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Truffles, Stewed in Champagne
Take ten or twelve large truffles, soak them for a couple of hours, rinse them in several waters, and scrub them thoroughly. Lay a thin slice of fat bacon at the bottom of a stewpan, put in the truffles, and add half a tea-spoonful of salt, and a little grated nutmeg, and, if liked, a carrot, a turnip, a bunch of green onions, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, two or three cloves, and a blade of mace. Pour over the truffles a little good veal stock, let them simmer half an hour, then add a bottle of dry champagne, and simmer for another half hour, keeping them very closely covered. They may either be drained, dried, and served cold in a silver dish, or on a dish covered with a napkin, with the sauce served cold in a tureen, or they may be heated and served hot, with the liquor, strained and considerably reduced, poured over them. Time to stew the truffles, one hour. TRUFFLES, TIMBALE OF. Line a plain round mould with good puffpaste. Take six or eight large fresh truffles; wash and brush them thoroughly, and cut them into thin slices. Put these into a small frying-pan with two ounces of fresh butter, and a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg, shake them over a brisk fire, and be careful not to break them. Drain them, and put them into the mould, place the cover on the top, make a hole in the centre for the steam to escape, and bake in a hot oven. When the pastry is done enough, fill up the hole, and turn the timbale on a dish. Make an opening in the top, and pour in a small quantity of good gravy, then lay a slice of truffle in the opening, and serve. Time to fry the sliced truffle, five or six minutes. TRUFFLES, TO PREPARE FOR USE. Soak the truffles for one or two hours in cold water, or, if necessary, in lukewarm water, to loosen the earth from them. Rinse them well several times, and brush them carefully, until they are delicately clean. Dry them in a soft cloth, and pare them very thinly. The parings of truffles should be used for flavouring purposes.
Two truffle preparations and a cleaning note, run together as they appear in Cassell's. Both assume a household with fresh truffles by the pound; the arithmetic is the first thing to confront.
- The hinge: heat destroys aromaAn hour of simmering, half of it in champagne, puts the perfume into the sauce as much as into the truffle. Current practice runs the other way — the volatile compounds that make a truffle worth its price are largely gone after prolonged wet heat. If you attempt this at all, treat the reduced liquor, not the truffles, as the point of the dish.
- Quantity and costTen or twelve large truffles is somewhere between 400 g and a kilo of fresh black truffle. At current prices this is a several-hundred-pound dish before the champagne. It suggests truffles once stood in a very different price relation to a bottle of wine than they do now.
- Which truffleThe book most likely means fresh winter black truffle (Tuber melanosporum), in season roughly December to March. Summer truffle (T. aestivum) is milder and cheaper but will not survive an hour of stewing. Tinned or jarred truffles have already been cooked once and should not be cooked again.
- Fat baconA thin slice of unsmoked fatback or green streaky bacon, laid down as a barrier so nothing catches. Smoked bacon will overwhelm the truffle entirely.
- Veal stock"Good veal stock" means a clear, unsalted, lightly gelatinous white stock, not a dark reduced jus. A little means enough to come partway up the truffles, not to cover them — perhaps 150–250 ml.
- A bottle of champagne75 cl of genuinely dry wine. The recipe is not asking for sweetness; a brut or a dry still white will behave the same way, and the bubbles are lost within seconds of hitting a hot pan.
- The timbale oven"A hot oven" for puff paste is 425–450°F (220–230°C), dropping to about 375°F once the pastry has risen. The hole in the lid is a steam vent; the pastry cover is closed over it once baked so the gravy does not run out.
- Serving and yieldNo yield is given. On the basis of one truffle a head the stewed dish would stretch to eight or twelve as a course in itself, and the timbale, built from six to eight truffles, would divide into a similar number of portions.
- The paringsThe closing instruction is the most useful line on the page. Truffle peel holds plenty of aroma; steep it in stock, butter or cream, or bury it with eggs overnight in a closed jar.
Cassell's belongs to the last decades in which truffles were a luxury of quantity rather than of rarity. Through the nineteenth century the Périgord and Vaucluse produced truffles in tonnages that would be unthinkable now — the harvest is generally traced as peaking in the years before the First World War, after which war losses, rural depopulation and the abandonment of the old oak plantations reduced French production to a fraction of what it had been. A dish that spends a whole bottle of champagne on a dozen truffles and then offers them cold on a napkin, unadorned, only makes sense in that world. The napkin service itself is a period marker: truffles en serviette, sent to table on folded linen with the sauce apart, was a familiar form in the grand English and French dinner service of the day, and the folded cloth is often said to have been there to catch and hold the scent as the dish travelled from kitchen to dining room.