The truffle.

The truffle is a spontaneous hypogeal mushroom of the Tuberacee family, whose collection includes ancient knowledge, an oral heritage, and traditions related to gastronomic, anthropological, and literary culture. The search for truffles opens out splitting between clues, memory, places, the rhythm of the seasons, moons, and all the elements of the production cycle of the land and the peasant world, both experiential and ritual. It was defined “kitchen diamond” by the gastronome politician Brillant -Savarin, instead Gramsci saw it as divisive food, thinking of the bean in the poor kitchen, and the truffle in the rich one, while Tolstoj included it “…among the foods that not only give pleasure but are part of a healthy diet for the rich of the nineteenth century”. The truffle, therefore, is placed in the collective imagination as food for the lucky few. The precious mushroom is the son of the cold; “la cerca” (the truffle hunt) and the kitchen are punctuated by shorter days and longer nights of the year. Pliny, in the first century after Christ, quoted thunder and lightning as generators of truffles, formed during the autumn storms, and that Juvenal invoked to promote quality and quantity, a thesis reconfirmed by Leopardi in the nineteenth century when he reconstructs the origin “…believed to grow and improve with thunder, from which a stormy season considered fruitful with good truffles.” The truffle does not behave like the other products of the earth, it is hidden to the eye of the man who needs the dog’s fine nose to locate it, not by chance the dog’s nose bears the same name. His research contains the mystery of its reproduction, preferring the roots of a few trees, such as poplars, hazels, willows, and linden trees, but above all the oak, held by the Celts, the axis mundi and sacred tree par excellence among the Romans. The enigmatic and solitary figure of the Trifulao (the truffle hunter), has as its only company that of the Trabuj (his dog), and together they run through the wild and barren spaces of winter isolation, which rain and snow make impracticable. Both integrate perfectly with nature, adapting to silence, reading and interpreting signals, knocking the earth with the stick, observing the snow melted by wet vapors, and looking for flies attracted by the smell, or cracks in the shape of a cross indicating the pressure of the truffle. Trifulao and Trabuj challenge, in the icy nights, places, and times forbidden by the Masche, the cruel, spiteful, and vindictive witches who in the folklore of the Langhe and Roero were endowed with the power of metamorphosis and unleashed negative forces on those who ventured, between sunset and dawn, in their unprotected spaces, of the night time. The close symbiosis between man and dog is the focus of the research, the Trifulao personally train their dogs, generally in dialect, in an intimate and deep dimension. Both are bearers of gestures and traditional knowledge, which still survive, although the new generations tend to turn to tools and languages foreign to the tradition and use of dogs trained in specialized centers. The fruit of their research, the white truffle, has different shapes and sizes, with scents ranging from mushroom, garlic, honey, and spices, and attracts thousands of visitors to Alba, between October and December, for the International Truffle Fair, the place of the world market, tasting and folklore of the territory. The event was created in Alba in 1930 by Giacomo Morra, a hotelier, and marketing genius, who made the white truffle of Alba, famous all over the world giving every year, on the occasion of the Fair, the biggest truffle to the most famous and prominent people of that time. The famous mushroom was received by Churchill, Hitchock, Marilyn Monroe, Joe di Maggio, Harry Truman, a clever strategy already used in the 1800s by Camillo Benso Conte di Cavour, who had made truffle a diplomatic means. White or black, truffles have always been considered valuable food, considered “a miracle” by Pliny, as they grew without being sown, and have enriched royal tables or gourmets of all time. The difficulty and unpredictability of the hunt, their flavor, and scent make the prices fluctuate, which can reach up to 4000 € per kilo. The truffle has now become an oceanic topic; we could still talk about what is considered its aphrodisiac properties, its noble use in gastronomy, the stories related to the territory and its consumption, its sale, and the many varieties existing. But perhaps it is enough to recall the phrase pronounced by Alexandre Dumas, to underline its character: ” Food lovers in every century have never been able to say the name of the truffle without tipping their hat “.