the charm of the truffle lies in its mystery.
È figlio della terra e del buio. Lontano da tutto ciò che vive e si ciba di sole. Non ha rami, né foglie, né tronco. Cresce nell’oscurità del terreno, aggrappato alla vita grazie alle radici degli alberi. Aspetta l’acqua. Poi cede alle piante elementi minerali per avere in cambio glucidi. Per ubbidire alla prima regola del mondo dei viventi, quella di conservare e propagare la specie, ha solo un’arma: il suo profumo. Un richiamo che seduce. Irresistibile. Qualcosa di ancestrale che si propaga nel terreno, affiora in superficie e imprigiona l’olfatto. Poi, la gioia arriva in tavola.
Nell'antichità il cane era un animale da caccia e quasi del tutto relegato a questa attività, mentre per la ricerca dei tartufi venivano impiegati altri animali. Principalmente il maiale era l'animale a cui spettava questo compito, con una predilezione per le scrofe, attirate da un ormone maschile presente nel tartufo, di cui anche altre bestie sono ghiotte, come il cinghiale. Altri erano gli aiutanti dei ricercatori di tartufi, basti pensare che in Russia si usavano addirittura gli orsi. Oggi, invece, è il cane a farla da padrone in questo ruolo, anche se in alcune zone della Francia, alcuni utilizzano ancora il maiale.
The long and fascinating history of the truffle is therefore inevitably mixed with another scent: that of myth.
The origins
Linguists agree that the word “truffle” originates from territùfru, a vulgarization of the late Latin term terraetufer (excrescence of the earth).
Legends about truffles date back to ancient times, almost 5,000 years ago. The first records of hypogeal mushrooms (from the Greek hipò, "under the Aegean earth," meaning "subterranean," growing underground) date back to 3,000 BC. The Babylonians utilized a mushroom found beneath sandy soil; this underground mushroom was a magnificent gift from the gods to mankind. It is said that they ate the "Tarfezia Leonis," a variety of truffle still found today in the arid regions of Asia Minor.
The Hebrews also included truffles in their diet. While in ancient Egypt, Pharaoh Cheops (2600 BC) was particularly fond of truffles, ordering sumptuous banquets enriched with dozens of kilos of truffles cooked in goose fat.
It was probably present in the diet of the Sumerians and the Hebrews at the time of the patriarch Jacob (1700–1600 BC). It was the great Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras (c. 570–495 BC) who first intuited the renowned aphrodisiac properties of truffles, astutely stating: "If you want to be manly, eat truffles."
Theophrastus of Eresus (371–287 BC), a student of Aristotle, classified truffles as "idnon," from which the term hydnology, the science that studies them, derived. In his treatise Historia Plantarum, he defined them as a precious table ornament born from the combination of rain and thunder. During the Roman Imperial era, truffles became a prominent feature of the banquets of Marcus Gavius Apicius (25 BC–37 AD), a "glutton" according to Seneca. Even Nero praised them as cibus deorum, "food of the gods." Dioscorides, a Greek physician and botanist in the service of the emperor, mentioned them in his treatise De materia medica, thus contributing to the history of medicine.
But the most accurate analysis of truffles in the 1st century AD is attributed to Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD), who defined them as "earthen callus", a miracle of nature, which came to the capital directly from "dry, sandy and fruitful Africa".
The Greek philosopher Plutarch of Chaeronea (46–120 AD) believed that it arose from the combined action of water, heat and lightning.
Caelius Apicius (1st century AD), in his treatise on the gastronomy of Imperial Rome, listed recipes that highlighted the organoleptic qualities of truffles. Decimus Junius Juvenalis, a Roman poet who lived between the 1st and 2nd centuries, considered the truffle to be the fruit of a thunderbolt hurled by Jupiter near an oak tree (a tree considered sacred to the father of the gods). Since Jupiter was also renowned for his prodigious sexual activity, truffles have always been attributed with aphrodisiac qualities.
Galen (129-199 AD), Greek physician, precursor of systematic medicine, considered the truffle very nutritious and able to avail of human pleasure.
Saint Ambrose (339-397) thanked Saint Felix, bishop of Como, for the truffles he received.
Pope Gregory IV (795-844) compensated for the energy spent fighting the Saracens with truffle-based dishes.
