we might run them up for as much again. These French truffles are in such request; the French cooks, ma’am, can’t get on without them.”
Nor will the vender allow that truffles are natives of England, or that any can be found to equal the French. But where the vender chooses to feign ignorance in order to prove the foreign growth of this curious vegetable from which he derives so large a profit, my readers will, if they consent to follow me, be admitted into the mysteries of the trade. Nor need we cross the Channel or rub up our long-forgotten French in our desire either to discover for ourselves the habits and history of the truffle, or to import so many pounds at a cheaper rate; for if these rough, black-looking vegetables could speak, they would astonish their admirers by declaring themselves, in broad vernacular English, to be natives of Wilts, Dorset, and Hants.
More than three-quarters of the quantity sold in London, and of the finest quality, are produced in English soil, and are in reality supplied to the London markets by our village labourers at a very low price; but as this is known to few, and as the public imagine that a cheap English production must be inferior to an expensive foreign one, so the wholesale dealers will continue to sell them at immense profit as a foreign importation. On the other hand, any purchaser may obtain this coveted dainty at very moderate prices direct from the country dealer; but as, unfortunately, the latter obtains few orders of this kind, he is forced to fall back on the London dealers, and supply their demand at their own prices, which are sure to be so low as to prevent him from deriving any profit from his trade.
Yet these country venders are deserving of encouragement, and truffles and truffle-hunting are curious enough in themselves to merit our attention.
Very little has hitherto been written about the truffle. Perhaps, owing to its growing in uncertain districts and places of England, it may have escaped the notice of many of our botanists. Its habitat is, however, well known to the truffle-hunters, and they have collected much curious information, and have formed many sagacious though unscientific opinions as to the cause of its propagation and growth.
In scientific works we find it classed in the ranks of the esculent fungi as the “Tuber cibarium,” and considered even in England, where few of that class are eaten, as the best of the species. There are few of Nature’s productions so extraordinary as this family of the fungi, and in no other country than our own are there so many varieties of the class to be seen, with their curious shapes, their beautiful colours, and their fairy-rings, springing up like magic after a night’s rain or a damp day. To this unsightly variety of the truffle may be applied all the customary characteristics of the more common kinds, for we find from the truffle-hunter that he instinctively looks for it close to the roots of large trees; and so well aware is he that it is propagated by the partial decay of their long fibrous roots, and nourished by the drippings from the branches, that he never dreams of looking for it in any other position. He finds them in shrubberies plantations, and woods, sometimes in banks and ditches, but always where trees abound, beneath them, or at a little distance from the stem, in rings of clusters of six or seven together round each tree. Nor will they flourish beneath every kind of tree, but frequent the oak, lime, and cedar, and appear especially to love the beech, since wherever that tree grows with the richest luxuriance, the truffles are found in great abundance, and of the best quality. Though they are often found in September, the truffler understands so well their need of wet and damp that he will refuse to look for them in a dry season until a certain amount of rain has fallen. Sometimes October almost passes without any worth gathering being discovered in their usual haunts. A few days’ rain, and then, in the very same places where the truffler had looked in vain, large clusters of the finest will have sprung up; so quickly is this strange fungus propagated under the soil in favourable situations and in damp weather. They will increase from a quarter to half a pound in weight, and even in rainy seasons to as much as a pound, whilst they measure from about four to six inches round. In dry, hot seasons they remain small, and are liable to rot and be infested with insects. Resembling externally a rugged knot of an old oak or piece of decayed wood, they are found where the soil is black, loamy, and mixed with flint, or is composed of chalk and clay. Examine them minutely through the microscope, and you will find on opening one that the interior is grained with fibrous lines, and is of a firm, tough texture, white in colour when young, and growing darker, until its ripeness is shown by becoming entirely black.
Besides this large truffle, there is another kind well known to the truffler, though ignored in scientific accounts. It is called in the truffle districts the “red truffle,” on account of its colour, and is of the size of a sweet-pea, but though small, is equal in flavour to the larger kind, and in some places as common. What would those persons say who disparage, or rather disbelieve in, English truffles, were they to make acquaintance with one place in Hampshire where the inhabitants find this red truffle in such quantities as to actually eat them every day for dinner, or, as my informant emphatically declared, “devour them as they would cabbages!”
Probably as soon as the harvest belonging to a truffle district is well in, and there is little to do at home, we shall see two or three of the labourers looking forward to, and preparing for their proposed jaunt, and for a lengthened absence from home. Each man has his separate beat, which extends for long distances into the neighbouring counties, and even in one instance as far as Somersetshire. On they trudge, day after day, through parks, shrubberies, and woods. However privately and far from the beaten road the object of their search may grow, these trufflers have still the licence to hunt, accompanied by their small well-trained truffle-dogs. For though these men are both clever and quick in fixing upon the likeliest situations for the growth of the truffle, they would never succeed in finding them unless they had the help of this peculiar breed of dogs. In order to explain how the dog is enabled