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Broiled Truffles
Wash well and peel four or five truffles, cover them over with slices of bacon, dust over pepper and salt to taste. and wrap them round with four or five thicknesses of paper dipped in cold water, push them into hot cinders or ashes, and broil them for fifteen minutes or so. Remove them when done, take off two thicknesses or the whole of the paper, place them on a dish, and serve.
A fireside method: whole truffles jacketed in bacon, sealed in wet paper and buried in embers. The hinge is the wet paper, which steams rather than burns and keeps the truffle's aroma from escaping into the fire.
- "Broil" means roast in embersIn this book broiling under ashes is the old sous la cendre method, not cooking under a gas or electric element. In a modern kitchen the nearest equivalent is a covered bed of settled charcoal embers, or a hot oven with the wrapped truffles set on the oven floor or a preheated stone. The recipe itself gives no temperature.
- The paperUse unbleached parchment or plain butcher paper, dipped in cold water and wrapped in four or five layers. Do not use printed paper, waxed paper, or anything with a plastic or silicone coating on the outer layers if it will touch embers. Aluminium foil over a single wet parchment layer is the practical substitute.
- Which trufflesFresh black winter truffle (Tuber melanosporum) or summer truffle is what this suits, sized roughly walnut to golf ball. Fifteen minutes in ashes will overwhelm a white Alba truffle, which is served raw and shaved.
- PeelingOnly fresh truffles need the scrub-and-peel described here; save the peelings for butter or eggs. Tinned or jarred truffles, which were available by this date, are already peeled and cooked and want no more than warming through.
- The baconPeriod bacon was generally saltier and fattier than most supermarket bacon. Use thinly sliced unsmoked or lightly smoked streaky bacon or fatback; heavy smoke buries the truffle. Salt the truffle lightly, since the bacon brings its own.
- TimingFifteen minutes suits a small truffle in genuinely hot ashes. Judge by aroma at the seam of the packet rather than the clock; a large truffle held too long turns soft and loses perfume, which is the whole point of the dish.
- Yield and servingFour or five truffles serve four or five as a first course, one truffle each. The recipe leaves the choice open -- "take off two thicknesses or the whole of the paper" -- so some of the wrapping may reach the table with the truffle. Serve with butter, coarse salt and bread.
Truffles cooked whole in the embers, wrapped in fat and damp paper, was still being written down in the late nineteenth century as truffes sous la cendre, a fixture of the classic repertoire. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection says something about the Waldorf's ambitions: fresh truffles were an imported luxury in New York, and printing a hearth recipe for them in a hotel cookbook flatters the reader by assuming both the ingredient and a coal fire to bury it in. Notably, the method has almost nothing to it. No sauce, no garnish, no stock — a sign of a kitchen confident enough to let an expensive ingredient stand alone.