trees. Truffles or no, it’s a nice place.

Périgueux is the center of the region known to affluent gourmets the world over as Le Périgord, which comprises parts of the departments of Dordogne and Lot-et-Garonne. I had expected to see the local restaurants crowded with people, all of them feasting with abandon on foie gras and truffles, somewhat as the natives of Detroit always seem to be riding in their cars, and the inhabitants of Pilsen used to drink beer most of the time. But the only foie gras I saw was in cans, in the windows of the more expensive shops.

The truth is, of course, that foie gras and truffles are too expensive for most Périgourdins. In Périgueux, as elsewhere in France, truffles are served in bourgeois homes only on special occasions—births, christenings, graduations, weddings, and funerals—particularly after funerals when the deceased has left a nice inheritance.

Some of my friends in Paris, great connoisseurs of foie gras truffé, had given me a letter to M. Charles Barbier, one of Périgueux’s and the world’s greatest authorities on the fine stuff.

“Barbier was once a well-known chef and now spends his mellow years surrounded by truffles and foie gras,” my friends told me. “He knows a lot about it. And he’s something of a philosopher to boot.”

When I found M. Barbier, he was literally surrounded by hundreds of foie gras. He stood in the big workroom of the canning factory of which he is the general manager—a large, rotund, placid man with rosy cheeks, a bristling mustache, a double chin, and an enormous stomach. The goose livers had been placed on long tables, one by one, and he was walking from liver to liver, giving them the sharp, merciless glance that

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