The food of love?

Abstract

On a particularly wet and windy day towards the end of a French summer I arrived in Reims in time for dinner. The ubiquitous red Michelin guide book titillated my mental taste buds with a restaurant called Les Crayers . Dinner was an experience I would love to repeat, but only the first course is of interest to the mycologist. I commenced with truffle en crout dans sa sauce, which turned out to be a large truffle, wrapped in puff pastry and baked in the oven, set in a brown sea of its own gravy. A whole truffle, just for me! Yes, of course I had eaten truffle before: as decoration on aspic covered fish (tasteless and hard) or set in a pate de Ioie gras . But this was the first time I had eaten a whole truffle alone, and John Paul Getty , senior or junior, can never have felt as rich and extravagant as I did then. This year I was delighted to find truffles in Spain at a price I could afford. Inland from Valencia you may find Morella, a remarkable fortified medieval town which has not been ruined by tourism, not yet anyway. Morella is built on the steep slopes of a hill rising to 3,500 feet on the top of which are the ruins of a castle with history going back to the days of El Cid , and last used in the Civil War. Local specialities are thickly woven blankets, as even in summer the nights are cool at altitude, and the local cuisine, which included truffled chicken and leg of lamb cooked with truffles. I returned to England with a jar of fresh truffles , cleaned and scru bbed in their own juice, to try them with my own cooking. Whether one is a successful truffle-hunter or a truffle buyer, the aim of both must be to enjoy the tuber in some culinary Rakin g for truffles