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"were you to visualize an ideal existence, this might be it: Awaken a mile from Davy Crockett's birthplace, the sun rising over the Blue Ridge Mountains, handily visible from your back porch. Phone for a rare Lagotto Romagnolo truffle-hunting dog to be brought around in an ever available Lexus SUV. Stroll your backyard hazelnut orchard with the happy hound bounding beside you, him sniffing the soft earth for precious Tuber melanosporum, you gathering them up\u2014hardly stressful, since they conveniently grow only inches beneath the ground. Rinse, put in Ziplocs, add rice to absorb moisture, and establish the price you'll charge, about $600 a pound, sometimes more. Try not to fret about the overhead. After all, we're talking bags and rice.\n\nOf course, you must find somebody to buy your harvest, but that's no problem. \"I thought the real hard part was going to be the selling,\" says Tom Michaels, thought to be the only man in America who earns a living selling black P\u00E9rigord truffles that he's cultivated himself. \"They sell themselves.\"\n\nHis personal life isn't bad, either. Michaels's house, that of a divorced man devoid of domestic skills, looks at best like a college dorm room. \"Besides being a slob, I'm not organized,\" he concedes, when I mention that most everything he owns is teetering in piles. On the occasions that his girlfriend, Vicki Blizzard, drives over from Knoxville, Tennessee, she finds it all just fine. \"Tom's house is wonderful. He's got that backyard, that view. So what if it's not as pristine as mine. I'm comfortable there.\"\n\nThat's two treasures, a tolerant woman as well as a ready crop of black truffles, one of the most expensive edibles on earth. Long considered a mainstay of French haute cuisine, Tuber melanosporum, a.k.a. the black P\u00E9rigord truffle, has not always been rare, but it has always been prized.\n\nBlack truffles are identified with the culture of French dining, and for good reason, although they were used much earlier by the Greeks and the Romans. Great thinkers among those ancients believed they were formed by thunderclaps, although Plutarch, the wisest of all, declared them to be mud cooked by lightning. Over the years, they have been eaten to gain strength in battle, to cure gout, and of course, as an aphrodisiac.\n\nUntil about now, truffles were not part of Tennessee folklore, and they certainly don't figure into the region's culinary traditions. \"Most people around here,\" Michaels points out, \"they want to know if you put gravy on truffles.\" He doesn't claim that his tastes are more refined than those of his neighbors, isn't trying to put himself or his Ph.D. in plant pathology on a pedestal, but he does enjoy his truffles chopped up and stirred into eggs, which is somewhat highbrow. On the other hand, he also admires them shaved over grits. To win the heart of Blizzard, he prepared truffled cheesy chicken breasts.\n\nThe black truffle found in P\u00E9rigord and Provence, and now Chuckey, Tennessee, has dozens of fungal relatives, some of them used in cooking, a few of them not bad at all, none of them its equal in beauty or bouquet. Once cleaned, the black P\u00E9rigord truffle glitters. Cut open, the veins resemble mica. (When they are cooked, the marbling disappears.) Although the truffle possesses a pleasant crunch, it is treasured not so much for its taste or appearance but for its aroma, which has been likened to bedsheets after a night of abandon, slatterns who disdain to bathe, all that is dark and alluring about the human body and soul. In the middle of the winter growing season, they can be fruity and floral. Later, they become muskier. Michaels remembers handing out samples at a festival, his truffles incorporated into a mushroom-truffle cappuccino: \"When I'd be shaving a truffle that was musky, the women, their eyes would roll back. If it was the fruity kind, it was nice but not as high a level of ecstasy. When I talk to women chefs, they seem to like the earthy ones, too, the real ripe ones. I swear there is a gender thing here.\"\n\nIndeed, the pleasure of truffles is often linked to pheromones, but I suspect they have more noteworthy virtues. Truffles are a dramatic example of a smell, taste, and appearance that should be undesirable but instead becomes the opposite. They are related psychologically to things that are nightmarish, that slough off flesh in the night. They are black, and movie-theater licorice aside, black is generally not an appealing food color. In truth, black truffles should give us the creeps, so alien are they to America's generally sunny dining habits. One would expect them to be categorized as bizarre, much like the oddities that freaky food-show hosts swallow, but in fact they are delectable, possessing a smell with uncommon allure.