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Truffles Au Champagne
On the subject of truffles prepared in this way, the late Alexandre Dumas' "Dictionnaire Gastronomique" waxes enthusiastic. "What," it says, "can be more exhilarating, more divine than truffles au Champagne? Take a pound of truffles, pour a bottle of AI MOUSSEUX into a saucepan; throw in the truffles, together with a little salt, and let them boil in the wine for half an hour; then serve them hot on a snow-white napkin. Who could resist the power of this composition, which charms the palate and tickles the fancy? How its enchanting aroma caresses, flatters, and rejoices!"
A quotation from Dumas rather than a worked recipe, but the method is complete enough to follow: whole truffles poached in sparkling wine and served hot. Everything depends on the quality of the truffles, since there is nothing else in the dish.
- "AÏ mousseux"Aÿ is a village in the Champagne region; mousseux simply means sparkling. Any dry sparkling wine of decent quality does the same work — the bubbles are lost within seconds of hitting the hot pan, so a still white wine gives much the same result.
- A pound of trufflesAt today's prices for fresh black truffle this runs into many hundreds of dollars, and it was an extravagance in Dumas's day too. Scaled down, allow 1 to 1½ oz of truffle per person; a bottle of wine will cover about 8 oz of truffles in a small deep pan.
- Which truffleThis is most likely fresh black winter truffle (Tuber melanosporum), which stands up to heat and gives up its perfume into the wine. White Alba truffle is generally not cooked — it is shaved raw over hot food. Tinned or jarred "truffles" have already been cooked once and will give far less.
- CleaningSoak briefly and scrub every crevice with a soft brush under running water; grit in a truffle ruins the whole pan. Dry them before they go into the wine and leave them whole and unpeeled.
- The half hourLong by modern standards but defensible here: whole truffles the size of a walnut need 20 to 30 minutes at a bare simmer to heat through and soften. Keep the liquid trembling rather than at a rolling boil, or the aroma goes up the extractor hood instead of into the truffle.
- Do not throw out the wineDumas serves the truffles alone, but the poaching liquid is now intensely perfumed. Reduce it hard to a few spoonfuls, mount it with cold butter, and you have the sauce the recipe is missing.
- The napkinServing on a folded white napkin was standard nineteenth-century practice for anything that had to arrive dry — the linen absorbs the last of the cooking liquid. A warmed plate and a folded cloth do the same job.
- YieldAs written, a pound of truffles would serve ten or more as a course on its own; the passage itself says nothing about the number of servings.
The passage comes from Alexandre Dumas père's Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine, the enormous culinary compendium he worked on at the end of his life and which was published posthumously in 1873; Cassell's, like many English books of the period, quotes it as an authority and gives the title loosely as the "Dictionnaire Gastronomique". Dumas was a genuine enthusiast rather than a professional cook, and the rhapsodic tone here is characteristic of the whole book. The dish itself belongs to a nineteenth-century French vogue for treating the black Périgord truffle as a food in its own right rather than a seasoning — cooked whole, sometimes in wine, sometimes wrapped in pastry or buried in ash — a fashion that depended on truffles being far more plentiful then than now. French truffle harvests in the late 1800s ran to hundreds of tonnes a year, against a small fraction of that today, which is why a pound of them could be simmered in a bottle of Champagne without comment.