Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (rm book recommendations .TXT) 📕

friends and I have arrived at the hotel-restaurant of Clément Bruno, the self-proclaimed truffle king, at 2:30 p.m., a time when the French are loath to feed the hungry. Groceries are shut down, their metal grates slammed and padlocked. Restaurateurs have stuffed menus into desk drawers, concealing them from the uncivilized who might show up after the national one-p.m. call to lunch, a kind of psychic whistle that sounds in the heads of citizens of the republic, beckoning them tableside.

The three of us have been in a car all day, driving from Italy to this tiny village of Lorgues, in southern France. So eager were we to arrive in truffle country that we have stopped for nothing but fuel (expensive) and tolls (outrageous). We walk into the restaurant, where the midday merriment has not abated, and mention to the maître d’ that we are guests of the hotel who have booked fully 75 percent of Bruno’s four rooms for the night. I explain that we are desperately hungry and would be grateful if he could provide us with a meager bite of cheese and bread. I sound pathetic, which is a mistake. Arrogance works so much better with the French.

He tells us, in his own way, to hit the road, mentioning a hamlet six miles down the road where we might find food. We won’t. There the greeting will be the same. We will be fortunate if the villagers do not light torches and gather in a mob at the gates, determined to keep us away.

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A L A N R I C H M A N

As we walk out the door, I mutter something to my friends. I cannot recall the words exactly, but I know I lost my air of hand-wringing obsequiousness. I might have cursed, and curses carry beautifully in crisp winter air. The maître d’ says, “You only want cheese, yes?” I wheel around, seal the bargain. He throws in dessert.

We drop our bags in our guest rooms, which have soft, fluffy towels and cold, stone floors. Minutes later we are seated in the restaurant, at a table overlaid with heavy damask. Surrounding us are happy locals who show no inclination to return to their dwellings or fields anytime soon. The low-ceilinged restaurant is situated in a building that appears to have belonged to an eighteenth-century farmer of irreproachable refinement. The paneling is dark, the paintings are in gilded frames.

Even the ceiling has frescoes. That the nymphs above us are not museum quality detracts not a bit from their charm. The fireplace is ablaze, as it should be but so rarely is in restaurants today.

On one side of us is a clearly overfed family of four. On the other is an elderly, much trimmer gathering of eight. Both groups have finished eating and commenced with the distilled spirits portion of their lunch.

I am not surprised that everybody is so jolly. After all, I have shown up at the perfect moment: it is the season of the black truffle, the supreme denizen of the dark woods of France.

The restaurant Bruno is the start of a brief and glorious journey for my friends and me, a journey through the heart of culinary darkness.

Technically, a truffle is nothing more than a fungus, an underevolved denizen of one of the lowest orders of the plant family, an accidental growth that springs from dampness and soil. It is, to be unmerciful, little more than a mushroom that grows in meadows, usually under oak trees, in favored regions of France from November until March. The black truffle, more properly Tuber melanosporum, is not even as celebrated as it once was. The decline began when Tuber magnatum, the white truffle of Italy, started getting excessive publicity, the same way that the clothing designers of Italy started stealing attention from the clothing designers of France a few decades ago.

Now it is the white truffle, which is actually a beige truffle, that F O R K I T O V E R

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attracts customers. The white truffle is cherished for its unbridled pungency, stronger and less sweet than that of the black truffle, and its cost is approximately five times that of the black. Yet it is the French black truffle—more versatile, more beautiful, and more delicious than the white of Italy—that I consider the more wondrous food.

Every year, about the time that the wealthy close up their Hamptons beach houses, the white truffle arrives in Manhattan and plays to packed houses in deluxe Italian restaurants. At that moment the cost of expense-account lunches rises by 50 percent as captains stand over bowls of eggy pasta and creamy risotto, shaving away. The white truffle is only eaten in one manner, raw and thinly sliced. It is not pretty, but it has an uncommon smell.

A few months later, almost unnoticed, the first black truffles reach the marketplace. Uncooked, the black truffle is a beauty. It glitters like mica, and the white veins are the equivalent of the marbling in a prime steak. When heat is applied, it turns coal black. The black truffle is part condiment, part vegetable, part indulgence. If the white truffle is a slat-tern with immoderate lipstick, the black truffle is a Ph.D. in a naughty dress. The black truffle is an essential component of haute French cuisine. When chopped up and put into a stew or a fricassee, the simplest of its uses, it provides nuances that elevate a dish from rustic to regal.

The aroma of the white truffle is a bombshell, bedsheets left unmade by lovers who ate garlic the night before. The black truffle intoxicates; it is an after-hours party at a formal dance. The only advice black-truffle eaters must heed is to be wary of near-fakes, either the basically use-less Tuber brumale, the cubic zirconia of truffles, commonplace in France; or the hated Tuber indicum, which is harvested in China.

Our prearrranged truffle plans did not include the small lunch