Holy Essence
October 16, 2025 at 10:57PM
Maria Pinto | Longreads | October 21, 2025| 17 minutes (4,200 words)
This is an excerpt from Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless by Maria Pinto, which will be published by the University of North Carolina Press on October 28, 2025.
Is that all there is? I thought, the first time I had a proper sampling of a truffle. It’s mostly earth and funk with nothing at its center. Very expensive, empty, earthy funk. A metric ton of what looked like a lump of coal had just been shaved over tagliatelle I ordered at a hip Italian restaurant in Cambridge. My friend was a cook there and kept sending freebies to my table, so it was kind of bratty of me to notice the expense, but skepticism is the natural state of those of my class, especially when we’re assessing one of the world’s most expensive foods. This “truffle” tasted nothing like the coat-your-mouth, oily essences that had been obligatory on menus in 2010 as a dressing for French fries, and I was disappointed. My naive palate had been expecting that chemical assault to the nth degree.
Talking to truffle fanatic friends later, I realized I had been barking up the wrong Quercus ilex at the Italian restaurant. It’s not the flavor of a truffle that grabs you by the collar and makes you pay a dollar—it’s the aroma. What I should have done at that bonanza of lovingly curated food was bow my head over my plate and take a deep draught, barely waiting for the server to finish shaving smooth, paper-thin wafers of marbled gray and white gleba with the thinnest halo of black, well-melanated peridium onto the dish. Really, one shouldn’t need to put one’s nose up against the plate to experience a truffle as gastronomically intended, but many of the imported specimens found in US restaurants are too many days out of the earth, so the chemical stew that makes them great has long faded in pungency.
Years later, finally wise to the truffle’s particular charms, I made good and fell in lust with these earthy lumps, these fruits “consecrated to Aphrodite,” as the writer Alexandre Dumas said. My friend Tyler, a fine food purveyor and owner of the Mushroom Shop in Somerville, supplied me, at cost, one small black truffle in a plastic jar on a humble paper towel. Because the fruit was regularly exhaling its unique complement of volatile organic compounds with each moist breath, I had to change the paper towel regularly. It was like shucking a gym shirt that had been sweated through, only you don’t want to launder the paper towel. You want to keep it, and sleep with it next to your head on the pillow.
From the moment Tyler brought it to my place and I took that first whiff as he watched, it was over. I could not stop unscrewing the lid to sniff it. I might have sniffed it fifty-seven times in the first hour of our life together. A conservative estimate. That scent! What was that?!
The next morning, ready to reencounter another of the truffle’s aspects, I shaved some of mine onto steaming scrambled eggs. The heat from the protein had the effect of sending Tuber fumes into my face, enough to make me groan, and I took a great, big, greedy bite. And reader, what did I taste? What played on the ol’ buds like it had always known them well?
Nothing, and a bunch of it, at that. It was as if the fruit body’s essence had evaporated upon contact with my tongue, like I’d been had by a practical joker. Or been touched by a spell, daring me to explain how a scent so intense could be so imperceptible in flavor. In just about every other encounter with food, flavor is generally determined by scent. But my partner could taste the absence, too, like an edible riddle. Deus absconditus. Or a lover who will whisper you to the edge but who simply can’t touch you, not where you want them to, anyway.
The truffle is an experience, not a food. You’re buying an idea, a brief essence, a marker of luxury, the notion that someone was out in the woods to hunt this for you with a dog.
An industry insider I spoke with said that this was the open secret among purveyors and their clientele—the truffle is an experience, not a food. You’re buying an idea, a brief essence, a marker of luxury, the notion that someone was out in the woods to hunt this for you with a dog. It’s sort of amazing how much cultural cargo these nuggets of empty, earthy funk can carry.
Dumas, of The Three Musketeers fame, also loved to write about fine cuisine. He called the truffle “the gastronomic holy of holies.” I get it: there’s something sacred about the ability to be stumped in this day and age, to live, for one deep breath, in a question. Truffles trade in the ineffable. Their currency is scent. Unlike other sensory information, “smell is hardwired into the limbic system,” writes Rowan Jacobsen in Truffle Hound, the obsessed author attempting to give a neurological explanation for why it’s so difficult to process the hold truffles have on us: “Scents bypass the higher brain, instantly imprinting on emotion and memory without interpretation.” This is one way to say their aroma can inspire mindless longing, that they practice a form of olfactory hypnosis. Hypnosis has been used to remember. To suspend its subject in a state between presence and memory. Perhaps some of the truffle’s power comes from how, through scent, it conjures the hint of a taste on the tip of the tongue, like a delicious dream whose outlines we only vaguely remember on waking.
