A Literary Culinary Journal
by Adventures in Good Eating, The Quonstant QuonnoisseurThe Count of Monte Cristo
Gentle readers, your correspondent is grateful for all of the letters and postcards that you have sent.
TQQ gets along fine with his mail carrier.
While it is not possible to respond individually to all information requests, The Quonstant Quonnoisseur here will answer some of the most frequently-received inquiries.
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by Alice DeLuca
A little prehistoric flower has been grown, re-created really, from 32,000 year-old seeds found in the ancient den of an artic ground squirrel. The photo of the little white flower in the New York Times [i] brought a rush of excitement and a feeling of kinship with the scientists who sought to cover those seeds with earth and add water, to cup their hands and breathe warm air over the planting, revealing the sprouts last seen by the tiny ground squirrel so long ago. I have the same feeling when reading an antique recipe that might bring back the flavors of the ancestors. Can we breathe life in to an antique delicacy and resurrect a better flavor? Why did people add rose geraniums to their jelly, infuse herring pie[ii] with grains de paradis[iii], or even stir and stir to create cornstarch pudding for that matter? Perhaps they knew a marvelous flavor-way or texture that has been lost to us, overtaken by food fads and conveniences of the present day?
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by Lenny Karpman
More than twenty years ago the King of Thailand was about to celebrate a landmark birthday, so he and his government planned a long list of special events and invited expatriate Thais from prominent families to return home and join the celebration. Yao, a Thai friend of mine was among the invitees. I went along.
“Let’s go find some durian, you know – the stinky fruit,” she proclaimed with a smile. I returned her smile with a little apprehension. I was usually impervious to all varieties of natural and synthetic aromas. Not so that Sunday in Bangkok. My diminutive soft-spoken friend from San Francisco was on the home turf of her family and her childhood. She was my guide for the day. Her feather-like hold on my arm steered me through the bustle of the Sunday crowds. There, at the weekend market on the edge of the city, thousands of shoppers gathered to buy everything from plaid boxer shorts and eyeliner to hundred kilo live pigs. We were on a durian quest.
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by Meeta Khurana Wolff
The macaron is a desert of legendary proportions, which easily transcends the cookie genre. Technically, it is simply a pastry, in which two shells made from ground almonds, egg whites, icing sugar and sugar encase a delicate filling flavored with a symphony of different flavors. In reality, its finesse goes far beyond that of cookies.
It is believed that macarons made their way to the French court from Italy with the chefs of Catherine di Medici who married King Henry II of France in 1533. This dessert of all desserts really came into its own in 1792 when two nuns seeking asylum in Nancy during the French Revolution baked and sold macarons to support themselves and became known as the macaron sisters! At that time, the macaron was just plain pastry no flavor and no filling.
It was not until the 1900s that Ladurée‘s Pierre Desfontaines revolutionized the macaron by taking two pastry shells and filling them with ganache. Today, besides Ladurée, there is, of course, Pierre Hermé, both whom have elevated the macaron to new heights and made them celebrated.
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by David Downie
“Even an expert has difficulty distinguishing brumale from melanosporum,” growled Pierre-Jean Pébeyre, France’s leading dealer of fresh and conserved melanosporum. I met Pébeyre on a freezing day in February in Cahors. Like many traditionalists Pébeyre expressed hostility to spore-impregnated trees, the probable source of the brumale infestation.
Pébeyre estimated that 5 percent of the black truffles he buys at premium prices turn out to be brumales. “You buy truffles when dirty, and you can’t tell. The ugly truth comes out after brushing.”
The Pébeyre truffle plant, founded in 1897 by Pierre-Jean’s great-grandfather, is based in central Cahors, capital of the Lot département. The Lot’s pre-Revolutionary name was Quercy, a deformation of the Latin quercus—oak. The scenic, oak-covered Quercy and abutting Périgord are France’s main melanosporum source. Another common name for this truffle is truffe noire du Périgord.
With a sense of humor as noir as the truffles he trades, Pébeyre, in a blue lab coat taut over his stout frame, walked me through the sorting, grading and brushing processes. He held up two black truffles that appeared identical, with rough patterned skin like a dog’s nose. “Brush a brumale and the skin detaches,” he grunted. With a pocket knife he sliced the brumale, pointed out the dark brownish exterior and flesh, and the thick, white veins within, and offered a taste. It was crisp, smelled unpleasantly of alcohol, and was flavorless.
Pébeyre then sliced a melanosporum, noting how the outside was asphalt-black, the flesh gray-brown, the pattern of veins fine. It was crunchy, smelled pleasantly of mushroom, and, I suggested, tasted something like strawberry jam and chocolate. Pébeyre fought back a frown.
“Mélanos smell and taste like mélanos,” he said, using the regional abbreviated form for melanosporum. “Why make taste or nose associations?”
The Pébeyre plant once processed tons of local melanosporum. With dwindling supplies, however, sourcing has widened to Italy and Spain. “The Italian and Spanish mélanos are just as good,” Pébeyre insisted. “The problem is brumales and others.”
Such is the demand for truffles in France that brumales and many undesirable truffle varieties are not discarded. They find their way into pâtés and truffled foods where they cannot be identified readily. France also imports around 50 tons per year of Chinese T. indicum; Pébeyre sells indicum worldwide. “Some people actually prefer it because it’s mild,” he shrugged, “and everyone likes the price.” In Europe, Chinese truffles fetch a fraction of the price of melanosporum. Boosters say Chinese indicum taste of moss and undergrowth, are not “bad” merely “different” from melanosporum.
