When I was 15, I went to Florence and had my first taste of gelato and white truffles. I was ruined for life. A worldly friend who was all of 18 had spent the previous summer in Fiesole, living with a family friend, the widow of a sculptor. She shared her wisdom in brown ink on beige paper, and I still pass on much of her advice to first-time visitors: Go to Perchè No? for gelato, hang out at the Bargello.
The revelation, though, was her instruction to pause of a late afternoon at Procacci, the carriage-trade gourmet shop on the via Tornabuoni, for a tall glass of seasoned-before-your-eyes tomato juice and a few panini tartufati—glistening oval finger rolls filled with white truffle paste. The suave ceremony surrounding the homemade tomato juice, kept in a tin sleeve set in a mahogany counter, seemed like something devised for Hemingway at Harry’s Bar: It involved squeezing half a lemon onto a saucer and stirring the liquid with salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce before slipping it into the tomato juice. The bread itself was seductive—lightly eggy and ever so slightly sweet, what the French call pain brioché.
And the truffles! A small sting of salt, and then a flavor unlike any I knew: less like a mushroom than some white meat like veal, earthy and pungent and garlicky. It tasted of parts of the body I urgently wanted to know better. This was more potent than anything I’d ever had, or at least anything I’d wanted more of.
After that trip, I set out on a lifetime search for that same excitement, going back to Italy as often as I could and taking cooking courses, sitting through 12-course truffle dinners, buying tiny cans of Procacci truffle paste with pretty turquoise labels. Then I graduated from bringing home tinned truffles (which tasted of the tin) to buying fresh.
Buying fresh truffles proved to be a furtive activity. While on my first culinary assignment in Italy, I went one damp and gray morning just after dawn to the truffle market in Asti, near the legendary white truffle capital of Alba, in Piedmont. Grunting men in shabby coats responded to my overtures in halting Italian only when they saw that I was with someone they recognized—a teacher who brought many free-spending, naive students. Very reluctantly, the men reached into their coat pockets for lumpy newsprint-wrapped bundles, making it plain that we foreigners were lucky to pay whatever price they named. They put a few pebblelike truffles to their noses and weighed the ones they’d decided to give us—inferior, no doubt, to the ones they were saving for their good customers.
I nestled my three gold-priced nuggets in Arborio rice and tightly capped the jar, following the advice of my teacher. (This was a bad idea, I later learned, unless you’re content to lose most of the aromatics to the rice; paper really is better.) Back home, I honored my hard-won prizes with homemade chicken stock, using the perfumed rice for a carefully stirred risotto. Just before spooning the creamy risotto onto warmed plates, I shaved the truffles over them with the gleaming bass-violin–shaped cutter I had bought with future article earnings.
I did not experience the epiphany I’d hoped for. The truffle-strewn dishes I had just been served in Piedmont showed me that fresh truffles were a subtler, more muted matter than the transfixing Procacci panini, though still strongly suggesting those exciting anatomical locales. The echo in my kitchen of this adult experience was far fainter than I had hoped.
I’ve had other truffle disappointments since then—not just in my own kitchen but in the kitchens and dining rooms of the expert buyers for whom those grunting Alba vendors were so obviously waiting.
“These truffles, they taste like nothing!” Tony May cries in the elegant bar of San Domenico, his New York City restaurant. San Domenico is the head station of the Italian-American underground railroad, the first stop for both Italian cognoscenti and newcomers who want to get themselves or their olive oil noticed in America. May is willing to spend good money on good ingredients like truffles, especially given his customers’ expectations. Italian food lovers count the days until the first white truffle appears—a wait that, unlike the staged anticipation of Beaujolais Nouveau, has not lost its cachet, at least not yet.
Once the season begins, friends will hear May complain aria-like (he talks in arias): “Look at that basket of truffles. I don’t want to tell you what Mimmo paid for it.” (His brother Mimmo imports luxury Italian ingredients.) “You walk in the room and you can’t tell there are truffles in the house. It used to be that if I had half this many truffles, I could tell from outside the door. It’s the same thing in Italy. Sometimes I’m embarrassed to sell some of the truffles I buy. They’re expensive. But no one says a goddamn thing, they just pay. Somebody has got to sound the alarm bell.”
If Tony May can’t get a decent truffle, something’s wrong. And so I recently went on a truffle-season tour of northern Italy to find out what’s changed—the market, people’s expectations, or the truffles themselves. I wanted to know why truffles seem so namby-pamby these days.
“How do I find good truffles? There aren’t any!” The speaker is Ugo Alciati, one of the three sons of the mom and pop who started Da Guido, Piedmont’s premier restaurant and, in the opinion of many, Italy’s best. A number of gourmands make annual pilgrimages to Da Guido to taste the year’s white truffle vintage, refusing even to sample what any other restaurants near Alba have been able to find—let alone those in Milanese or Roman restaurants, and certainly not Parisian or Californian ones. “Oh, there are truffles, of course,” Alciati says. “But really good ones are very, very rare. There are almost none.”
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