\n\nThey are not just pungent. They meld with certain foodstuffs, in particular fresh pasta, melted cheese, and runny eggs, enhancing their taste. They work well with vanilla ice cream, too. They are intoxicating. They weaken and captivate. All of us have at some time been desperately attracted to someone we knew was wrong. In the food world, that is the role of black truffles, although the only personal danger that results from coming under their spell is fiscal, not emotional.\n\nIn the wild, they are denizens of dark woodlands, underground dwellers that seek dampness and the roots of certain species of trees. Originally, they were pursued with pigs, lumbering beasts that sniffed them out and tried to eat their find before the farmer could yank them away. It's part of the romanticism of the black truffle that pigs are perfect hunters, but in truth they got the job because they were the primary farm animal attracted to the dark smells. Says Michaels, \"A 300-pound pig will go through an orchard like a rototiller, digging up everything. Truffle pigs are out of control, and they go home when they decide they want to go home.\" Later came dogs, perhaps not as quixotic, but dogs had virtues. At about thirty pounds (the weight of a Lagotto Romagnolo), they were easy to pick up and heave into the back of a wagon, and they were less interested in eating than in the tongue-wagging joy of the hunt. For a truffle dog, the work has all the pleasure of an Easter-egg hunt.\n\nOver the years, the availability of black truffles has wad and waned. Industrialization, rural exodus, two world wars, and the aging of nineteenth-century truffle fields is blamed for the current depletion of the crop. Once added lavishly to recipes, they tend now to be used cautiously. At the peak of production, near the end of the nineteenth century, about 1,000 tons of black truffles, many of them wild, were harvested in France. Now there might be as few as ten tons a year, almost all of them cultivated. They have become so expensive that almost no chef dares to be overly generous, but there was a hundred-year period, from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth, when they were abundant.\n\nLarousse Gastronomique, the bible of French culinary arts, lists more than seventy-five truffle dishes, and I can't imagine more than a fraction of them being prepared today. (When's the last time you had sarla-daise sauce, prepared with brandy and truffles and served with roast meat, or were offered lobster cardinal, as much about truffles as about seafood?) To be a French chef\u2014or for that matter a French grandee\u2014was hollow unless your weighty pronouncement on the glories of the fungi was immortalized in print. Alexandre Dumas described them as \"the gastronomes' holy of holies.\"\n\nIn the early nineteenth century, the epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (a famous cheese is named for him) praised them as \"the jewel of cookery\" and added, \"It is safe to say that at the time of writing, the fame of the truffle is at its summit. Nobody dares to admit having been present at a meal which did not include a single truffled dish.\" Colette called the black truffle a \"jewel of impoverished lands.\" (She probably considered rural life to be intolerable drudgery.) When Julia Child wrote her seminal book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, designed for the American kitchen, all but one of her truffle recipes called for canned truffles, probably because fresh ones were almost unknown in this country. (I've had canned truffles. They're quite good on pizza.)\n\nI was fortunate enough to be around near the tail end of the era of abundance. I've had raw truffles sliced thin and served as crisps, accompanied by Ch\u00E2teau Margaux. (Terrible technically but gratifying spiritually.) I've had them added to a pot of winter vegetables at Alain Ducasse's Le Louis XV in Monaco. (Vegetables never tasted so fabulous, but they might have been nearly as sublime without the truffles.) I've had them at a garden party, on a warm winter day, at the home of Herv\u00E9 Poron, owner of the Plantin truffle company in Provence, where he put out a bowl of cut-up truffles drizzled with olive oil and suggested we make ourselves truffle crostini. (The greatest outdoor dining of my life.) My neighbor's son once cooked truffles and eggs using Jo\u00EBl Robuchon's recipe for scrambled eggs, and no breakfast equaled his. (The kid wasted his talents by going into medicine.) I've had black truffles on risotto at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. In my opinion, no white-truffle risotto compared, but then I'm no devotee of white Alba truffles (Tuber magnatum). Although they are more expensive than black P\u00E9rigord truffles and probably higher on the gastronomic food chain, I find them wanting. They are unsightly and not particularly versatile, and they possess a regrettable olfactory profile that tips toward garlic.