However some unscrupulous retailers and restaurateurs fraudulently pass off lesser truffles as melanosporum. “It’s bad for business,” sighed Pébeyre, whose products are clearly labeled. “And in this business reputation is everything.”
Over lunch at Pébeyre’s comfortable house we savored delicious tastous, sandwiches of long, thin, lightly buttered country bread and shaved raw brumale seasoned with salt and pepper baked in a very hot oven for about two minutes. We followed with hearty truffled cervelas sausages and truffled mashed potatoes.
As with white truffles, the food melanosporum accompanies should be simple. Unlike whites, however, blacks stand up to cooking. “Cooking melanosporum transforms the flavor,” said Pébeyre, citing a handful of classic French recipes including poulet en démi-deuil (roasted chicken with sliced truffles under the skin). “Cooked truffles, whether they’re fresh or conserved, are different, more complex, less forceful than fresh, raw truffles.”
Conserved melanosporum are sterilized in 115° C boiling water for 2 1/2 hours. The juice is sold separately and is, to my palate, as flavorful as the conserved truffles themselves.
The French melanosporum harvest has at times dipped to or below a mere 10 tons in bad years. There have been many bad years in recent decades, and very few good years. Pébeyre ascribed the decline to rural abandonment, meaning demographic shifts of farming populations to cities. He also cited unsuccessful propagation efforts, and changing weather patterns. “There are fewer summer storms and to thrive all truffles need heavy rainfall in July and August,” he explained, adding, “it’s possible one day we’ll simply run out of melanosporum.”
About 10 kilometers by road due south of Cahors at the government-funded Station d’expérimentation sur la truffe, chief botanist and trufficulteur Pierre Sourzat, an excitable, sinewy man in his 50s or early 60s, showed me spore-impregnated seedlings he was growing and took me to visit two truffle plantations. An affable zealot whose mission is to unravel the mystery of mycorrhization and bring back the days of 1,000-ton melanosporum harvests in France, Sourzat radiated optimism about boosting truffle production worldwide through scientific methodology, soil preparation and fertilization, and summertime irrigation. He spoke in a rapid-fire tenor voice, pulling me along as he raced to keep up with Boubou, his trained golden retriever. Within minutes Boubou had unearthed a dozen small brumales, melanosporums and other truffles.
Peak truffle production in France coincided with the phylloxera outbreak that decimated vineyards in the late 1800s, Sourzat explained. “Desperate grapegrowers replaced vineyard tracts with truffle-oak plantations. They bore fruit for decades but after World War Two weren’t well maintained or replanted, and we’re suffering the consequences now.”
Host trees take 5 to 15 years to bear truffles, producing for 40 to 60 years thereafter. “If we hadn’t reforested with spore-impregnated trees decades ago we might have no truffles at all by now,” Sourzat insisted. “Mycorrhization does work. Look at Spain. Soon plantations in Oregon, Texas and New Zealand will be commercially viable.”
In the fourth and final segment of Truffles in Black and White I travel to the legendary truffle town of Lalbenque and meet truffle-hunter Marthe Delon and her truffle-hunting pig.
The photos in this series of articles on truffles were taken by Alison Harris. You can see the entire set as a slide show in Food Art: Behind the Scenes of the Noble Truffle, food photography by Alison Harris.
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Including a food trend prediction for 2012…
by Alice DeLuca
When first married, I received lots of advice on how to stay married, which is of course so much more complicated than “getting” married. For example, Sally told me that both a happy marriage and a career had been possible for her because she created and froze 4 quiches at a time. I immediately pictured 4 quiches in the deep-freeze, carefully labeled for rotation of the stock so as to avoid freezer-burn and waste. The quiches would keep.
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If you’re interested in food history, take a look at this food timeline/infographic discovered by Rambling Epicure contributor Alice DeLuca. It covers just about everything there is to cover, from prehistoric grains such as emmer grain circa 17,000 B.C. and einkorn grain circa 16,000 B.C. to modern food terms such as Twecipes & Recessipes. This is a true reference for lovers of food history, and definitely one to be bookmarked.
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Swiss television station TSR has just produced a version of Food, Inc. in French.
Click here to watch it.
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by Jonell Galloway
Bonbons, which we call in English sweets or candy, are a recent enough arrival on the European food scene. The Crusaders brought back sugar cane from the Orient, arriving first in Sicily, where Jewish scientists in Sicily carried out experiments on it in around 1230. Until then, Europeans made their sweets using fruit juice and honey, often flavored with cinnamon.
Candy instantly became the rage and techniques were refined. During the Renaissance, men of means carried bonbonnières, or candy holders, in their pockets, often decorated with precious stones, and offered ladies candy from them.
Wikipedia notes that the “Middle English word “candy” began to be used in the late 13th century, coming into English from the Old French çucre candi, derived in turn from Persian Qand (=قند) and Qandi (=قندی), ‘cane sugar’.”
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by Jonell Galloway
A recent Huffington Post article revealed that in 1980, Donald Rumsfeld was head of G.D. Searle, as well as part of Ronald Reagan’s transition team, along with Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes, Jr., later to be named head of the FDA. Hayes, not having experience in food additives, allowed Searle to reapply for approval of the use of aspertame, which had previously been banned because “it might induce brain tumors.”
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Meet Jonell Galloway, a freelance writer and editor specialized in French cuisine. 
