Excerpt
ABOUT THIRTY YEARS AGO, I WAS A YOUNG MAGAZINE EDITOR IN MILAN ON MY first European business trip. I had always been interested in exotic foods and their specialized table accessories, and I discovered a small cutlery shop on the Via Montenapoleone called G. Lorenzi. Amid escargot forks, asparagus tongs, fruit cutlery, sewing kits encased in tortoiseshell bobbins, shoe button hooks, cigar cutters, miniature pocketknives, and other curious sharp metal items I'd never imagined, I found a little truffle shaving set: a pretty hardwood plank on which sits a stainless steel shaver, a fine dust brush made of horsehair, and a blown glass bell-jar cover to protect the precious commodity. It suggested to me the most simple yet decadent entertaining idea: a shave-it-yourself truffle dinner. The salesman at Lorenzi told me where to buy the best truffles in Milan (I had never even tasted one before) and advised me to serve it over hot buttered pasta. Even with the little truffle smothered inside a box filled with arborio rice and bound by three layers of plastic wrap, the smell of it still filled the plane as I carefully carried the tuber and its set back to my fifth-floor walk-up apartment in New York.
Ever since, it has been my tradition to put a whole truffle—the largest my budget would allow—beneath the bell jar and pass it around the table, the implication being that everyone can have "as much as they want." Of course, most guests are far too polite and sensible to take more than a little, which is a good thing because with Stephanie's recipes—much evolved since my days of pasta al dente—we have to make the truffle last all the way through to dessert. There are few foods more special than a truffle: expensive, rare, and volatile. Stephanie usually manages to get just one truffle each season (calling upon her professional connections, as most of the best ones go directly to restaurants and bypass the retail market entirely). The arrival of our annual truffle always warrants a special occasion at Rancho La Zaca. And it's not difficult to get friends to drop everything and come to dinner: The allure of the fragrant tuber is universal.