A Walk In The Woods

On a chilly morning in Périgord, Heidi Fuller-Love hunts for truffles with one of the last caveurs to use a pig.

- Heidi Fuller-Love

Tall and agile with iron-grey hair, Daniel Chaume is waiting for me outside his 17th-century Périgord farmhouse in the forest near the pretty town of Mareuil-sur-Belle. As we head for the stables where Daniel keeps his prize truffle sows, he tells me that in his grandfather’s day, truffles were so common in Périgord that even the poorest households had them for breakfast, dinner and tea.

Like his grandfather, Daniel seeks out truffles with the help of a pig; unlike his grandfather, who was one of many, Daniel is now one of the last caveurs in France to use a truffle sow.

“In the 19th century, France had hundreds of truffle plantations, but when World War I came, so many men went to fight and never came back, and most of the plantations were abandoned,” he says. 

Before the 1914-18 war, France was producing 2,000 tons of truffles per year, but that figure had dropped to 40 tons by World War II. Later, truffles were imported from Spain, Italy and even China to meet demand.

Dubbed La Belle Ténébreuse (the mysterious beauty) by 19th-century gastronome Brillat-Savarin, there are at least 50 truffle varieties worldwide, but the black melanosporum and the white Italian magnatum are the most prized by gourmets. Their origins remained a mystery until the 19th century when scientists discovered that truffles grew underground in symbiotic association with the roots of certain trees, including oak and hazelnut. This led to experiments in inoculating tree roots with truffle spores.