The truffle-hunter’s tale

Behind their backs they held long wooden poles and small garden rakes that made them look disconcertingly like invigilators patrolling the aisles of an examination hall with rulers tucked behind them ready to be rapped on the desk of anyone caught cheating.

After days of rain the sun had finally come out. This, a friend assured me, was the perfect time to go in search of “keme” armed with a piece of wood to bang on the ground before scraping the soil carefully away to reveal them. I have to admit that I didn’t immediately understand what it was that he was talking about, and even after I’d shinned over the wall with the aid of a rusty pylon, narrowly avoiding a tortoise going about its own peaceful business in the grass on the other side, it still took me a while to twig that all this focused activity was aimed at unearthing Turkey’s own version of the truffle: a desert truffle found throughout the Middle East and belonging to the Terfeziaceae family.

As we all know, true truffles are some of the world’s most valuable foodstuffs, and it didn’t take long for me to appreciate why that might be. In the first few minutes of tapping the ground, then scraping it carefully away, we had beginner’s luck in unearthing a fraction of truffle about the size of a dollar coin. After that, though, our luck was out, and to my intense irritation one of the women managed to snaffle the one apple-sized truffle that lay right in our path before we could get our hands on it.

“Look for cracks,” she told us, before waving some ferny grey leaves and tiny flower buds at us. It made no difference. The “cracks” were actually more like little mounds of soil caused as the fungi pushed their way up from underground, but every hopeful-looking mound that we tapped had already been turned over by the early birds. It was real needle-in-a-haystack stuff, and I was hard put to it not to point out that in France they resort to the very un-Islamic expedient of using pigs as truffle hunters.

After a fruitless hour of bending double in the sun to no avail, my friend commenced negotiations with one of the women, whose apron pockets taunted us with keme-shaped bulges. Soon we were in her back garden watching as hands hennaed as black as the soil washed the mud off a kilo’s worth for what seemed like a snip of a price at TL20.

“They’re great with eggs. Just put some salt and pepper, then fry them up and add the egg,” my friend said. His brother was of more adventurous disposition though. “I’ll buy some special chicken and we’ll eat them with that tomorrow,” he told me. And so it was that on one of the rare few sunny days so far this spring we sat out on the lawn and tucked into chicken and rice with desert truffles that I can now report have a color, texture and taste not unlike potatoes.

Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.