89: Just a truffle race to the end

Hello, I hope you’re well.

Here’s Border Crossing issue #89.

Thank you very much for continuing to support my writing. If you’re a new sign-up, a warm welcome, I hugely appreciate you.

Tomorrow I turn fifty, so today is a ‘final day’ of sorts. To mark it, I’ve written about making change and a big bucket of truffles.

gems

1

The family of campaigning journalist John Pilger, who died late last year, have rebuilt his website as an archive of his writing and filmmaking.

2

Phil Hoad’s brilliant story in The Guardian of mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, who became a hermit in the French countryside.

3

Albert Burneko argues in Defector that Mars is impossible to permanently colonise.

4

Sasha Weiss’ epic in-depth essay for New York Times about the exhaustive nine hour Prince documentary that we may never see. Thanks Simon Kobayashi for sharing this piece.

5

The Huddersfield poet Sarah L. Dixon was working on a collection about her passionate nineties indie fandom, when she got caught up in the Brighton hotel fire. Her resulting book A Bit Like Falling In Love adds that visceral twist into an eccentric, endearing, bittersweet mix. The merest hints of darkness and a difficult journey shadow her enthusiasm. This isn’t my usual preferred kind of verse writing, but especially if you’re familiar with that pre-Britpop world (many mentions of Carter USM and Miles Hunt and such) it’s a delightful, immediate, thoughtful read.

potato gem

Now on AirB&B: spend the night inside a giant potato, in Boise, Idaho. It’s called The Big Idaho Potato Hotel.

•

Just a truffle race to the end

Last week my sister Anna sent me a gift of a big box of truffles. Not the little round sweets (though I love those too, obviously) I mean your actual truffles, the pungent earthy assassins of the mycelium plain, whose lives are spent in psychotic parasocial coupling with an individual tree, just below ground level, until they’re sniffed out by specially trained dogs. These were English Burgundy — or ‘autumn’ — truffles, a much mellower type than your typical French black Perigords or Italian whites. A fabulous, ridiculously indulgent gift to show up in the post as the season shifts.

They tasted astoundingly good. The challenge was, truffles don’t hang around long. Really, they’re only good for a couple of weeks after being dug up, at absolute best, with careful handling. You wrap them in kitchen towel, put them in an airtight container in the fridge. Then, once or twice a day, you take out the container, wipe its inside surface free of truffle sweat (unlike Prince Andrew, truffles sweat) and re-package them in fresh paper towel. Even then, they’ll be done by next weekend.

So now it’s a truffle race.

We found ourselves in the strange position of being in possession of this rare, precious foodstuff (that I absolutely adore), which normally I would only eat a tiny bit of, grated expensively onto something in a treat restaurant, or as an artificially recreated flavour. Yet now we’re wolfing down loads of it as fast as we can, basically eating it on and in everything, as long as it survives. I’d not possessed a real truffle before, yet the one thing we can’t do is eke it out.

We went straight out, bought good mushrooms, eggs, other accessories, then I went to town on truffle-oriented DIY cookery. We did give one away to Ben, a kitchen towel blob tightly wrapped in foil, with care instructions.

One reason for storing truffles airtight is they tend to infuse everything nearby with that unique odour, which you really don’t want, except when you do. For example, you can create ‘truffled eggs’ simply by storing truffles along with some eggs in an airtight container. They’re so potent, the truffle flavour infuses right through the shell into the egg itself, just from being nearby.

I briefly considered making truffle oil, to preserve such a wealth of them. But it turns out, not only is that trickier than you’d imagine, it’s actively dangerous: you cannot simply chop up bits of truffle, put them in the oil and let time do the labour: that’s an expressway to botulism and the Food Standards Agency says a hard no. If you do do it (and I didn’t) you’d have to consume the oil very quickly, while toxins quietly build up (and you can’t see or smell anything to tell you when that’s happened). One trick to get around this is to infuse by proximity again, like the eggs. It sounds bonkers but place your truffles beside an open container of oil, lots of surface area exposed, but separated from other foods. The oil is gently infused but — crucially — doesn’t physically contact the truffles. That method is apparently safe.

I didn’t consider looking up recipes, rather bodged it from the get-go, with dishes I already knew would benefit from truffle nuance. I’m comfortable with what its flavour does, what it goes with, so it was easier just to imagine. Omelette. Good homemade pasta. A kick-arse mushroom risotto kind of thing. Filled supermarket pasta. Scrambled eggs. Another mushroom and tomato thing. Salad.

I’m not a food critic. My taste is as squonky and ill-defined as my taste in everything. Anyway, being a lifelong veggie locks one out of a world of sublime food. But if I’ve learned one thing of value from a Bourdain obsession and occasional chaotic forays into the bleeding edge of fine — and off-grid — dining, it’s that the most prized, glorious food experiences sit breathlessly, perilously close to the most appalling, gross food experiences. Comfort is the enemy of enrichment. The magical balancing act along that tightrope is where the heights of foodie alchemy thrive. Knowing your own red lines of flavour and texture, and being prepared to brush up intimately against them, occasionally stumbling over, even if you risk coming away retching, that is the ball game.

So with life, eh. The truffles have disrupted, augmented, off-pisted, our food routine in glorious fashion. Though, going forward, perhaps life without easy access to truffles will be like taking long-haul flights in coach, after you’ve experienced first class.

Last week I quit Twitter. I’m reshuffling how I interact with all short-form social media, to leave it behind except for promo content, which — to as great an extent as humanly possible — gets automated or farmed out.

The tools of revolution became the tools of the oppressor.

Any value in my own ‘activism’ has shrivelled this decade and I’m ashamed for it. The billionaires bed in, playing their grand chess game with the world, like an ancient Greek or Roman pantheon, in one of those Ray Harryhausen Clash Of The Titans type films. These final months on social media have been utterly wretched. They’ve reminded me of a treacle-black Chris Morris sketch from Jam where a man tries to take his own life, but slowly, so instead of jumping out of a fifteenth storey window, he jumps out of a first storey window over and over again. This week I watched an old episode of Nathan Barley on YouTube and it is so prescient, it has ceased to be amusing, it is a horror show made by visionaries.

But. In two weeks I’m taking a long train ride to do an Arvon writing retreat for non-fiction, with tutors I admire. I don’t often do courses, I’m not excellent as part of a group, nor at giving over agency to facilitators or guides. I swear I’m not in any way disruptive or domineering, more likely retreat into myself, at least at first. So it’ll be a nerve-wracking few days. But it’s urgent now. We all need to figure out what on earth we’re meant to be doing — too many ideas, too much incomplete work — with the rest of our time on this planet, before the truffle hound comes digging.

We’ve got one-third of one truffle left, which may or may not still have some life to it. Either way, it’ll be gone fast. I’m so, so glad I had this taste of what an autumn day can feel like with a big bucket of truffles in the fridge. As President Bartlet says, what’s next?

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email: chris@christt.com
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Look after yourself and your people.

All my love,
Christopher
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