A few years ago a French magazine carried an advertisement for young oak trees which had their roots impregnated, if that's the word, with spores or what ever, of truffles. You planted your young oak and in a few years you had a nicely growing tree and truffles at their base. Was it just laziness at the thought of form filling and so on?
Anyway, with just a little effort, truffles might now be part of the daily diet. There was a small sideshow when the question was put here and to whether truffles had ever grown in Ireland. One man wrote from the West and said he and his pals used to dig them up on the way to school. He was quickly shot down by another letter which said that those were pig nuts which everyone knew about.
But here comes a second chance. In the English magazine Country Life for February 15th David Wheeler reveals how you can have your truffles and your oak.
For he tells us that a firm in Surrey can supply oak, hazel and poplar saplings, imported from France, the roots of which have been inoculated (so that's the word?) with the truffle my celium. You would need to get, and plant, them pretty quick. Truffles, he tells us, thrive best in chalky, well drained soils where competition from other naturally occurring fungus colonies is low. You should have truffles in from five to eight years. And they would go on producing for twenty five years.
The trees cost £40. But truffles do not come cheap. Our author has it that the Covent Garden price of black truffles last month (January) was £550 yes, five hundred and fifty pounds per kilo. These saplings, he tells us, can be had from Wentworth Exotic Mushrooms, 1 Hurst Lane, Egham, Surrey. It appears that oak, at any rate, would not require a plant passport, as it is called, in moving from England to Ireland.
The author, a vegetarian, has some interesting thoughts on dishes for families where some are meat eaters and others not. We might get back to that.