the piedmont truffle robbery

last week, when i was looking for the article on wolves in germany i wrote about, i found a little article that made my mouth water and had me grinning from ear to ear.

a couple of years ago i spent the end of october and beginning of november with a friend in piedmont, italy. we had chosen that time because work was a little slow for both of us at that time, we could afford to take off, and the fall vacation rush was over by that time. what we didn’t know but were quite ecstatic to find out about, was that it was the time of the annual truffle fairs in piedmont.

the streets of the little town of alba, which we passed through looking for accomodation, were filled with stalls merchandising local truffle products. every restaurant in town offered special truffle dishes and menues from moderate to outrageous prices. but the heart of the event was the truffle market courtyard, where the “trifolai”, the truffle searchers, proudly display and sell their treasures. and true treasures they were, the most splendid specimens — up to fist-sized — often displayed like jewels on crimson or purple velvet in glass cases. the smell was unbelievable.
the dishes the piedmontese prepare with those jewels of the kitchen are pretty awesome, too: scrambled eggs with truffles, raw minced beef with truffles, fresh pasta with truffles, cheese fondue with truffles … i thought i had died and gone to heaven.

but now back to what reminded me of all that. this news article on german magazine’s “der spiegel” online site describes the robbery of about 2,000 € (at the moment almost 3,000 $) worth of white truffles. apparantly the thieves disguised themselves as a highway patrol, stopped a collector on his way to the truffle fair, and relieved him of 400 grams of his precious goods. what made me grin was that i thought that was a pretty neat idea for a robbery — no italian driver would let himself be forced off the road by anyone but the police, you’d be more likely to end up in a ditch yourself if you’d attempt anything like that.
but whoever heard of stealing truffles? well, not so absurd maybe, if you consider that after this especially hot and dry year in italy the truffle “harvest” has been quite poor, pushing the price of white truffles up to 8,000 € (11,500 $) per kilogram (arrrgh … 35 ounces).
i would have liked to imagine these highway fungus robbers as some kind of italian robin hoods, who would now share their booty among their friends, all poor italian farmers of course, who couldn’t afford a single truffle in their lives themselves. most likely it didn’t turn out that way.

~ by bine on November 14, 2007.