THE VILLAGE OF PALADINI, on Croatia’s Istrian Peninsula, has a population of forty-seven people and ninety-nine truffle dogs. To reach Paladini, you follow an ever-narrowing series of roads through the oak forests of central Istria, the route climbing past a sparkling reservoir to a cluster of stucco homes overlooking the forest.
Radmila Karlic, the fifty-something matriarch of Karlic Tartufi, the multigenerational family business that has agreed to take me truffle hunting, is cleaning truffles outside when I arrive. Three huge amphorae mark the front yard. Ancient olive trees pepper the back.
Radmila greets me, and I immediately put my foot in my mouth. “Beautiful lake,” I say.
A cloud darkens her sweet round face. “The best truffle grounds in all of Istria,” she says, pointing a finger in the direction of the offending reservoir, “are at the bottom of that lake. That was my father’s favorite place to hunt truffles.” On further questioning, she concedes that nobody in central Istria had freshwater until the reservoir was built in the 1970s, but it still bugs her. The best truffling in Istria.
The white truffle for which Istria is famous, Tuber magnatum, grows only in the rich lowland forests of the Mediterranean and eastern Europe. The truffle itself is the fruiting body of a mycorrhizal fungus that lives in symbiosis with trees, nestled against their roots. Filled with spores, it depends on animals to dig it up, eat it, and spread its genes through the forest. Its lure: one of the most extraordinary smells in the natural world.
I’d tried my first white truffle in Italy the previous fall, and was hooked. It didn’t smell delicious in any normal sense of the word. It reminded me of garlicky dinners and childhood forts, mossy stumps, old loves, gasoline, fallen leaves. For days afterward, I couldn’t get it out of my head. It seemed to be tripping around the place in my brain