Before we became such a complex profusion of cells, we were driven by chemical impulse, which a truffle knows better than anyone. That’s why they fetch the prices they do. Why animals will harm themselves to unearth a fruit. Why truffle hunters are poisoning one another’s dogs. Why suspected truffle thieves in French orchards get shot. Why I brought that truffle everywhere I went for days, even driving with it down the entire Eastern Seaboard, like a talisman, like a security blanket, like a holy, holy tribute to the primordial cells in me that have operated under impulse power toward their chemical quarry since near the beginning of time. Why I asked a stranger from the internet if I could come visit her truffle farm in the Virginia Piedmont.
With her bell-clear voice and a tone about as sober as the one she uses when discussing scientific matters, microscopist-turned-farmer Jasmine Richardson sings Peggy Lee’s ’69 anthem of the unimpressed: “Is That All There Is?” She wonders whether that’s all there is to a fire? All there is to the circus? All there is to love? If so, let’s pop a bottle, basically, and, well, turn up. It’s the third night of my visit to her nascent truffle orchard in south-central Virginia, and we are not totally sober, singing YouTube karaoke despite her crappy internet connection, our beer and wine emptying quickly. It feels good to croon together after a long day of weeding, crouching in her tree plantation and fretting together over the dozens of juvenile trees just outside the front door.
One thing that has impressed Jasmine is the so-called Périgord or black winter truffle—Tuber melanosporum. She has pledged allegiance to T. m.’s mysterious allure, staking her future on it. The self-described former army brat, who lived in the UK, Kyoto, North Carolina, Berlin, and more over the course of her upbringing, always considered physical movement as a measure of progress in life. That is, before she began putting down literal roots in establishing her orchard.
But the gag is that this enterprise is not a sure thing. That’s despite the roughly $50,000 in investment capital that she and her family will have spent—not including the purchase of the foreclosed property where she lives and where operations are based. Orchards of this kind are not guaranteed to take, even with all the resources that must be sunk into the soil to set the stage, the terraforming required in a mid-Atlantic context to gestate alien mycelium from the Mediterranean. The difficulty and capital-intensiveness of the proposition is one reason so many North Americans are surprised when I tell them Jasmine’s orchard exists. In the popular imagination, truffles are associated with night hunts led by pigs or water dogs in France and Italy. It’s hard to imagine their enclosure—not least because if truffles were easy to enclose, they would be much less expensive. But truffle farms have existed in one form or another for a couple hundred years.
These organisms are different. They’re a dream, a hypnotic trigger object, a haunting, an essence without body. Even if you succeed in growing them, can you really tame the holy?
Jasmine is petite, striking, high of cheekbone and broad of smile. I had been fascinated from afar by what I could discern of her from social media, how she might be waiting seven years or more from planting to first fruits. I was taken by the endeavor’s slowness and her nerdiness, how it all appeared to be an experiment, a public bet on herself, a labor of love. I wanted to know how she arrived at the middle of her own story, what she saw through her microscope’s objective, what her days looked like.
When I finally worked up the pluck to ask if I could visit the farm, she said yes but warned there was weeding to be done along with a host of other tasks. Weeding and whatever else might come up seemed to me like a fine trade for getting to witness the scientific bottling of magic. So on my first full day in Virginia, Jasmine, my partner, and I weed by hand under a mellow early fall sun, grasshoppers arcing into the air around us as our hands disturb their perches. Sometimes, our hori-horis connect with golf balls mostly buried in the earth, strange inversions of the hoped-for crop: T. m. skins erupt with tens of small, blunted pyramidal structures, where a golf ball is pitted. Jasmine explains that the former owner of the property used the wide lawn for a driving range.
