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Truffles
Truffles should be well brushed and cleansed; they belong to the family of the mushrooms and are used principally as a condiment for fish, game, beef, etc.
When truffles are well cleansed and brushed they may be sliced thin, put in a baking dish and seasoned with butter, pepper, salt, parsley, garlic and a little mace. Bake nicely, and serve while hot with lemon juice.
A period entry that treats truffles as a vegetable to be baked in their own right rather than shaved raw over a finished plate. Modern practice has moved almost entirely the other way, and that is the first thing worth knowing before committing an expensive ingredient to the oven.
- Which truffle, and whether to cook it at allBlack winter truffle (Tuber melanosporum) stands up to gentle heat better than the aromatic white Alba truffle, which is usually shaved raw over hot food rather than cooked.
- Oven heatThe original gives none; the instruction is only "Bake nicely." As a modern suggestion, a modest oven for 10 to 15 minutes in a covered dish is enough to warm slices through and melt the butter; longer simply drives off the aromatics you paid for.
- CleaningBrush under cold running water with a soft toothbrush, working the grit out of the creases, then dry thoroughly. Do not soak. Peel black truffles only if the skin is heavily soiled, and save the peelings for butter or stock.
- MaceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, sold ground or in blades. It is warmer and less sweet than nutmeg. A pinch is the whole of "a little" here; more will bully the truffle.
- Garlic and parsleyBoth are period-correct for a truffle dish but heavy-handed by current taste. Half a clove, crushed into the butter and not left in chunks, plus a scant teaspoon of chopped parsley, is proportionate to two or three ounces of truffle.
- The lemonAdd the juice off the heat, at the table. Acid cooked into the dish flattens the aroma; a few drops on serving lifts it.
- Quantity and yieldThe recipe gives no amount. Two ounces of black truffle, thinly sliced, is enough for four as a condiment. The entry opens by calling truffles a condiment for fish, game and beef, though the baked preparation itself is directed to be served hot with lemon juice.
- A note on costFresh truffle now runs to hundreds of dollars a pound, a price relation quite unlike the one this book assumed. Preserved or canned truffle is already cooked and needs only warming; most truffle oil is built on a synthetic aroma compound and behaves nothing like the real thing under heat.
The entry's careful explanation that truffles "belong to the family of the mushrooms" suggests the compiler expected many readers never to have met one, and the list of accompaniments — fish, game, beef — places the dish squarely in the ambitious French-influenced dining that the American middle-class cookbook of the period aspired to reproduce. Truffles reached American kitchens chiefly tinned, from Périgord and Piedmont, since no reliable domestic source existed and the fresh article does not travel well; cultivation of Tuber melanosporum outside Europe is a development of the later twentieth century. Baking slices in butter with garlic and herbs is a treatment generally traced to Provençal and Périgourdin country cooking, where truffles were plentiful enough locally to be treated with less ceremony than elsewhere.