Herald Publications - El Segundo, Hawthorne, Lawndale & Inglewood Community Newspapers Since 1911 - (310) 322-1830 - Vol. 4, No. 8 - February 24, 2022
Inside
This Issue
Certified & Licensed
Professionals.......................8
Classifieds............................2
Entertainment......................2
Hawthorne............................3
Lawndale..............................4
Inglewood.............................5
Legals............................. 5,6,7
Pets........................................8
Weekend
Forecast
Friday
Sunny
63˚/45˚
Saturday
Sunny
69˚/47˚
Sunday
Partly
Cloudy
69˚/52˚
Lawndale Tribune
AND lAwNDAle News
Hawthorne Press Tribune
Featuring the Weekly Newspapers of Hawthorne, Inglewood and Lawndale
South Bay Stadium Receives a
Wonderful Gift for All to Enjoy
Inglewood Unified School District is proud to announce the Caroline Coleman Stadium Refurb. In partnership with Nike, NFL, Los Angeles Rams, and Los Angeles Chargers the stadium will be remodeled
giving our students access to state-of-the-art facilities. Photo courtesy Centinela Valley Union High School District.
Cherchez la Truffe!
Article and photos
by Ben & Glinda Shipley
This story starts out on a bitterly cold November
Grignan—Lunch of the century at le Clair de la Plume.
evening in the ancient Marais quarter of
Paris, at our favorite northern Italian restaurant
on the planet, Enoteca. Actually, it probably
starts out a few hours earlier, around the corner
at our favorite absinthe bistro on the planet,
Chez Janou. The latter is renowned for its
tiny horseshoe bar and the expert Provençal
bartenders who can identify and recommend
every one of their 53 styles of absinthe—so
we might not be entirely sure about the bitter
cold that evening, but we vividly recall the
rest of it.
We’ve never come close to a bad meal at
Enoteca—a highly unusual circumstance in the
mom-and-pop style of restaurants we typically
patronize in Paris, where nearly everyone suffers
an occasional off-night, and you just have to
roll with the punches. But that evening, the chef
decided to celebrate truffle season with fresh
truffles in every dish on the menu—from the
carpaccio to the tagliatelle, to the veal chop,
and even the fresh ice cream.
At that point in our lifelong culinary journey,
we knew truffles mainly by reputation. What
we didn’t know was that 95% of the truffle
dishes we’d tasted were a certified rip-off. If
you don’t spot the thin black or white slices on
your plate—if the dish is flavored with “truffle
oil”—then you’re nearly always consuming
cheap olive oil flavored with the synthetic
chemical 2,4-dithiapentane. If that isn’t appetizing
enough, consider that 2,4-dithiapentane
is also known as the dimethyl dithioacetal of
formaldehyde. And if you still haven’t lost
your appetite, 2,4-dithiapentane is the odor that
overwhelms your nostrils in halitosis, smelly
feet, and some forms of flatulence.
Yum!
So that evening, our entirely authentic (and
wildly expensive) dinner at Enoteca, even with
hours of Chez Janou’s absinthe in our bloodstreams,
came as a revelation—one of those
thing comes when your French grocer uses
three keys and a secret password to unlock
the caviar-pâté-truffle cabinet.
Why so expensive? Because human beings
have never quite found a way to standardize the
harvesting of the tuber, a distant relative of the
common mushroom. Truffles grow in random
clumps a few centimeters underground, in the
roots of oak and hazelnut trees, both wild and
cultivated. Theoretically, they can be found
anywhere on earth, but the three dominant
regions are Italian Piedmont for white truffles,
and Périgord (just outside Bordeaux) and upper
Provence for the black, French version. In the
19th century, these regions exported truffles of
both colors, but then World War I killed too
many farmers, World War II destroyed too
many forests, and suddenly, truffle-harvesting
became a rare and disappearing art.
meals in your gastronomic life that divides the
BE from the AE (Before and After Enoteca).
As of that night, we still had a few weeks
of vacation left and nothing planned, so our
mission became clear—to thoroughly research
the subject of truffles and to chase the weird
and elusive tubers all the way to their origins.
There’s a scene in the movie Goodfellas,
where the Paul Sorvino godfather takes forever
to slice a garlic clove with a razor blade into
tiny, translucent sheets (since he’s in prison, he
naturally has the time). No one would blame
you for slicing your truffles that way (in or
out of prison), because the genuine article
comes in at more than $300 per pound. So
one way to guess that you’re buying the real See Travel, page 4