tuber

The Latin word tuber meant a swelling, a lump, a knob. It was the same root that gives us 'tuber' for potatoes and similar underground growths. The Romans applied it to the underground fungi we now call truffles — Pliny the Elder wrote about them in his Naturalis Historia around 77 CE, calling them one of the greatest miracles of nature. He was puzzled by a thing that grew without roots, without seeds, seemingly from nothing.

The Latin tuber shifted in Vulgar Latin to tūfer, then into Old French as trufe or truffe by the 1300s. Italian took the same root and produced tartufo. The French and Italian words diverged slightly but remained recognizable cousins. English borrowed 'truffle' from French in the 1590s. The word carried with it the mystery of the thing itself — nobody fully understood how truffles grew until the nineteenth century.

Truffles became synonymous with luxury in French cuisine by the 1700s. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin called them 'the diamond of the kitchen' in 1825. The Périgord black truffle and the Alba white truffle became the two most coveted varieties, commanding prices that rivaled precious metals. Pigs were the traditional truffle hunters — they could smell the fungi underground — but they also ate what they found. Dogs replaced them because dogs could be trained not to eat the merchandise.

The word 'truffle' now also names a chocolate confection that resembles the fungus in shape. The chocolate truffle was invented in the 1890s, probably in France, and the name stuck because the cocoa-dusted ball looked like a small, dark, irregular lump dug from the earth. A Latin word for 'lump' became the name of the world's most expensive fungus, and then also the name of a candy shaped like it.