| 词汇 | truffle |
| 词源 | truffle. The “diamonds of gastronomy,” as black truffles are called, and the “pearls of the kitchen,” white truffles, are the world’s most expensive food (save for a few rare spices), selling some years for more than $2,000 a pound. The underground fungi probably take their name from the Osco-Umbrian tufer, which is a variation of the Latin tuber, “truffle.” According to this explanation tufer changed to the Vulgar Latin tufera, which became by metathesis (the transposing of letters) the Old Provençal trufa, which was the basis for the French truffe and the English truffle. So far, so good—black truffles, after all, are more plentiful in Italy’s Umbria region than anywhere in the world. But why the l in truffle? Some authorities believe that it’s there because the English truffle derives directly from the Swiss trufla, not from the French truffe. The Swiss word, they claim, comes from the French truffe, with the l added from another French word, trufle, which means “mockery” or “cheating,” alluding to the hard-to-find fungi’s habit of hiding underground. In any event, there was inevitable confusion be- tween the French truffe and trufle, and it is easy to believe that people accidentally combined the two words, given the truf- fle’s evasive qualities. It’s interesting to note that the eponymous hero of Molière’s famous play Tartuffe was named for the Italian word for truffles. Tartuffe appears to have been drawn from the character of a bawdy French abbot of the period, and Molière is thought to have used tartuffe to symbolize the sensuous satisfaction dis- played by certain religious brethren when contemplating truf- fles. It is said that the name came in a flash to the playwright “on seeing the sudden animation that lighted on the faces of certain monks when they heard that a seller of trufles awaited their orders.” People have always been excited by truffles, so much so that they have gone to the trouble of training many animals with keen senses of smell to sniff them out from under the earth—pigs, dogs, goats, ducks, and even bear cubs among them. No other food has been so eulogized. The “pearl of ban- quets” has been apostrophized by poets like Pope—“Thy truf- fles, Périgord!” Porphyrus called truffles “children of the gods”; they were “daughters of the earth conceived by the sun” to Ci- cero, and “la pomme féerique” (the fairylike apple) to George Sand. “Who says ‘truffle’,” wrote Brillat-Savarin of the reputed aphrodisiac, “pronounces a grand word charged with tooth- some and amorous memories for the skirted sex, and in the bearded sex with memories amorous and toothsome.” Perhaps the truffle’s aphrodisiac reputation can be explained by the old French proverb, “If a man is rich enough to eat truffles, his loves will be plenty.” But aside from this cynical saying, little can be found in any language derogatory of the truffle. About the only such expression is the French slang word truffle, which means a “peasant” or “boor,” in reference to the peasants of the Périgord and elsewhere who dig for truffles. Truffles are found by gatherers throughout America, though they are inferior va- rieties and no dogs or pigs are employed to sniff them out. There have been recent successful efforts to farm truffles in Spain. |
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