Shortly before Jasmine was bitten by the mycobug, she was living in California with a long-term partner. Their breakup sent her into a crisis. I can well imagine how a party girl’s instincts might kick in at the moment , how one might easily avoid staying still long enough in one’s own mind to really see the structural damage left by a dislodging. When Jasmine’s father drops by the farm later for a visit , he intimates that the split sent her spinning. What drew her back from the brink was the prospect of the grand Tuber melanosporum experiment, along with one of the many varieties of psychedelic-assisted clinical therapy. I’m reminded of my own split and how I took to the woods on small doses of psilocybin. Jasmine tells me she listens to “Is That All There Is?” to prepare for the administration of her treatments.
Before I learned of Jasmine’s ambition, I was uninterested in fungal cultivation. For me the search for mushrooms had always been about following my nose—the pursuit of surprise and novelty. A tolerance for uncertainty and the ability to modulate one’s expectations were flexibilities I felt I needed to learn, and poking around in the duff looking for food can supply both in droves. As in: Well, we haven’t found matsutake but we did get to watch a snapping turtle eat a frog and we collected wintergreen to make a minty infusion, so the outing was a success. This feels especially useful in a place and time when, for a fee, one can get anything delivered to their door in a matter of hours. Like some landed aristocrat of old. But the T. m. orchard also has its flirtation with the unknown, and risk, and uncertainty. Plus, these organisms are different. They’re a dream, a hypnotic trigger object, a haunting, an essence without body. Even if you succeed in growing them, can you really tame the holy?
Jasmine keeps some of her perfume collection in the guest room, and that night I test the scent of each one. The result is a muddled miasma I hope will dissipate quickly. When I ask her about the bottles, she says that she’s been collecting fragrances since she was in high school, a hobby she no longer engages in. Of course, she’s now attempting to grow nature’s consummate perfumier, as truffles have mastered the manufacture of aromas that become obsession. In addition to their staggering number of volatile organic compounds, they also tend the bacteria within their fruiting bodies to make a unique, fermented product many times more complex than the aromas of the finest of fine wines. Fascinatingly, it seems there is a correlation between the truffle “bliss compound” of anandamide and a black truffle’s blackness. In a study from 2015, researchers proposed that the anandamides in a truffle control melanin synthesis in a process that both aids the truffle’s maturation (during which its fertile surface darkens in color) and signals to truffle-hungry mammals that they should seek them out for the fruiting body’s intoxicating effects. Does this mean that the blacker the truffle the sweeter the fruit?
Mushrooms choose from an extensive scent library and trade on combinations that would only occur to the most ingenious alchemists. We smell something because it is sufficiently chemically reactive, it will bond with fat, and its molecules are duly small. Scents deliver striking pungency if several olfactory receptors are tweaked at once in novel or nostalgic ways. Because we have so few words to describe scent, but as humans we can detect 1 trillion odors, to think with smell means sometimes resorting to the language of the synesthesiac. Jasmine describes the truffle’s bouquet as cozy.
One of my canned lines when leading a foray is “mushroom hunting is a sensual experience.” Sometimes this draws titters or smirks—folks aren’t used to linking kingdom fungi with sensory pleasure outside of eating well-prepared mushrooms. But scent, already established as perhaps our most primitive sense, is also one of the most useful tools of mushroom identification we have. Mycetinis scorodonius (vampire’s bane if you’re nasty) smells more like garlic than garlic does. You better really love the scent of maple syrup if you’re going to dry candy cap mushrooms on your dashboard—your car will smell like a pancake breakfast in New Hampshire in April till it retires to the scrapyard. There’s the cucumber rind of dryad’s saddle, the bleachiness of certain powder-veiled amanitas, the anise that shades into fishiness of oyster mushrooms, the cinnamon plus aged cheese scent of matsutake. Some say the green goopy gleba of stinkhorn mushrooms always smells of rotting flesh, but I know I’m not the only freak who sort of likes the way the Phallus ravenelii I left in my pack with my leather jacket that one time had the jacket smelling for several days. There were other, more pleasant scents underlying the “corpse” that made things interesting. Who was it that said there is no exquisite beauty without strangeness in proportion?