\n\nBlack truffles, on the other hand, are multitalented. They have always been the Hamburger Helper of haute cuisine, taking mundane fare and transforming it into something majestic. Yet today, with black P\u00E9rigord truffles so uncommon and expensive, they tend to become the star of any recipe, just as they were with all but one of those great truffle dishes of my memory. They are in such short supply in France, where they are thought to be at their best, that efforts at cultivating them are taking place throughout the world, perhaps most successfully in Australia and Spain. In America, where production lags behind, the business of growing the black P\u00E9rigord truffle is boutique level at best. There have been stunning failures, the most notable an orchard of tens of thousands of trees planted in Texas in the '90s that yielded only a few truffles.\n\nMichaels is the most successful American grower, although he concedes in generous moments that in the next few years the orchards of others are likely to come on line. In his rare prideful ones, he hints that he knows more than anybody else and that other growers might not do so well. His Ph.D. thesis is titled \"In Vitro Culture and Growth Modeling of Tuber Spp. and Inoculation of Hardwood with T. Melanosporum Ascospores.\" That means he studied black truffles, and the other guys did not.\n\nIt appears incongruous that gastronomic prominence has come to the hills of Tennessee. The region is hardly famous for fine dining, an exception being Blackberry Farm, the fabled resort outside Knoxville where the on-call truffle dog resides. The land around Chuckey, where Michaels lives, is soft and rolling, studded with tobacco-drying barns now so shrunken and weathered they look like ghosts. When I visited, a local radio station was promoting \"a chance to win a weekend in a luxury RV,\" and Michaels bragged that he had found a Mennonite repairman who fid the hydraulic seal on his tractor for thirty bucks. To drive the countryside is to come upon horses in backyards, wisps of fog that give the Great Smoky Mountains their name, Christian bookstores, old stone churches, and locals who seem to welcome strangers as warmly as any people in America.\n\nIt is my belief, for which I can offer no evidence, that when French black truffles were at their most bountiful, some of those 1,000 tons sent to market must have been Tuber brumale, an inferior and despised competitor with few culinary credentials. In France, the truffle hunter has several natural enemies: the encroaching Tuber brumale (sometimes known as the musk truffle), the vigilant tax man, and worst of all, the much hated poacher, sneaking in at nightfall to steal from privately owned orchards. So far, none of these nuisances haunt the American truffle grower, and Michaels says of poaching, \"Please, don't discuss it. There is no such culture here. Truffles are not like a watermelon patch. They are hard to see.\"\n\nThe true natural enemy of the American-grown black truffle is skepticism, a reluctance to believe that it can be the equal of the native French product. Anytime America duplicates what was first celebrated in that nation\u2014cheese, wine, and foie gras come to mind\u2014doubt immediately arises. And in truth, what we produce here often does taste different, a result of what in the wine world is known as terroir, a word that incorporates climate, soil, and a certain degree of mysticism.\n\n\n\nmichaels, 62, has always been a mushroom man, although over the years he has considered other occupations\u2014he once attended community college to become a para-accountant. He was born in the suburbs of Chicago, his father a teacher who bought a mushroom farm and started cultivating them. \"It was good enough to almost make a living,\" Michaels says. \"I have memories\u2014I'm not exactly sure how old I was\u2014sitting on old mushroom crates, folding those little cardboard bos that we'd fill with mushrooms. We sold them as Fairy Ring mushrooms. I loved being there in the cellars, loved putting together those bos. We didn't have a car, just a paneled pickup truck with so many rust holes you could see the road. We lived on a shoestring, didn't get furniture until I was 6\u2014before that, I remember sitting on mushroom crates in the house.