Happy December, food & foraging friends!
Anytime I can combine foraging, furry friends and fine dining, you know I’m in. So when my Rome-dwelling grad school bestie suggested an Tuscan farmhouse stay with onsite truffle hunt and three-course meal, I was squealing like an Oprah audience member that just got gifted a new car.
Paolo, our guide to the underground fungi, popped the hatchback and out hopped curly-mopped Lea and Soup (pronounced with an Italian accent, SOAP-ah), already filthy from rainy morning adventures scouring for a pair of prized white truffles, done at dawn to evade other hunters.
Paolo had a small army of truffle dogs, but this mother-daughter duo were his favorites, claiming that girls are smarter at the game. By law, Italian truffle hunters aren’t allowed to have more than a pair of dogs out at a time, but that doesn’t stop some unscrupulous hunters. The truffle business is dangerously competitive, with dogs being poisoned by jealous rivals; Paolo himself recounted having his tires slashed. It’s so cut-throat he has scent-masking pouches to hide white truffles so if he encounters another hunter he can feign bad luck. I highly recommend The Truffle Hunters for a well-drawn portrait of the lives of these treasure hunters.
I’d learned a bit about truffles from MAW guest mycologist Michael Castellano a few years back. Numerous truffle species are underfoot in the DMV, but as the volatile compounds they emit aren’t particularly pleasant for humans, they are left for the flying squirrels and other burrowing rodents whose diets depend on them. Truffles are nothing without their signature aromas, which are used to train lagotto romagnolo doggos like Lea and Soup to fetch them (pigs, we learned from Paolo aren’t really used as they get high on their own supply so to speak, eating their masters’ finds. In fact, wild boars gobble up many an Italian truffle, much to the dismay of hunters like Paolo.)
In no time, Lea was excitedly pawing at the ground, Paolo commanding porta!, “bring it.” Like a little drug mule she opened her mouth and out dropped a little black nugget in exchange for a nibble of kibble.
Over the next few hours trapsing through the oak forest behind our inn, Paolo’s pouch swelled with black nuggets of different shapes, sizes and smells. A few dozen truffle species are native to Italy, but only a handful are sanctioned for sale (including two of the prized whites). Some of our finds smelled like the signature aroma those of us who have had truffle-scented products would recognize; however, one large blackie smelled like a terrible, terrible turd.
Paolo had given me and Ana Paula little spades and invited us to help the dogs dig once they had honed in on a spot, but we were useless at the task. Even knowing just where to dig, we just couldn’t seem to find them, particularly given their often small size, not to mention the soil camouflaging their earthy color.
Paolo left the farmhouse chef with our finds and we soon sat down to a simple but divine primi of fried egg with truffle crumbles, followed by a secondi of buttery pasta (I believe it was tagliatelle, but I do not speak pasta fluently) topped with thinly sliced truffle. Chef’s kiss!
If you’ve read this far, you deserve to know the truth: nearly all commercially available truffle products are snake oil. They infuse them with artificial flavoring that bears little resemblance to the real thing. Truffles are a fleeting joy, best consumed as a whole food!
Left/top: Top row, Lea, Soup and Paolo, and two chunky white truffles, followed by black truffles of various sizes. Ana Paula and I worked hard, not smart, for our lunch of egg and pasta topped with black truffles.
Right/bottom: Top row, chicory, a name covering multiple species of greens wild and cultivated; Mediterranean nettle growing on Rome’s sidewalks; middle row, malva served at a trattoria and also offered as an apothecary remedy. Bottom row, ancient stone housing wild onions, curry plant and rosehips.
My weekend in Tuscany followed a whirlwind few days of heavy feasting in Rome, where I probably spent as much time photographing wild sidewalk greens as the artistry of stones and bones at Villa Borghese and the Capuchin Crypt.
I’d been to Rome as a 17-year-old and visited the Colosseum then; given my rushed agenda, initially I planned to skip a visit to that well-aging beauty. But then I read about the hundreds of wild plants that had thrived in this space for centuries, some potentially tracked in by the exotic wild animals who fought to their deaths here (or perhaps through the modern cat door installed for the local felines to have little gladiator fights at night).
A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum (sorry, not sorry!): I discovered several wild food sources, many cousins to plants I know, love and eat at home. There was a new-to-me nettle and wild caper plant and fumitory, which I later saw in fancy jars at an herbal apothecary. Squee!
I was equally delighted to discover wild things on the menus, in addition to seasonal delicacies like cardoon (artichoke thistle), chestnuts and cavolo nero (“black cabbage,” which turns out to be dino kale, a fave in my community garden). At Hosteria Grappolo d’Oro, after much back and forth with the kitchen, I learned my sauteed greens were a blend of broccoletti and ramoracce foraged from the foothills surrounding Rome. At my host’s favorite neighborhood trattoria, we feasted on a misticanza of 20+ types of wild greens topped with sumac, along with a simple side dish of wild malva (mallow), which I often cook with at home. I had never before seen mallow on a menu besides my own!
Other interesting finds included curry plant, an herb smelling like a mind-bending combo of curry, maple syrup and general herbaceousness, and plants like pennywort and a fat wild onion growing from ancient stone walls.
The greens frankly were a digestive aid for the food bucket list I valiantly ate my way through: creamy cacio e pepe, carbonara bright yellow with raw farm egg, pizza so thin-crusted it limped, trapizzino with cold beef tongue, and other culinary delights.
Being the addict I am, I couldn’t help smuggling home a few truffles, cedar branches for my next evergreen class, and monster-cloved, mild-flavored Aglione garlic. Unlike Paolo, however, I wasn’t so successful at evasion, and got my prized possessions confiscated by customs. Time to heed my own advice: enjoy their fleeting joys in situ and savor their aromas in memory, where they will stay forever fresh.
Wildly yours,
April
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