to hunt for the vegetable, I must first point out its most striking peculiarity.
Reader, have you ever smelt an uncooked truffle? If you have, you will not require any description of what is so offensive; and if you have not, you may rest assured that “ignorance” is in this case “bliss.”
This extraordinary odour is so powerful and so peculiar, that no imposition can be practised in providing this article of food. I can never forget, whilst living in a truffle district, the first time that three or four pounds were brought into the house. It was impossible to support their oppressive and pungent odour, which pervaded the whole house, and they had to be removed at once to a safe distance till the cook, by either boiling or stewing them into sauce, prevented its recurrence. For, strange to say, it is the raw truffles that offend in this way, and then only when ripe and fit to eat; the young unripe ones are hardly perceptible by smell. This peculiar perfume, imperceptible though it is to the human nose when growing beneath the soil, is yet scented out by the fine instinct of the truffler’s dog. It is, therefore, for the purpose of hunting them out by their smell that the truffler is accompanied everywhere in his rambles by his dogs, or, rather, follows the little animals, as they generally run on before with their noses to the round, as if after some game. Clever little dogs they are, of a peculiar breed, and trained from puppyhood to hunt the truffle out by the nose, and then to scratch it up with their long sharp claws. It is curious and interesting to watch the powers of nose possessed by these small dogs; how, directly they perceive the odour of the hidden truffle, they rush to the place straight as a dart, even at twenty yards’ distance.
Many an amusing anecdote, or, as I may call it, many a truffle tradition, did I pick up in my wanderings with some of these village trufflers. Nay, at one time I was almost tempted to adopt the trade myself! What could be pleasanter than to wander through wood and plain with my dog-friends for weeks together, and thus spend the bright autumn days.
But unfortunately one of my truffle friends knocked my daydream on the head by attributing his rheumatics to truffle-hunting in damp and rain.
“You see, sir, the wetter it is the better for our trade, though bad enough for we. Many and many a rainy week have I trudged on, wet up to the knees, followed by my little dog Nell. Did you ever hear tell of how I found, in the hottest autumn I ever seed, the monster truffle?” continued my friend, lowering his voice into a kind of solemn whisper, and assuming additional dignity of bearing.
“No,” I said; “but I should like to know about it.”
“It was in this way, sir: I was going leisurely along, promiscuous-like, with my little Nell there, in a woody path down south—I was terribly wet, surely, and thought as how I was making a bad business of it besides; when I sees Nell, as I thought, run mad, for there under a beech she stood, pointed and scratched, pointed and scratched at nothing at all but a big root. It was just above the soil, and quite right as to colour; but, bless you, sir, it were a foot round in size, and so heavy that it weighed three and a quarter pounds. Nell made such a fuss about it, too, and whined and whined as I was quite beat like, and didn’t know whatever it could be. So to please the ’cute little dog, I took ’em up and smelt ’em; and sure enough Nell was right, it were a truffle, but such as never was seen before or since. I sent it as a cooriosity to a gentleman, and got something handsome; but I never were so proud as at finding he, and we calls ’em the monster truffle to this day.”
My friend, who thus delighted in relating former triumphs, was an elderly man, strong and active, and very intelligent, and somewhat better educated than the others of the trade. He was better off, too, and might be considered, amidst the universal poverty, as a thriving man. He had long been in the habit of buying up all the truffles found by the other hunters in the village, and hawking them about in his travels. He also dealt with several gentlemen, and what he could not dispose of in this way he sent to Covent Garden. He introduced me to his friends, and made me acquainted with his village, his dogs, and his favourite walks; and well pleased was he to answer my questions, and satisfy my curiosity, and display his superior knowledge in all that concerned his trade. Soon I found, on our becoming more intimate, that my friend, though prosperous, was a bit of a grumbler, and loved to enter into a discussion about “public affairs,” and of “how the village labourer weren’t done well by, and ought to be protected.” At first I imagined my friend to be a thorough-going radical, but to my astonishment I discovered that the “good old times” when his father “was a boy,” and when they in this village had their rights, were as precious in his eyes as in those of an old-fashioned tory—and I then found out that he considered the truffle-hunters needed to be supported by diminishing the present tax on their dogs, and that the decline in the trade he attributed to each of these animals being assessed at 12s.; instead of, as formerly, at 8s.
“You see, sir, I speaks more for the others than for myself, but even I am forced to give up all my dogs but one, and she can’t find out alone the same quantity of truffles. There’s no chance of our poaching with them, as was said, for they have no nose for anything else, and are too small and weak for any game. You come with me and see a truffle-hunt, and you’ll soon see that they are a separate breed, just fit for truffling, and nothing else.”
My friend was very lengthy in the detail of a grievance which certainly does weigh heavy on these poor labourers, and he went on to tell me, with much pride, how he had drawn up for himself and companions a petition against the said tax, which had actually been presented to Parliament by the late Lord Herbert, though without effect. But the very idea of what he had done was sufficient to raise him in his own opinion (and I could see he thought in mine as well) into the position of a “village Hampden.”
It was on a bright August day that I accepted my village friend’s invitation to a truffle-hunt,