\"\n\nHe recalls how hard his father worked and, more significantly, how the middlemen who bought from his father prospered while paying as little as two cents a pound for his father's mushrooms. \"My dad laminated a sales slip to show what shysters the merchants were,\" he says. To this day, Michaels wants no part of bureaucracy, and he markets his black truffles either by bringing them to the kitchen doors of restaurants himself or by overnighting them to out-of-town customers. He remembers his father as an intelligent man, a radar specialist during World War II, and something of a genius when it came to mushrooms. He developed a way of curing and composting mushrooms that killed flies without the use of pesticides. Upset by the business practices that kept him broke, his father started a mushroom co-op to counter unfair prices, and it thrived until a virus hit the industry. Then he was done. After that came financial hardship, kited checks, and a move to California to begin again. Michaels has two brothers, Pat, a climatologist, and Bob, an economist. \"My brothers tried to stay away from the business,\" Michaels says. \"I always wanted to do it.\"\n\nFrom the time he wrote his thesis until now, the domestic black-truffle industry hasn't accomplished much academically or agriculturally. \"My data from 1982 is still publishable,\" he says. \"The field hasn't moved. Since then I've been able to multiply the growth rate of the spores [in culture] by ten to twenty times, but they still poke along. You know, the logo of the Slow Food movement is the snail. They should change it to the black truffle. It's the ultimate slow food.\"\n\nHe seems a little disappointed when I earnestly write that down, failing to laugh.\n\n\"That's a little truffle humor,\" he says.\n\nAlmost nothing is known about Tuber melanosporum cultivation in America. The United States Department of Agriculture keeps no records or statistics and makes no effort to regulate their sale. \"Black truffles are where button mushrooms were 200 years ago,\" says Michaels. In other words, he has pretty much the same freedom as the forty-niners who panned for gold in California in the nineteenth century. Much like them, he knows where the treasure is supposed to be, but he can't always be certain of finding it. And like prospectors, truffle growers aren't keen to share what they know. \"We don't talk to each other that much,\" he says. The primary difference in the two enterprises is that truffles require enormous staying power, inasmuch as it takes five to seven years for truffles to appear in the roots of hazelnut trees\u2014if they are going to show at all\u2014and ten to twelve years for oaks. Although hazelnut trees are highly susceptible to a disease known as the eastern filbert blight, Michaels mostly plants them, not oaks. \"Every American is in a hurry,\" he says. \"I was willing to risk blight to get the truffles faster.\"\n\nBlack-truffle orchards are popping up throughout America, in states with climates as diverse as those of Texas and Idaho, but nobody has had his success. Nobody is close. He says of his proprietary findings, \"There are three things I know for certain about truffles: lime the heck out of the soil, plant a good seedling, and hope for periodic rainfall.\" He later adds a bunch of others\u2014putting enough distance between trees, irrigating when rain is insufficient, and looking for property with warmer south-facing slopes. \"That's all I know for sure about truffles, and what works for me. This is art, not science.\"\n\nHe works at a disadvantage\u2014he doesn't care for dogs. To see him in his living room, playing the piano (after moving aside piles of papers stacked on the bench), his cat hopping up to sit beside him, it's obvious what animal he prefers. \"I know squat about truffle dogs,\" he says. \"It's a strategic blunder to get into the truffle business without loving dogs.\" However, he does have the services of one whenever he needs it, which is once or twice a week during truffle-harvesting season, which peaks from mid-December to mid-February both here and in Europe. Whenever he phones, the truffle-dog loaner comes to him in an SUV provided by Blackberry Farm.