Friday, June 09, 2006

Old MacDonald, Chinon, truffles

Sitting in the garden, I hear on the pavement on the other side of the hedge an approaching song. It is a young woman singing Old MacDonald had a farm, accompanied by the screams of an increasingly irate baby. "Ee aye, ee aye O," sings the mother. "Ea eea, eah, eah", screams the child. Down the road they go, the child slowly dominating proceedings, but the mother battling on unpeturbed, with rather a pretty voice. "Old MacDonald had a farm, with a quack, quack
here, and a quack quack there ..."

In this hot weather, what better than a glass of Chinon, the light red wine from the Loire, which can be served chilled and goes with food or without it!

I see that you can buy (from a firm calledTruffles UK) oak and hazel seedlings impregnated with the fungal spores of truffles. But you have to wait 1o years for the trees to grow and the fungus to develop. And then the truffles are the inferior summer truffles (tuber incinatum) and not the black truffles (tuber melanosporum), which I once saw hunted in Perigord with the help of a pig. Nor yet the white truffles of Alba which have a faint smell of garlic, and like the black truffles, require a a lottery win to purchase even a few shavings.

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