Huitlacoche: The Mexican Truffle
Don´t judge a mushroom by its looks!
Digestive ruin or international delicacy? The gringa decides to find out for herself.
At the market on Sunday morning we waited for ten minutes….fifteen minutes…twenty minutes…fighting back the throngs of new arrivals to make sure our orders survived the chaos of the scene, until finally, in an expert gesture, the señora handed us our steaming plates, offered a “buen provecho” and returned to filling the next round of empanadas, memelas, and quesadillas for the crowds pouring in. She kneaded the tortilla dough, flattened it, gently juggled it between her palms, and slapped it on the grill to puff up and brown. People nudged their way forward and shouted out cryptic orders—flor de calabaza, tinga, champurrado, and the most sacred of all: Huitlacoche.
Huitlacoche (pronounced wheat-la-coach-ay) is a black mushroom that grows on corn. Its gothic appearance (like a terrible moldy fungus devouring the innocent yellow corn) earned it the name “filth of the raven” in prehispanic Mexico.
With such a majestic title, who wouldn’t be intrigued? Huitlacoche has earned a reputation as a delicacy in Europe and the United States and can now be found in the most elite of Mexican restaurants (folded into ravioli, pureed into molé); happily, however, it has not lost its place as a staple of the Mexican diet, particularly in the indigenous communities of the South.
Like all delicacies, Huitlacoche walks the fine line between the repulsive and the exquisite. The fateful morning a friend and I arrived at the market, with the purpose of ending my flirtation with the mushroom once and for all, every cell in my digestive system (already ravaged by such innocent snacks as apples and grapes) screamed “Don’t eat the corn fungus!!”….but I closed my eyes and sunk my teeth in.
It was delectable. Soft, smooth, creamy, with a distinct mushroom aroma somewhere between shitake and portobello…it retained all the fascinating, skin-curdling punch it´d had when I´d first spotted it. Finally, I had tried what was often referred to in the international culinary community as “the Mexican truffle.” Standing elbow to elbow with the Sunday morning market-goers, mouth full of mushroom and tortilla, I thought, “how happy that this ugly little veggie, now of international fame, remains the central feature of Sunday breakfast in the market.¨ Perhaps that’s why I feel a little surge of respect now when I see the curdled-looking shrooms crawling over the corn in the market: “the filth of the raven” won the culinary elite but never left the hands of Mexico´s expert señoras.
For more information on Huitlacoche, see this excellent study (in Spanish!) by Mexican scientist Octavio Paredes Lopez: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2001/09/10/cien-paredes.html
