History treasures truffles

In November 2008, Macau casino mogul Stanley Ho outbid celebrities and movie stars in a worldwide auction to pay an astonishing $US200,000 for a 1kg Italian white truffle.

The year before, he paid more than $US300,000 for a 1.5kg specimen, one of the largest truffles found in decades.

In September 1987, an article on the front page of the Otago Daily Times announced that Dr Ian Hall, a mycologist then working at the Invermay Research Centre, had cracked the secret of infecting tree seedlings with the Perigord black truffle fungus, and projected a potential windfall from this new crop for New Zealand.

With that first newspaper article and subsequent media coverage, Dr Hall was deluged with some 600 letters and telephone inquiries from New Zealanders wanting to know more about growing truffles.

While one of the examples above is of excess and obsession, and one of a healthy interest in commercial opportunity, both illustrate an ongoing fascination with a fungus that has been apparent in written records for the past 4000 years, and before that if you take into account the oral traditions of the Australian Aborigines and the peoples of the Kalahari in southern African, for whom desert truffles have long been a food source.

Indigenous truffle hunters interviewed in Namibia referred to them as "God's given gift from the soil".

The first written records were left by the peoples of Mesopotamia and Sumer, or present day Syria and Iraq.

Archaeologists excavating a 4000-year-old Amorite palace in what is now eastern Syria found remnants of truffles still in their special baskets as well as mentions of them in the palace's inventory lists.

Further to the West, the Egyptians were reputed to have a fondness for truffles, and it has been suggested that the manna, which God provided for the Hebrew people in the book of Exodus, may have been some sort of truffle.

The Jews are said to have revered them, associating them with abundance and divine reward.

Throughout history they have been variously referred to, favourably, as mysterious products of the earth, food or children of the gods, children of the earth, jewels of cookery, black diamonds of the table, and the gastronome's sancta sanctorum, and, unfavourably, as an evil ferment or imperfection of the earth, the devil's handiwork, tuberous excrescences, warts bred in the earth, and a disease of the root system.

Ancient Greek philosophers believed truffles were a product of thunder and lightning and it is from them that come the terms children of the gods or food of the gods, a not unreasonable connection when you consider they attributed phenomena such as lightning to the actions of the gods.

Magical and medicinal powers have long been attributed to the truffle.

They featured in the medical works of the imminent Persian physician Avicenne, or Ibn S-n- (around 1000AD), regarded as a father of early modern medicine and clinical pharmacology.

He recommended truffles as a treatment for healing wounds, a use since supported by the fact that the Terfezia species, the desert truffle, are now known to produce antibiotics.

Islamic references were also made to their use in treating eye problems.

Truffles have been revered for their ability to cure gout and have been used in syrup as a source of energy.

Since the earliest times, they have been considered an aphrodisiac.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle, the Roman physician Galen, Loius XV's mistress Madame de Pompadour, Napolean and the French novelist and feminist Georges Sand have all mentioned the fungus in this connection.

Nineteenth century French food connoisseur Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who referred to truffles as "the jewel of cookery", noted the belief that "truffles are conducive to erotic pleasure" and decided to prove it.

He wrote that after consulting "reluctant ladies" - "For all the replies I received were ironical or evasive" - and men - "Who by their profession are invested with special trust" (presumably doctors) concluded that "the truffle is not a true aphrodisiac but in certain circumstances it can make women more affectionate and men more attentive".

What Brillat-Savarin did not know, and what scientific research has since shown, is that the fungus produces a steroid identical to a pheromone produced by boars during pre-mating behaviour, which is also secreted by humans, but in much lower concentrations than in pigs.

It is thought that this at least goes part way to explaining why pigs, particularly sows, have a natural fondness for truffles, and were traditionally used to sniff them out, before being largely replaced with the more amenable dog.

The first attributable scientific statement about truffles was made around 300BC by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, known as the father of botany.

He described truffles as plants without root, stem, branch, bud, leaf, flower, nor fruit; neither bark, pith, fibres, nor veins.

He also noted a belief that they might be grown from seed, anticipating the thoughts of researchers 2000 years into the future.

From Theophrastus can be picked out a pathway of inquiry leading from the ancient Greeks to the Romans, thence to medieval Muslim philosophers and scientists, to the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, down to the present.

Simple early observations linked their growth to rainfall and, despite fanciful conclusions that they might be produced by lightning strike, led to observations of habitat and association with particular plants which foreshadowed developments in the centuries of inquiry following the Renaissance, specifically with respect to structure, spore observation, propagation, growth and cultivation.

It was in the early 19th century that the first indirect cultivation of truffles was carried out, the method discovered not by the scientific researchers of the time, but by a French peasant, Joseph Talon, who planted acorns from truffle-growing areas and was surprised to be able to harvest truffles under the young trees a few years afterwards.

This method was used to establish vast plantations in the late 1800s.

The latter half of the 19th century is considered to have been the golden age of truffles.

By 1890, there were 750sq km of truffieres in France, with annual production somewhere between 1000 and 2000 tonnes.

Then, from the beginning of the 20th century, the industry collapsed and truffle production declined dramatically.

A number of reasons have been advanced to explain this collapse.

At the beginning of last century, truffle growing and harvesting was cloaked in mystery, much as it has always been.

The location of known truffle beds was a closely guarded secret known only to a select few. Truffles and their harvest were the preserve of men.

Women, considered to be "impure", were kept away from truffle beds for fear that their very presence would strike the beds sterile.

Only on his death-bed would the truffle grower pass on to his sons the secrets of truffle cultivation, or even the places where they were to be found in the wild.

Since many truffle growers died in the trenches during the 1914-18 war, their secrets often died with them and their families had great trouble even finding the truffle beds, let alone knowing what to do when they did.

Prices for truffles plummeted and demand did not recover in the difficult post-war years.

Such was the economic devastation, oak trees were either cut down and the land developed for more profitable crops or landowners simply neglected the trees on their property, leaving many truffle-producing areas in chaos.

As well, truffles do not grow well in areas of dense vegetation.

In the past, wood-cutters and grazing animals kept forests half clear, but with the shift in balance between urban and rural living during the 20th century, large parts of France and Italy are wilder today than they were a century ago.

By the end of World War 2, production had collapsed completely.

Today, in a quest to reverse that decline, truffle research is conducted worldwide, with successful industries being developed in Australia, the United States and Spain, as well as in New Zealand.

- Gordon Brown