Like the history of civilization, truffle consumption has also undergone phases. Almost as if to underscore what was happening to humans, throughout the Middle Ages all traces of the truffle were lost; legend, mythology, pagan beliefs, and science were overtaken by its demonic origins. The "son of lightning" disappeared from the tables only to return to prominence during the Renaissance in the sumptuous banquets of the Communes and Signoria, such as the courts of Lucrezia Borgia and Catherine de' Medici. Catherine, the Queen of France and a profoundly passionate lover of gastronomy, brought Italian culinary art, along with the precious truffle, to the French court. Her love for this ingredient was rooted in memories of Tuscany: when she went on wild boar hunts, she would see the animals suddenly stop to dig up and extract the truffle.
Petrarch (1304-1374) was crowned poet in the Campidoglio in 1341. He traveled extensively, even carrying out diplomatic missions thanks to his European fame. In his masterpiece “Il Canzoniere”, in addition to giving the most clear and passionate expressions of love and pain, creating the forms and language of modern lyric poetry, he probably identified in the gaze of his Laura the charm and mystique of the noblest product of our land: the truffle . Francesco therefore also deserves recognition from the world of gastronomy, precisely because, in the ninth sonnet, sending a basket of truffles to a friend, he poetically describes them as follows: in sonnet VIII he praises the truffle, referring to the land that:
...and not only what opens up to us from outside,
adorns the banks and hills with little flowers,
but inside,
where it never updates,
pregnant makes of itself the earthly mood,
where such and similar fruit is gathered…
The Greeks called it Hydnon (from which the term “idnology” derives, the science that studies truffles), the Latins called it Tuber, from the verb tumere (to inflate), the Arabs Ramech Alchamech Tufus, the Spanish Turma de tierra, the French Truffe (deriving from the meaning of fraud linked to Molière’s theatrical performance “Tartufe” of 1664), the English Truffle, and finally the Germans Truffel.
The idea of cultivating truffles dates back over four centuries; in fact, it was Alfonso Ciccarelli (1532-1585), a doctor from Bevagna (Perugia), who published his work Opuscolum de tuberibus in 1564, considered the first monograph on the truffle. Ciccarelli is a 53-page (19 chapter) work in Latin on etymology, nomenclature, classification, popular uses, and properties—including aphrodisiac properties. He was the first to express the opinion that truffles could be "sown"—albeit erroneously without the use of symbiotic plants—after having chopped them up and mixed them with soil from the same areas where they were collected.
Nevertheless, it was only many years later that the first concrete experiments in truffle cultivation began - albeit carried out empirically and without a complete understanding of the mycorrhiza phenomenon - by a farmer from Provence, Mr. Giuseppe Talon (1802), who, using acorns scattered by truffle-producing plants to reforest his land, noticed that these - once sown - gave rise to truffle-producing oak trees. Therefore, the sowing of "truffle acorns" was considered a valid method - defined as the "Talon method" - for the creation of truffle grounds in truffle-producing areas and spread to other regions of France.
A fruit so rich in personality and mysterious, that it even becomes… a proper name for a person, in Molière's play “Tartuffe (or Tartuffe) or the Imposter” (1664).
Tartuffe, in Molière's comedy, is a cunning and charming character, capable of deceiving and manipulating his benefactor, Orgon. But behind this facade lies an attack on the religious respectability of the time, behind which they concealed their own misdeeds and sins: the theme of deception, then. Moreover, in Old French, the term "tartuffe" referred both to truffle and to a dishonest person.
Is it a coincidence? Did Molière use the term by chance? We don't know. The use of the term "tartuffe" today is a curious coincidence, considering the truffle scams to which this rare and delicious fruit of the earth is subject. But what we do know for sure is that "Tartuffe" has also influenced the writings of other authors.
Like Carlo Goldoni, who admits to having been inspired by Molière's “Tartuffe” for his “Molière” or Stendhal: in “The Red and the Black”, in fact, the protagonist Julien Sorel identifies several times with Molière's character of Tartuffe.
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1685-1737) in his “Botanical Classification” (volume published in 1711) established the vegetal nature of the truffle, described its organisation and the “germs” (spores) present in the “pulp”.
Pier Antonio Micheli (1679-1737), Florentine botanist and mycologist, in 1729, taking up Geoffroy's studies, produced a drawing of the spores contained in the asci
Michel-Jean de Borch (1753-1810), a Polish naturalist, also held the noble title of Count de Borch. He was a scholar, a traveler, and an eclectic figure with a cultural background primarily focused on natural sciences, mineralogy, and lithology. He was a member of the Columbaria Society from 1779.
Published in 1780, “Lettres sur les truff du Piemont”, the Polish Count Michel-Jean de Borch wrote this treatise on truffles and their natural habitat during a long stay in Sicily in 1776.
