Truffles

This is a test.

Which is the truffle? Which is the morel?

Here's a hint: two are truffles.

Here's another hint: a morel looks like a johnson with a skin disease.

And you don't really need a translation of "johnson," now do you?

When I was a little girl growing up in Wisconsin, my mom would tell me all about morels, wild mushrooms that grew in very woodsy, leafy areas on farms. Her teacher friend had just such a farm. Dottie invited us out to look at what she found under some tress in the back forty. Morels! Mom exclaimed! I whooped! Dottie got two grocery bags. We filled them up. That night Mom grilled a sirloin strak and fried the morels in sweet butter. The steak was smothered in morels. I rarely remember such a good meal.

Forty years later Mom and I had just such a meal again. I ordered fresh morels from Dean and Deluca in New York City. Fifty dollars for a pound of morels! And it was worth every penny. That sirloin was smothered. We fond them again at the grocery store in the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, CA. We found a mushroom farm in Wisconsin that sells morels for only two week in May. We tried to grow our own in the basement. I bought Mom a bronze-cast morel from a Wisconsin artist.

I realized that this family eating adventure might not be a common one when a dear friend came to the house for dinner one spring evening. Again, we had scored some morels. Out came the grill. On went the sirloin. The morels sizzled in the butter. And Carolyn would have nothing to do with them. She pushed them off to the side of her plate quietly, not causing any trouble, but determinedly. She would not eat them. I thought this was Unamerican.

So I have a weaknes for mushrooms. My good friend in Los Angeles added to my repetoire one evening when we ordered risotto with truffles in Beverly Hills. I had never had truffles. I was willing to try truffles. And then, oh my god, oh my god, they tasted like candy. I was eating a whole bowl full of candy. For the first time in my life, I would not share with others at the table. It was a magical experience, that bowl full of truffles.

So last April I find myself on the Place de la Madeleine in Paris, at Fauchon. There, right in the window, in the Fauchon black and white signature box, a big box, really big, was an entire box of morels. I thought I had come to the Place for chocolate. I was wrong. But, I looked longingly at the morels - and moved on. My American Exoress card breathed a sigh of relief.

So my friend and I are walking along, walking along, walking along and then - The House of Truflles. Right in front of us. Just past the House of Caviar. Truffles. And not the chocolate candy ones, either. The real thing. Lumpy disgusting-looking little pieces of coal worth more than your gold inlays. I turned to my friend. "I could buy a truffle," I said, the shock registering on my face. "I believe you could," she replied.

And that's how I came to make a gigantic bowl of risotto with truffles right in my own kitchen. "That's was rather tasty," my brother said, after polishing off a vegetable dish-sized serving. "Well, I hope you did enjoy it," I said, "since you'll probably never get it again."

But you never know. These mushroom stories just keep popping up in this family. When Mom died and I had a celebration of her life for her friends, Dottie showed up and told everyone the story about the morels under the tree. Maybe someday my friend will tell the story about the truffles on the Madeleine.