After another day of work, I make a giant cast-iron pan of shepherd’s pie, featuring bison and hen-of-the-woods mushrooms I’ve brought down from Boston. Two of the men Jasmine regularly employs to bush hog and do other assorted tasks around the farm are invited for dinner, but only one of them, David , will eat a dish that features fungus. Mason doesn’t eat mushrooms or bison but happily munches on the buttery mashed potatoes that top the dish. When I ask whether he’ll relax his no-mushroom rule to sample the fruits of his and Jasmine’s labor in the future, he smiles coyly.
Later that evening, Mason drops a bombshell. We’re discussing the former resident of the Richardson homestead: how he built the large home, his dream house, complete with putting green; how he lost it all during the 2008 financial crisis; and how he slowly drank himself to death, with the basement bar as a haunted relic. Mason offhandedly mentions local lore that the family had some ties to the KKK. I can’t tell whether this is the first time Jasmine is hearing about this speculation. She makes a joke about having a crest made that will show her stomping on a Klan hood, and I think again about what it would mean for her to succeed in raising truffles in this particular soil.
It’s less than common knowledge that Tuber devotee Alexandre Dumas’s grandmother was an enslaved Black woman, that his father was a famous general. His haters loved to try to level his Blackness against him. Balzac once visited his publisher’s office with big “Bitch Better Have My Money” energy, and the publisher said that his pay had been equivalent to Dumas’s for the same amount of work. Balzac replied, “From the moment you compare me with that Negro I have the honor of wishing you good evening.” Eugène de Mirecourt (who wrote, but whom nobody has ever heard of) said, “Scratch Monsieur Dumas’s hide and you will find the savage . . . a Negro!” I should note here that scratching the outer layer of a black truffle is one way to discern the real deal from “counterfeits”—Tuber melanosporum will have a brown layer just underneath, while the less fragrant Tuber indicum will show black.
But Dumas had the ability to ether his literary competitors and other rude detractors with the twirl of his pen, the blade of his wit. He famously said to one who had derided his ancestry, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, sir, my family starts where yours ends.” The great “quadroon” was a cad and could be a windbag, it seems, but most importantly, he understood the truffle’s allure. He was of the opinion that to “tell the story of the truffle was to tell the history of world civilization.” He also included a recipe for bear paw in his famous Grand dictionnaire de cuisine. Trust me, you need to know all this for reasons.
Jasmine lays flat on her stomach, her chin nearly buried in the earth at the base of a scrawny oak tree. She’s covered in that fine micaceous layer and it’s making her golden. I’m on my hands and knees, on the other side of the oak seedling that was planted about a year ago, trying to dig the way she digs.
“It’s okay, you’re not going to hurt it,” she says, because she sees how shy I am about excavating the lateral roots of the plant. I believe her but am still wary. Each of the more than 200 trees that surround us set her back $27. They are also, of course, living, and relatively new to the whole “being a tree” thing. Plus, I’m clumsy and aware of my impatience to examine the roots—this will be my first time seeing fungal material under the microscope. Whether the oaks and pines are stressed by our radical meddling or not, collecting these roots will give us important information. When we examine them in search of Tuber melanosporum colonization, it will tell Jasmine whether her operation has begun in earnest the five-to-seven-year process of becoming a real, productive truffle farm.
At certain points in history, truffles were poor people’s food. They were more abundant when forests were more abundant, and all a would-be hunter needed was to know what trees they like to grow with and how to retrieve them from the retriever. My own relationship to luxury is typical for one who grew up mostly secure but had a single mother who sometimes went without so we could have. We were raised to appreciate quality, but not expect it. I still enjoy quality, but grapple with knowing that luxury for me means that someone else, down the supply chain, will, under our current system, lack.
More than once during my visit to the farm, and especially when we’re digging and excavating, I think about Wolfiporia, a large black subterranean sclerotium (a fungus’s nutrient store for rough times) and wild crop that was dug up and eaten sometimes by people who had self-emancipated from slavery. Sclerotia from fungi in this genus have been used in Chinese medicine for millennia. For those dispossessed on the so-called North American continent, finding the coconut-like, tuber-like mass would mean digging up an immense store of medicinal sustenance.
Jasmine has created a small patch of the Mediterranean in Virginia. Under her guiding hand and watchful eye, the land, which has so often had to witness atrocity, nightmare, and labor without beauty, is dreaming.