\n\nMichaels unearthed his first truffles in 2007, without canine assistance. Shortly afterward he attracted the interest of Sam Beall, owner of Blackberry Farm, which has a steadfast interest in anything gastronomic. Michaels brought some of his truffles to the resort's kitchen, and Beall was sold. He decided to plant a small orchard of 150 hazelnut trees on the property and to invest in dogs to hunt them. He says, \"If I have one role here, it's to know a good thing when I see it. Tom sent me a little flyer that said tennessee truffles. It sat on my desk. I paid no attention to it, not to somebody claiming he had world-class truffles. But he was persistent. He drove down here, with his truffles in a little Tupperware container, packed in Carolina rice, and aromatically, there was no denying it. A little later, I was up at his place, and I said, \u2018What can I do to help, to be a part of it?' The next time we talked, he identified it: He needed some dogs. He didn't have any, acknowledged that he was not a dog guy. We came to an understanding that I would get dogs.\"\n\nMore good fortune followed. Tennessee happened to be the home of Mel Sykes and his wife, Hilarie Gibbs-Sykes, among the first Americans with a consuming interest in Italian truffle dogs. They had brought Lagotto Romagnolo dogs to this country in 1999 and bred the first litter of Lagottos born here. Hundreds of years ago, the breed was used as retrievers that worked the marshes of the Italian province of Emilia-Romagna\u2014they're also known as Romagna water dogs. After the marshes were drained, the dogs went to work as truffle hunters. Gibbs-Sykes says, \"It's just like job retraining in today's world. The old job went away, and so they changed careers.\"\n\nApparently, it's not an innate love of truffles that entices the animals to hunt. She says that Italian breeders put truffle oil on the nipples of the mothers when the pups are nursing, and later they add truffle oil to their food. The dogs play with rags soaked in truffle oil, which are then buried so the dogs can dig them up. She adds, somewhat sorrowfully, \"They are not natural-born truffle hunters. They are natural-born diggers in your yard.\"\n\nIn October 2007, after Blackberry Farm decided to go into the truffle business, Hilarie Gibbs-Sykes traveled to Italy and picked out Tom, now 7, who was already a champion truffle hunter, as well as another Lagotto, Lussi, now 2, to be his mate. (Besides relentlessly digging, Lussi has another bad habit\u2014she loves to chase chickens, and chickens are raised at Blackberry Farm.) The family is now three: Tom, Lussi, and Rolla, one of their offspring, a female who shows signs of surpassing Tom as a hunter. They are cared for and trained by Jim Sanford, who came to Blackberry Farm ten years ago after a career as an elephant trainer. \"Training is training,\" Sanford says. He once raised Asian elephants for the Perth Zoo, and his last job in the elephant business was onstage as the opening act at John Ascuaga's Nugget Casino in Reno, Nevada. The cast consisted of two elephants named Bertha and Angel, him, and one pretty showgirl. \"Elephant trainers like pretty girls on elephants,\" he says. In his career, he handled forty-three elephants, and, he says, \"I think about every one of them every day.\"\n\n\n\nmichaels remembers precisely the moment when he found his first truffles, these coming from the orchard of 350 trees he had planted behind his house for that very purpose. It was January 3, 2007, a cold day, the sun going down. \"I was blowing leaves, doing orchard maintenance, and I almost stepped on a little blister in the ground. It was roundish, black, sitting at the surface. I had looked at my trees, didn't think they were doing so well. I figured, \u2018Wait until next year.' This was under my foot. I almost crushed it. It was epiphany. It was eureka. And I almost crushed it. I went down on my hands and knees to get it\u2014I knew what to look for. I put it to my nose. I started looking around. I found two more, bigger than golf balls. They were beautiful, perfectly round. I didn't have a dog yet. The next day, I walked around and found two more pounds close to the surface.\"\n\nThe first person he called was Blizzard. When they met, she asked him what he did, and he replied, \"I'm waiting for my truffles to come in.\" For years he had endured teasing, the comments from friends, such remarks as \"Say, Tom, how are those truffles of yours coming along?