With this work, he wanted to show the errors and false positions on the subject supported by Patrick Brydone in the book Journey to Sicily and Malta.
It is one of the first scientific works on the subject and contains, among other things, one of the first mezzotint color engravings by the famous French engraver Louis Gautier d'Agoty (painter and color engraver, born in Paris in 1746; he was one of the five sons of Jacques Fabien; the other brothers were Jean-Fabien, Arnault-Eloi, Jean-Baptiste and Edouard; like the latter he engraved views of Italy).
In the form of letters addressed to the Marquis of Balbiano and the Count of Morozzo, the work deals with two species of white truffles, the tuber albidium and the bianchetti, and their unsurpassable fragrance and flavour.
Two anastatic reprints were made (Alba, 1974 and Lodi, 2001), the first of which was edited by the Order of the Knights of the Truffle and Wines of Alba.
Tubera Terrae, the first edition to address truffle hunting in Piedmont, features a cover depicting two farmers with their dogs searching for and extracting truffles. This Latin text, published in Turin in 1776, is considered the first photograph of truffle hunting in Piedmont. Vico, a professor of Latin eloquence at the University of Turin and a member of the Academy of Sciences, is considered the first photograph of truffle hunting in Piedmont. Vico focuses on the significant resources of Piedmont's economic reality, celebrating in its pages the intersection of intellectual and economic activities, a cornerstone of late-18th-century Piedmontese thought, which sought a unified concept of culture and knowledge directed toward action through integration with the various sectors of the productive world. Not only is Vigo's work the first dedicated to truffle hunting in Piedmont, but it also describes the production area between the Po and the Bormida rivers, specifically mentioning the Monferrato and Asti hills as particularly renowned.
In 1825, Alexandre von Bornholz, a German nobleman, in his work Der Trüffelbau (translated into French in 1826, Italian in 1827 and Polish in 1828) supposed that the truffle could not be considered either a vegetable or an animal, but should be placed in an intermediate category.
The Renaissance revived the pleasure of the table, and truffles, a symbol of wealth and opulence, became a staple at European court banquets. Truffles were present at the closing dinner of the Congress of Vienna (1815). Count Camillo Benso di Cavour used them for diplomatic purposes. Gioacchino Rossini called them "the Mozart of Mushrooms." For Alexandre Dumas, they were "the Holy of Holies of the table." Lord Byron enhanced his creativity with the scent emanating from truffles placed on his desk.
In 1831, with the “Monographia tuberacearum” of the Italian
Carlo Vittadini (1800-1865) provided the first scientific description of the Lombard truffle species. This marked the birth of Idnology (from the Greek Ydnon = truffle and logos = study), the science that studies truffles and underground mushrooms.
Carlo Vittadini was a true pioneer, and even today the nomenclature he coined for "hypogeal fungi" is used in all botanical and scientific documents and truffle classifications. His meticulousness and passion in describing the various truffle species is undoubtedly commendable: he first illustrated their shape, the size each type can reach, the color and size of the spores, the characteristics of the gleba (he also observed the texture of the niches in great detail), and carefully described the odors and olfactory pleasantness of each truffle.
Vittadini left no detail unattended and in his works he paid extreme attention to the terrain, the territory where each truffle was found, its symbionts and to illustrating the seasonality of the precious tubers.
Louis René ('Edmond') Tulasne (1815-1885) in 1862 and Gaspard Adolphe Chatin (1813- 1901) in 1892 published information on the botanical characteristics of the genus Tuber and its species and on the relationships between truffles and host plants.
After that we get to 1929 to talk about the main character in the world of truffles: Giacomo Morra.
The well-known restaurateur and hotelier from Alba had the brilliant idea of making the white truffle (which he himself called the “Alba Truffle”) an object of international cult, creating an event around the precious fungus that would be both tourist and gastronomically attractive.
And it's thanks to Giacomo Morra that the White Truffle has become a staple on the tables of enthusiasts around the world. He was, in fact, the creator of the Alba International White Truffle Fair, which still attracts enthusiasts, visitors, and tourists from around the world.
In addition to this, he also had the idea of sending a precious truffle every year to a famous person such as: US President Harry Truman in 1951, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1953, sportsman Joe Di Maggio and American actress Marylin Monroe in 1954, Winston Churchill, Alfred Hitchcock, Ike Eisenhower and Sofia Loren, and many others.
All the historical and scientific data reported are the result of research conducted by Giuliano Borgia