I thought that using a microscope was not for me, until that day with our excavated lateral roots. Whereas in high school, I had little interest in the things we were trying to see more clearly, like blond versus brunette strands of hair or onion skin cells, this would be different. When Jasmine turned the light on under that root tip, she gave me the gift of the mushroom hunt in miniature—a search that had meaning. We were looking for a sort of “hairy” “glove” around the “finger” of a Quercus ilex root. Strangely, I don’t remember who looked first, whether Jasmine did the teacherly thing and made me tell her whether the root held what we were looking for or whether she was too impatient to know herself.
Whichever of us it was, we did not see the handiwork of the holy of holies. My disappointment on Jasmine’s behalf reminded me of what I felt when I first tasted a truffle, expecting the manipulations of that cloying, synthetic oil and getting inert matter. The root we examined instead showed evidence it had been colonized by something undesirable. Despite the brief letdown, Jasmine knew it was still very early days. Later, her Spanish mentor reassured her that things would start to happen in due course.
The next morning, I peep through the blinds in the guest bedroom to watch thick fog lazily burning off the stover as crows forage within it. Black birds rooting around makes me want to root around too, but this isn’t my house and I don’t want to wake anyone with my movements. Plus, I haven’t asked Jasmine where exactly her property ends, which would make just wandering risky. I’m feeling a little inner hecticness—it’s been a minute since I’ve strolled under continuous canopy. Are we far north enough, I wonder, to be in Tuber canaliculatum country? That’s the Appalachian truffle, which grows wild in eastern North America. I learned about it on the morning of The Flavorless Expensive Scrambled Eggs™, vowing that in the next chapter of my life, when I live in a place where I’m able to house a dog companion, I would teach my new friend the scent of this native truffle, which we could maybe find together.
Mycology elder Walt Sturgeon told me that when he transported this obscure truffle, its aroma was so powerful that he couldn’t keep it in his hotel room. I want to be overwhelmed in that way, to be knocked on my ass by the hidden, unexpected fruits of creation, just me and a pup. My partner snores where I left him in bed. There is no separate paradise, I think, though it’s way too early in the morning for all that, just the one that we ignore and destroy chasing after capital. A couple of crows in the spent corn look to be tussling. I wonder if this restlessness is how my grandmother felt on the rare occasions she didn’t make it to church. Like she hadn’t properly informed the Lord that she was grateful that week. I’m grateful in this moment, at my favorite time of day, when it’s still all potential, before the minutes button themselves down and the sun etches sameness into place on the landscape.
I’ve come around on cultivation, and Jasmine is the one who brought me round. Not least because what she’s doing involves more secrets, and a whole lot more intensity, than your average grow. I find it poetic to see her taking up so much space in a speculative future with the fruit of her knowledge. And in many respects, what she has magicked into being with her consummate practicality and scientific know-how has all the impractical beauty of an art. She’s created a small patch of the Mediterranean in Virginia. Under her guiding hand and watchful eye, the land, which has so often had to witness atrocity, nightmare, and labor without beauty, is dreaming. She’s come a long way from the little girl on Okinawa who believed balling up flower petals in your hands turned them into seeds you could plant.
In the time since my visit, Jasmine has found brûlés around some of her trees, which I hope means it won’t be long till the fruits of her labor land on the market. Since that time she has added a new truffle species to the business plan, given talks at major mycological conferences, come to visit me in my new apartment, where she christened the microscope my partner salvaged for me, and begun an apprenticeship with a cousin who has decades of experience working the land. She has fretted about the bear den on her property, alerted her neighbor to the problem, then put out a call on Facebook asking for everyone’s favorite bear recipe. As soon as I can find a translation of the one for bear paw in Dumas’s Dictionnaire, I’ll go looking for that post. Maybe the dish will involve the holy of holies.
Maria Pinto spent her feral childhood in the Jamaican hills and the grassy waters of South Florida. She lives in the Boston area now, where she teaches for the literary arts nonprofit GrubStreet, serves on the board of the Hale land conservancy, and leads mushroom walks independently and for Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. Her words have appeared in Orion, Necessary Fiction, Peripheries, and Arnoldia.
Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/10/16/truffle-farm-fungi-maria-pinto/
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