\" He knew all of them wanted to roll their eyes, but none did, this being a polite section of the country. \"They thought I was a crazy old flake, living with my trees on a hillside. I know they were thinking, Why doesn't he get out and earn a living?\"\n\nHe cleaned, sorted, and packed up his small haul, then phoned a Knoxville restaurant called the Orangery, hoping he could bring them over. \"Remember,\" he says, \"I had raised mushrooms. I knew how to deliver mushrooms to a restaurant's back door.\"\n\nThe chef at the time, Chris Stallard, has a precise memory of what occurred. It was a moment that might well be immortalized as the day America's commercial black-truffle industry was born: \"He phoned me during the lunch rush, and what I remember is this solemn voice telling me he had truffles he wanted to sell. In the back of my mind, I'm thinking, \u2018Right, you have truffles.' He said it was the P\u00E9rigord strain. I thought, Nobody has those. I rushed him through, told him to come by the next week if he wanted. He shows up with this little basket. Inside it are GladWare containers, and he says, \u2018Do you remember me, the guy who called?' He popped open the container. An amazing smell filled the room. The line cooks stopped cooking. We knew instantly. They were the real deal.\"\n\n\n\nmichaels has four truffle orchards\u2014he likes to refer to them as \"tranches,\" for no reason other than he likes the sound of the word, one used in moneyed circles to designate a slice of a financial instrument. It's another rare appearance of that almost entirely suppressed streak of intellectual affectation. He buys trees or he nurtures his own seedlings, and he inoculates the roots himself, adding soil mid with chopped-up bits of black truffles that contain the precious spores that will develop into more of them. The result is a model symbiotic relationship, the tree and the truffle in the soil, assisting each other with nutrients and water. He says getting the spores to colonize the roots is the simplest part of the job. \"It's not rocket science. It's not third-grade science. Thousands of species of fungus grow on the roots of a tree. What we are doing is giving the truffle a head start.\"\n\nHe planted his first orchard twenty-five miles from his home, in 1999. It consists of ninety hazelnut trees, on land he doesn't own, a handshake deal with a friend. A year later came the \"home orchard,\" the one in his backyard, and the site of his first success. Both of those are planted with hazelnut trees. To fight off eastern filbert blight, he allows the trees to mature not in a stately upright manner but more like bushes, so that new shoots are always replacing dying ones. Next came 1,000-plus trees a few miles away at a spot known as Jockey Creek, where we are headed with Jim Sanford and Tom the truffle dog. (Michaels has a fourth orchard of 900 trees, planted in 2003.) The third and the fourth orchard are a mixture of hazelnut and two kinds of oak\u2014the hairy oak and the pedunculate oak. You ask Tom Michaels about trees, the information keeps coming, although I received a warning from Blizzard that it could get worse. She said to me of her scholarly boyfriend, \"Don't get him started on corn. He'll be talking about whacking enzymes all afternoon.\"\n\nIt is a bright day in early February, and Michaels, Sanford, and Tom the truffle dog are going to work. First they stop to show me the part-cinder-block, part-tin, part-wood falling-down structure that Michaels describes as \"the ugliest shed in Tennessee.\" It contains sacks of hydrated lime for carrying out acid adjustments in the soil, and Tom begins his workday by peeing on the sacks. Sanford shouts a command in Italian, and the dog is off.\n\nThe Lagotto Romagnola is small, friendly, and energetic, with a tufted coat that makes it look like a cross between a poodle and a Berber carpet. Tom, who has a brown head and a white body with brown patches, is relentless in his pursuit of truffles. Says Michaels, \"That dog can smell through snow, I swear. He smelled through ice in January. He was saying to us that the truffle was there, but he couldn't paw through the ice to get it. We got a shovel, pulled away the ice, and there it was.\" The orchard that Tom is prowling is no beauty, no Maine apple orchard, more like scrubland, because of the way Michaels allows the trees to develop. Beneath a great many of those stunted specimens are tiny orange flags poking out of the ground. They mark the spots where Tom has located truffles. Says Michaels, in praise, \"Ninety-five percent of the time when Tom indicates that he's found a truffle, he's right.