There are times when France smells better than any place on earth…the boulangerie early in the morning when the baguettes are still warm, sun-soaked lavender in July, the cheesy blast that hits you over the head in a Michelin restaurant when the server rolls back the cover of the chariot de fromages.
But nothing compares to the earthy pungent muskily orgasmic scent of hundreds of fresh truffles, or Tuber melanosporum, the Périgord black truffle, the diamant noir. And the best place to get a good nose-full are the truffle markets in the south of France. These run from late November to mid-March, because truffles never ripen all at once, and like most fungi start to deteriorate as soon as you dig them up.
Lalbenque Truffle market
Most of the weekly markets are in Provence, but my nearest one is the Tuesday market in Lalbenque in the Lot, which on good years yields around 20 per cent of France’s crop. You need to arrive by 2.30pm these days (it used to be earlier, until someone finally realized that got in the way of lunch). There will be a rope strung down the middle of the main street, the Rue du Marché aux Truffes, separating the throng of buyers from the trufficulteurs with their little Red Riding Hood baskets of bumpy, black turd-shaped balls wafting their ineffable aroma in heady gusts. Buyers, many of them suave looking types in immaculately tailored coats mill about, dicker, stick their noses in the baskets. The rope descends at 3pm: the sale is on. Within minutes the truffles have vanished. The rest of us can buy small ones that are just about affordable inside the mairie.
Eye watering prices
This year the prices were eye watering. Wholesale truffle prices that day were 950€ a kilo, while the rest of us might pay 1500€ for the same. Lack of rain and irrigation in Spain were blamed. Wait a minute…Spain? Until the 2000s, France was the world’s top producer, but its 40 tonnes a year have been eclipsed by the 120 tonnes from Spain (where they were once piquantly known as turmas de la tierra or ‘testicles of the earth’).
How truffles grow
Although we like to think of truffle hunters and their dogs foraging in woodlands, most of their foraging really happens in orchards of holm oaks, white oaks and hazelnuts, planted in the poor limestone soil truffles favour. As saplings the tree roots are inoculated with truffle spores (a technique called mycorrhization developed in the 1970s by the INRA, the French agricultural research institute), which, with luck, leads after a few years to the mysterious symbiosis of fungus and tree to create the fruiting body we love. Today 90 per cent of truffes come from domestic groves.
Using mycorrhization, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States also produce black truffles, but demand is still reckoned to be around 50 times the world crop. In spite of all the science, there remains in truffle world plenty of secrecy, intrigue and a shocking amount of crime. even murder (just read The Truffle Underground by Ryan Jacobs).
A glut of truffles
Connoisseurs yearn for a return to the truffle golden age. From the 1880s until the First World, France produced (and devoured) 1000 tonnes a year, and imported just as much from Italy. Back then, a restaurant meal in Paris without a truffled dish was unheard of; no one in the Dordogne would eat a roast turkey unless truffles had been first jammed under its skin. In the Lot a train, Le Truffadou was built in the 1880s just to transport truffles from Martel (and still runs as a tourist steam train in summer, although minus any truffles).
Ironically, the truffle glut came about because of catastrophe: the phylloxera epidemic that decimated Europe’s vineyards in the mid 19th century. Farmers in search of a new livelihood planted trees in age-old truffle zones, having known since Napoleonic times (thanks to a Provençal farmer named Talon) that the odds were good that spores would spread to their roots.
The magnificent truffle era ended as it began, with a catastrophe: the First World War. Rural workers who survived the bloodbath took better-paying factory jobs in the cities. By the 1920s, the champs truffiers were only good for firewood. Secrets were forgotten. Land was lost to urbanization. Wild boars wrecked mayhem in the orchards.
The earthy aroma of truffles
The thing is, truffles WANT boars to eat them–the pheromone in truffles, androstenol, is the same produced by male pigs to attract sows. Truffles in the wild propagates by sows gobbling them up and defecating their spores. The same pheromone appears in women’s urine and male armpits. Oh heavenly aroma!
Even if truffle prices continue to rise, you can always go to a market and breathe it in for free.
By Dana Facaros, one of the world’s leading travel writers, and author of multiple guide books, she is a regular contributor to The TImes, The Telegraph, and other quality journals.
The French food decoder box
After living in France for over 30 years, writing about food and restaurants in guidebooks, I thought I knew everything about French cuisine, so it would be easy to create a French food app—not a translator app but one full of anecdotes and insights on everything from how to buy potatoes, fish and meat to which cheese really is the stinkiest of them all. Boy was I WRONG. The more I delved, the more I realized I didn’t know—and often what I thought I knew wasn’t right! It took over a year and currently has 1,270 entries, arranged by category and region, and has a search feature that allows you to instantly find what you are looking for in French or English, and only costs as much as a double espresso in a Paris café. And it’s constantly updated because there’s always more to learn: facarospauls.com/apps/french-food-decoder/
