A truffle under the tree

I like traditions and rituals -- especially those that involve food, whether simple or elaborate.

Every time I go to a sports event, I take my own peanuts, purchased by mail from a company in Virginia. When I go to Paris, my first breakfast is usually a cup of hot chocolate at Maison du Chocolat. When I come back from anywhere abroad, my first meal is almost always barbecue ribs from Phillips in Leimert Park, often purchased on the way home from the airport and eaten in the car.

Holidays provide especially good opportunities, of course, for the marriage of food and tradition-cum-ritual. Thanksgiving isn’t Thanksgiving without turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce. Come New Year’s Eve, no matter what else Lucy and I do -- stay home alone, go to a restaurant, give a party, go to a party -- we begin our evening standing in our kitchen, toasting each other with Champagne and nibbling on a small amount of caviar. For my birthday in January, our 15-year-old son, Lucas, has taken to making me a mouthwatering batch of dark chocolate nut bark every year.

And Christmas? Well, Christmas is something of a gastronomic orphan for me. There’s no particular dish, no particular flavor, no particular table tradition that I associate with Christmas.

A friend says that for her, Christmas means peppermint -- peppermint candy canes on her tree and in her hot chocolate and in candy dishes and, for all I know, attached to every gift, every wreath and every sprig of mistletoe in her house.

“It reminds me that Christmas is about being a child,” she says.

I have no such totemic or sensory feelings about any Christmas flavor. I don’t think it’s because rampant commercialism has made Christmas my least favorite holiday. And I don’t think it’s because I’m Jewish. I wasn’t raised as a particularly religious Jew -- no Hebrew school, no bar mitzvah, no temple on the High Holidays -- so while we sometimes light the candles on a menorah for Hanukkah, we also buy a Christmas tree, buy (and receive) Christmas presents and have Christmas dinner, usually at my stepdaughter’s house.

But I’ve had Christmas dinner at many homes, including my own, over the years, and while I can clearly (and fondly) remember specific dishes -- especially those made by Lucy, who has celebrated various Christmases by curing her own salmon, poaching her own foie gras, roasting a goose and sauteing wild venison -- there is no special “Christmas flavor” in my palate memory, no equivalent of the Thanksgiving turkey.

Interestingly, I do have a few flavors I associate with some Jewish holidays (latkes with Hanukkah, for example), but none of them -- certainly not Passover’s unholy trinity of haroset, gefilte fish and beef brisket, no matter how well prepared -- are dishes I long for. In fact, I consider it a testament to the love and respect I have for my late parents that after eating all that horrid Passover food when I was forced to attend seders as a child, I didn’t convert to Christianity -- or Buddhism -- as an adult.

Because I’m so fond of holiday traditions, I’ve tried over the years to come up with a drink or a dish that could be “my” Christmas flavor. But Lucy is known around our house as “Our Lady of Variety,” so -- obligated to cook turkey for Thanksgiving -- she always wants to try something different for Christmas. She’s not only done goose and venison but sauteed duck breasts, roast loin of pork, a mustard-coated leg of lamb, a standing rib roast and a tenderloin of veal wrapped in mushrooms and caul fat, among other beasts and birds.

Lucy is a wonderful cook, and I’ve loved all those dishes -- especially the duck. So I’m certainly not complaining. But it’s tough to have a specific tradition if the menu changes every year.

My stepdaughter, at whose house we’ll have Christmas dinner again this year, almost always makes turkey. That’s great. I love turkey. I’m very happy to have it again. And again. But for me, like most folks, “turkey” invokes thoughts of Thanksgiving, not Christmas.

What about some of the side dishes and accompaniments?

Eggnog? It’s fine. But I’d rather drink wine.

Mulled wine? Why ruin good wine -- or drink bad wine, mulled or not?

Apple pie? I can have that anytime.

Croquembouche? I’d rather have apple pie.

Chestnuts? Lucy made a rich, earthy chestnut and porcini soup for Christmas a couple of years ago, but it could be a decade or more before that dish reappears in her holiday repertoire.

Fruitcake? Fruitcake? Gimme a break.

Actually, there is one flavor I would like to associate with Christmas. But I can’t afford it.

White truffles.

Christmas falls right in the middle of white truffle season every year, and if there’s a better, more satisfying, more sensual dish anywhere in the world than risotto with white truffles, I have yet to discover it. Piero Selvaggio, the owner of Valentino, calls it “the Lord’s porridge,” and even though we worship in different religions, I suspect that my God would be as happy as his to accept that tribute.

But I think truffles on almost anything are divine. So it’s no wonder that at this time of year, I often find myself singing, “I’m dreaming of a white ... truffle.”

I can still remember the December evening, more than a dozen years ago, when Lucy and I were having dinner with friends at the beautiful Rex il Ristorante in downtown Los Angeles, and the proprietor, the late Mauro Vincenti, set two whole white truffles and two silver truffle shavers between delicate cloth napkins on our table and invited us to shave and eat as much as we wanted.

“Heavenly decadence” may seem an oxymoronic expression, but I can think of no better way to describe that experience, expensive though it was.

I can also remember spending a week in Piemonte six years ago with Robert Parker, the wine writer, while researching a profile of him for The Times. It was the heart of white truffle season, and everyone was so eager to please Parker that we were given generous portions of white truffles on virtually every dish but dessert, for every lunch and every dinner (and even a few breakfasts) for seven straight days.

By the end of the week, I had actually OD’d on white truffles. When a waiter asked if I wanted truffles or porcini on my last serving of tagliolini, I said the unthinkable: “Porcini.”

I’d like to have truffles at our family’s Christmas dinner. Not on every dish. Just one or two. But chefs tell me that truffles are about $2,000 a pound wholesale this year, which means about $3,000 a pound retail.

Gulp.

I’ve seen single truffles sell for as much as $35,000 at auction, but truffles are fragile, with a very brief shelf life, and I was appalled last week when I heard that Zafferano restaurant in London bought a two-pound truffle at a charity auction for $54,000, then left it on public display for so long that it went bad and had to be thrown out. Word has it the chef buried it in his garden. Were it up to me, I would have buried the chef.

Unfortunately, although white truffles and caviar share at least two characteristics -- they taste great and cost a fortune -- they are sadly dissimilar in one crucial area. While two tiny spoonfuls of caviar on New Year’s Eve satisfy me until next year, I find that I need a critical mass of white truffles for that uniquely pungent, quasi-sexual aroma to have its full and proper impact. And when you talk about that many shavings of truffle, at those prices, for the dozen or so people we’d have for Christmas dinner -- well, if we did that, I’d have to choose between taking out a second mortgage on our house and telling Lucas that he gets no Christmas presents this year. So I’ve never actually had white truffles for Christmas dinner.

Maybe I should just ask Lucy to buy me a white truffle for Christmas. No clothes or wine, no books, CDs or electronic gadgets this year. Just one perfect, nicely wrapped truffle. Even a small truffle would be nice -- just enough for Lucy, Lucas and me. I could open the package on Christmas Eve, and we could have the truffle as part of an intimate family dinner that night.

That would be the start of a great Christmas eating tradition.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous “Matters of Taste” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.