I am fond of buttered toast, I own.  If it is a weakness, I candidly plead guilty.  My mother—­bless her soul!—­brought me up in the faith of buttered toast.  I had breakfasted upon it all my life.  I could conceive of no breakfast without it.  Hence the shock I felt.  “Not the custom!” Why not, I wondered.  A problem of no easy solution, I can tell you!  It has been haunting me for the last seven-and-twenty years.  If I had a thousand dollars,—­a bold supposition for one of the brotherhood of the pen,—­I would even now found a prize, and adjudge that sum to the best memoir on this question:—­“Why is buttered toast excluded from the caffes of Turin?” It is not from lack of proper materials,—­for heaps of butter and mountains of rolls are to be seen on every side; it is not from lack of taste,—­for the people which has invented the grisini, and delights in the white truffle, shows too keen a sense of what is dainty not to exclude the charge of want of taste.

“Pray, what are the grisini? what is the white truffle?” asks the inquisitive reader.—­The grisini are bread idealized, bread under the form of walking-sticks a third of a little finger in diameter, and from which every the least particle of crumb has been carefully eliminated.  It is light, easy of digestion, cracks without effort under your teeth, and melts in your mouth.  It is savory eaten alone, excellent with your viands, capital sopped in wine.  A good Turinese would rather have no dinner at all than sit down to one without a good-sized bundle of these torrified reeds on his right or left.  Beware of the spurious imitations of this inimitable mixture of flour, which you will light on in some passages in Paris!  They possess nothing of the grisini but the name.

“I have it!” I fancy I hear some imaginative reader exclaim at this place.  “The passion for the grisini accounts most naturally for the want of buttered toast in Turin.  Don’t you see that it is replaced by the grisini?”

A mistake, a profound mistake. Grisini are never served with your coffee or chocolate.  Try again.

The white truffle,—­white, mark you, and not to be confounded with its black, hard, knotty, poor cousin of Perigord,—­well, the white truffle is—­the white truffle.  There are things which admit of no definition.  It would only spoil them.  Define the Sun, if you dare.  “Look at it,” would be your answer to the indiscreet questioner.  And so I say to you,—­Taste it, the white truffle.  Not that you will relish it, on a first or second trial.  No.  It requires a sort of initiation.  Ambrosia, depend upon it, would prove unpalatable, at first, to organs degraded by coarse mortal food.  It has,—­the white truffle, I mean, not the ambrosia, which I have never tasted,—­it has a shadow of a shade of mitigated garlic flavor, which demands time and a certain training of the gustatory apparatus, to be fully appreciated.  Try again, and it will grow upon you,—­again and again, and you will go crazy after the white truffle.  I have seen persons, who had once turned up their noses at it, declare themselves capable of any crime to get at it.  Nature gave it to Piedmont, “e poi ruppe la stampa.”  Gold you may find in different places, and under different latitudes;—­the white truffle is an exclusive growth of Piedmont.