We had to go to Cahors anyway to get stuff for the house, so we took Philippe up on his urging that we visit the truffle market at Lalbenque. I had never seen a truffle until Philippe pulled a bunch out of the fridge. I guess he stores them atop eggs with the idea of grating them into omelettes. In the event, we made a pitstop at "Le Juge", the home of Kim and Denis in Fontanes. Kim had left for a marathon day teaching in Toulouse despite her bad cold while Denis was left to juggle Daisy, also sick, with making us one of the omlettes he is famous for.
Lalbenque, the epicenter of the truffle world, is just a few kilometers away from Fontanes so we got there in plenty of time. This is not a market with stands and awnings as almost every town of any size has once a week. In this market, truffle vendors line up behind rough counters, planks on sawhorses. The truffle-mad public is kept a meter or so at bay by a long rope until the market formally opens. During this pre-market phase, you go up to the rope and look at the tiny baskets of turd-like mushrooms. Now an then a vendor will actually pull back the handkerchief to reveal the contents or even pass the basket across the divide to be sniffed.
It was a pretty good-sized crowd especially since the hot summer made for a poor crop of truffles. I heard the price was around 1,000€ per kilo (I think that works out to $33 per ounce vs gold at $28 or so) The official poster sets out the rules: no excess dirt to pad the weight, no truffles damaged by frost or rot. Minimum weights for the two grades.
It seemed like a lot of the crowd was there for the "folklore" as Philippe had put it when encouraging us to go. In fact, we bumped into Philippe's brother and two sisters-in-law
You had to work to get pictures where most of the crowd wasn't taking pictures of the crowd. After we came home, I looked up other tourists' blogs and they all looked the same: straight-faced peasants ranged behind their crude counters waiting for the market to formally open.
You had to work to get pictures where most of the crowd wasn't taking pictures of the crowd. After we came home, I looked up other tourists' blogs and they all looked the same: straight-faced peasants ranged behind their crude counters waiting for the market to formally open.
I couldn't work out the commercial end of this at all. There were no price tags, no observable haggling. At two-thirty they dropped the rope and there was an explosion of chatter and movement. My view of the scene was totally blocked by aggressive tourists vying for good pictures. I didn't even see any money change hands. Just this one young woman, when she wasn't smooching with her boyfriend, working something out on a calculator.
Before long, her father wandered over to an accurate-looking digital scale for what looked like an official weighing of his tiny basket of mushrooms.
There were also a couple of vendors up the street selling mainly oak saplings that had been "infected" with the truffle microspores. One of them told me that when the phylloxera epidemic wiped out the vineyards in the middle and late 1800s, a lot of vintners turned to trufficulture to survive. An old woman in Fages had told us the same thing last year. This vendor told us that even the cultivated truffieres required a trained dog for "cavage", searching out the mature truffle underground. You can use pigs too, but he said pigs will eat the truffles unless you jab them in the mouth with a sharp stick! This is not a problem with dogs who receive a different reward. It's striking that the French, like the Americans, are almost universally tender-hearted toward their Fifi's but completely indifferent to their pigs.
Here, for the record, are the obligatory fine faces from the crowd. Cue Casting Central!
On the way back through Cahors, we rejoined the normal modern world of shopping for stuff with price tags. We found door handles and curtain rods at Cahors Decor and paid with an American credit card because the exchange rate has been improving.
