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Boiled Truffles
Peel and wash a dozen or more of large truffles, place them in a saucepan just large enough to hold them, add three or four cloves, a small piece of beaten mace, salt to suit the taste, and pour over sufficient white wine and water, in equal quantities, to cover. Set the saucepan over the fire, cover it over and cook gently for one hour. Take out the truffles when done, drain them, place them on a napkin spread on a dish, and serve.
A plain preparation from the era when fresh truffles arrived at hotel kitchens in quantity and were treated as a vegetable rather than a garnish. Almost everything here turns on the truffles themselves.
- Quantity, honestlyA dozen large fresh truffles is a very costly proposition today, and the recipe cooks them for an hour. Many modern cooks will treat this as a historical document rather than a plan for dinner.
- "Peel"Oscar means paring away the rough black outer rind of a black truffle. Save the peelings; steeped in the cooking liquid or in butter they carry most of what you paid for.
- Beaten maceMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed, sold today as blades or ground. "Beaten" means crushed in a mortar. A pinch of ground mace stands in for a small blade.
- Cooking timeAn hour is long by modern standards; black truffles are more often given a short simmer today, and summer truffles less still, since prolonged cooking drives off the aroma.
- "Cook gently"This is the hinge. A bare simmer with the lid on keeps the volatile aromatics in the pot; a rolling boil drives them off and leaves you with expensive potatoes.
- The pan size"Just large enough to hold them" is deliberate. Less liquid means a more concentrated cooking broth, which should not be thrown out; it becomes a sauce base or is reduced and stirred into butter.
- ServingThe truffles are drained and set on a napkin spread on a dish, which helps them arrive dry and hot; butter or a little coarse salt is the usual accompaniment.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the Waldorf as it operated in the 1890s and early 1900s, when truffles appeared in the kitchen as an ingredient to be simmered, sliced and stuffed rather than shaved sparingly over a finished plate. What the recipe really shows is scale: a hotel kitchen that could set a dozen large truffles to cook as a matter of routine.