\"\n\nTom, on the job, starts scraping.\n\nMichaels bends over, starts digging. Nothing. \"Not this time,\" he says.\n\n\"You calling my dog a liar?\" says Sanford.\n\nMichaels tells about the time, a month back, when storm clouds started coming in, and Tom, seeming to sense the urgency, found five pounds of truffles in forty minutes. That's about $3,000. That's digging for dollars.\n\nSoon the dog starts locating truffles, one of them a particularly sweet find because it comes from beneath a tree with no previous orange flags. \"Lost its virginity,\" Michaels says. Suddenly Tom shoots out of the grove after a particularly wonderful prize: a rabbit. Say what you will about pigs, they don't do that.\n\nAfter two hours of hunting, we leave for home with about two pounds of truffles, which to Michaels is a small haul, signifying that the season is winding down. He spins truffle tales, one about a ten-ounce behemoth, another about finding a cornucopia of \"russet potatoes\"\u2014his term for the truffles of six to seven ounces that had been plentiful weeks earlier. The best day for him was December 21, 2008, when Tom located 24.2 pounds of truffles, worth more than $14,000. He says, \"You can get 20,000 pounds of onions or 40,000 pounds of potatoes off an acre of land. At the truffle conversion rate [an estimate based on sunshine, rainfall, etc.], you should theoretically get a ton of truffles per year per acre. We're getting 1 percent of that. Isn't that pathetic?\"\n\n\n\ni returned to New York with a tiny payload of truffles, each one packed in rice, sealed in its own plastic bag. Michaels had taken the two pounds collected with the help of Tom the truffle dog and spread them across his dining room table, first pushing aside the clutter\u2014books on truffles, and the microscope he uses to study truffles. Then I got to hunt, pick through them the way a kid scrutinizes candy at a corner store.\n\nEach truffle looked and smelled different. Some had claw marks from Tom, the equivalent of bird shot in a wild Scottish partridge and prized by some chefs as a sign of authenticity. Inasmuch as I had been on site, I required no such reassurance. I felt the truffles for firmness. I smelled them for sweetness. I rejected the muskier ones, preferring the fruitier smells. Between sniffs I breathed in ground coffee to refresh my nose.\n\nI selected the best of the previous day's harvest and paid the prevailing rate of $640 a pound, exactly what French black truffles were selling for in America. Michaels has always priced his truffles the same as the imports, figuring freshness would compensate for any perceived lack of pedigree.\n\nI brought my truffles to the restaurant Cru in Manhattan, after chef Shea Gallante agreed to arrange a blind tasting, the French P\u00E9rigord truffles he had on hand versus the P\u00E9rigord truffles I'd brought back from Tennessee, melanosporum versus melanosporum. The Tennessee truffles were three days out of the ground, absolutely at their peak. The French truffles, at least two weeks old (not unusual for imports), seemed drier and more brittle when I looked them over in the kitchen. Five of us went to Cru for the tasting, and Gallante prepared two dishes.\n\nThe first was a poached organic egg on farro risotto, surrounded by a cheese emulsion. The second was pappardelle pasta with butter and Parmigiano-Reggiano, absolutely traditional. Truffles were shaved atop both.\n\nTo me, the bouquet of those from Tennessee was distinctive, probably because I had picked them out. I found them clearly superior, almost certainly because of freshness, not because of origin. I recalled Michaels telling me that truffles from trees growing next to each other were just as likely to be dissimilar as truffles from different countries. The Tennessee truffles were fresh, lively, and fruity, while the French specimens seemed tired. Said Gallante after the meal, \"The Tennessee truffle was sweeter on the palate, almost like it had sugar content. In the kitchen we wondered if this was from the soil or due to the freshness. The French was more gaseous, the Tennessee more delicate.\"\n\nI'm not claiming that my truffle tasting was the equivalent of the famous Judgment of Paris in 1976, when American wines were found to be more delicious than French wines, but here's the final tabulation, based on five voters tasting two dishes: Tennessee, 10; France, 0.\n\nalan richman is a gq correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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