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

He harvests grapes that are sent to a cooperative and made into an inexpensive red. He grows lavender, the crop that embodies the spirit of Provence. He has a few fruit trees. He stopped growing tomatoes because prices were too low. He asks that I not use his name, since truffle hunters try not to make themselves known to revenue-collectors.

Taxes and truffles don’t mix. At least his truffle-hunting dog, Rita, is wildly pleased to see me. “You need a lively dog, not shy, not tentative,” he says.

As we walk out onto his property, he points to a hole in the ground that Rita did not dig and says, “Yesterday, somebody stole my truffles.” I am surprised when he says he knows the identity of the poacher, a local man who has not been caught in the act. “He comes at night and does not keep it a secret,” he says. “He makes a hundred thousand euros [about $120,000]. If we catch him, we will take off his clothes, tie him to a tree, and leave him for four or five days. We did this to somebody already. If he is naked, he has a harder time calling for help.” I nod appreciatively at the terror this punishment must impose.

Secretly, I am thinking that I would consent to being tied naked to a tree for four days if I got $120,000, tax-free.

F O R K I T O V E R

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Truffles appear in mysterious ways. They are the phantoms of the plant kingdom. They thrive in and around the roots of oak trees, although the thirty-year-old oaks that the truffle hunter planted on his property to encourage the growth of truffles do not resemble the stately oaks of American woodlands. These are gnarled and misshapen. Druids might be living in them. Black truffles of exemplary quality once grew in profusion throughout the countryside of Périgord and Provence, but now this so-called wild production is mostly gone. Nobody has learned how to cultivate first-rate truffles, but planting oak trees on land where they once thrived somehow causes truffles to return within ten years.

The harvesting is still done by animals with an extraordinary sense of smell. Traditionally, this was the pig, but now it is a dog. “I have heard of a man near Nice who still uses a pig,” says the truffle hunter, “but the problem with a pig is that I cannot imagine throwing a hundred-and-fifty-kilo [330-pound] pig in the back of your truck. It is very interesting, but I have never seen a pig hunt.” Rita, who is three years old and may weigh thirty pounds, is an underweight black-and-white mutt deliberately underfed to keep her enthusiastic about digging for truffles—not that she gets to eat them.

Her reward is a crust of bread. Truffle hunters who have neither pigs nor dogs have been known to hunt by the rays of the sun. They look for a telltale glint off the wings of fleas or gnats that hover above the ground where truffles grow. The truffle hunter says a man hunting by the twinkle of fleas will uncover one-third the truffles of a dog like Rita. When she smells one, or the truffle hunter follows his instincts and tells her where to dig, she becomes a miniature steam shovel. When she gets to within an inch of the prize, she stops.

Rita and the truffle hunter seem to find truffles with ease, although none are of great size. The largest weighs about three ounces and will sell for $25 at the back door of the restaurant La Beaugraviere, out of sight of the taxman. I try telling the truffle hunter that he seems to be doing well. He picks up a few hundred dollars in an afternoon while strolling through the woods with his dog, an exercise I think of as digging for dollars. He says it is not poor people like him who become 2 6 6

A L A N R I C H M A N

rich from truffles but the middlemen and the restaurants of Paris.

He tells me a story about a widow. (These sorts of unhappy tales invariably have widows in them.) A local woman discovered a truffle weighing almost three pounds, sold it to a local négociant for $350, and he immediately resold it for nearly $1,200. He says to me, “I cultivate them and I sell them to people like Mr. Jullien, who sells it to you to eat.

Why should there be four or five other people . . .”— he pauses in mid-sentence to gather his dislike of middlemen—“who also eat off this truffle. You are not robbed when you go to Mr. Jullien.” La Beaugraviere resembles no other French restaurant I’ve ever seen.

It seems to have been designed by a New Mexico architect specializing in pueblos who inexplicably found work in Provence. The walls are off-orange, the fireplace oversize and rustic, the tablecloths folksy, and the paintings garish interpretations of the black truffle. The menu has a picture of a truffle hunter and his pig on it. Even the truffle hunter has warned me to expect nothing from the decor. “It does not compete with the food,” he says.

The dining room is reached by walking through the kitchen, where I see federally protected game birds awaiting the roasting pan. They have been brought in by some customers, who order a jeroboam (almost a gallon) of 1989 Beaucastel Châteauneuf-du-Pape. They are dressed in sweatshirts and jeans, and they have hung their waterproof jackets over the backs of their chairs. Clearly, it is not only the dining room decor that does not compete with the food.

The glory of La Beaugraviere is truffle overload. A meal prepared by Jullien is a throwback to a long-ago time when black truffles grew everywhere and farmers tossed them into their pots along with the onions and carrots. Sea scallops are cut in two and presented with a