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TRUFFLES (a l'Italienne)
Cleanse well, dry, and pare ten truffles, and cut them into thin slices. Put these into a small frying-pan with an ounce of fresh butter, a minced shallot, a table-spoonful of chopped parsley, and a little pepper and salt. Stir over a gentle fire till they are done enough, which will be in about ten minutes, then pour off part of the butter, and add an ounce of fresh butter, two table-spoonfuls of thick brown gravy, with a little cayenne, and the juice of half a lemon. Stir the mixture over the fire until it is on the point of boiling, and serve very hot. Time, altogether, about twenty minutes. TRUFFLES (a l'Italienne), another way.
Cleanse thoroughly, dry, and pare eight truffles, cut them into thin slices, and put them into a baking-dish with a quarter of a pint of Lucca oil, a table-spoonful of chopped parsley, a pinch of powdered thyme, another of powdered mace, and a little pepper and salt. Let them bake gently nearly an hour, squeeze the strained juice of half a lemon over them, and serve very hot. If liked, a clove of garlic may be minced and put with them. Time to bake, one hour.
Two versions of the same idea: sliced truffles cooked in fat with herbs and finished with lemon. The first is a quick sauté, the second a long, slow bake in oil. Both assume black truffles in quantity, which is the main obstacle to reproducing them.
- Which truffleThe book does not say, but the treatment suits the black winter truffle (Tuber melanosporum) or the cheaper summer truffle, both of which stand up to heat. White Alba truffle is not cooked this way — its aroma is volatile and ten minutes in a pan will leave you with an expensive mushroom.
- Ten truffles is a fortune nowVictorian cookery books use truffles freely as a garnish and as a dish in their own right, though they were never a cheap ingredient. Ten small truffles is perhaps 200-300 g. At current prices, scale to what you have and treat the recipe as a method rather than a quantity.
- ParingThe instruction to pare comes from an era when truffles arrived caked in soil and were often gritty. Many cooks now scrub them with a brush under cold water, dry thoroughly, and leave the peel on; others still pare, and save the peelings for sauce. Pare in any case if the surface is damaged.
- Lucca oilA period name for fine olive oil shipped from Lucca in Tuscany, then the standard for table-quality oil in Britain. Use a good extra-virgin olive oil. A quarter of a pint in imperial measure is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a cup.
- Thick brown gravyNot gravy from a roast but a reduced brown sauce — espagnole, or in a modern kitchen a well-reduced veal or beef stock with body enough to coat. Two tablespoons is meant to bind the butter into a glaze, so it must be genuinely thick or the sauce will break.
- "Bake gently" for an hourThe book gives no temperature; read it as a slow oven, perhaps around 300F/150C, essentially confiting the slices in oil rather than roasting them. Check at 40 minutes; thin slices in a shallow dish will be done well before the hour is out.
- The finishIn the first version, bring the sauce only to the point of boiling as directed. Butter mounted into a reduction will split if it boils, and the lemon juice should go in off the heat to keep it bright.
- YieldBoth versions are garnishes or a small savoury course rather than a main dish — enough for four to six as an accompaniment to roast game, poultry or a plain steak.
Truffles appear throughout Victorian cookery books as a garnish used freely in well-off kitchens — stuffed into poultry, studded through galantines and forcemeats, and served as a dish in their own right, as here. Most were imported, and Britain also had its own native truffle industry: trained dogs and pigs worked the beech woods of the southern counties into the early twentieth century, when clearance and changing woodland management largely ended it. The label \l nineteenth-century English kitchens generally signalled olive oil, parsley, garlic and lemon rather than any specific regional dish, and the second version here — oil, thyme, garlic, a long slow bake — is recognisably that convention. "Lucca oil" was the period's shorthand for the best grade of edible olive oil, distinguished in the trade from the coarser Gallipoli oils sold for lamps and wool-dressing.