They Smell of Death and Sex…

By morel delimma ⋅ November 20, 2006 ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

The writer of the following paragraph - with the story to follow at The Observer - is named Rachel Cooke. The story is at once hilarious and insightful. She claims that her father was a mushroom expert and that he wrote a book on mushrooms. I can only think that her father is M.C. Cooke, the author of the now totally obscure, “Edible and poisonous mushrooms: What to eat and what to avoid,” (one new and used available at Amazon.com for $125US). Enjoy the article - I did!

A few years ago, the chef Giorgio Locatelli took me into a dark store room, and shoved a large white truffle - it was the size of an elephant’s testicle - in my face. ‘See?’ he said, nostrils inflating like two fleshy sails. ‘Eet smell like ze intestine of ze pig on heat, no?’ At the time, I had no idea what the intestine of a pig on heat might smell like; I still don’t. But I knew what he meant. There, among his eggs and his risotto rice, I could smell both sex (raw animal sex, of the kind a person might enjoy in the last few moments before the end of the world) and death (those gag-inducing top notes of rotting vegetation and liverish skin). It was the kind of smell that made you want to be sick. It was the kind of smell, to be frank, that made you want to turn on your heels and run…

Read more at The Observer >>>