What gift is good enough for the Queen? A crop of French Perigord black truffles (worth £150-£200 per 100g) is no bad choice – as Prince Philip discovered after 12 years of fruitless attempts to coax the mushroom into growing on the Queen’s Sandringham estate.
Aside from making the Duke of Edinburgh reportedly the first person to cultivate black truffles from English soil, the success also fulfilled a decades-long obsession he had developed with the elusive fungi.
His love affair with these ‘black diamonds’ is said to have begun in the 60s after the Duke was taken on a truffle-hunting excursion in Italy by his uncle, Earl Mountbatten of Burma.
‘We were never allowed to buy fresh truffles at the palace. Always deemed too expensive a luxury,’ former Palace chef Darren McGrady recalled in 2019. The only time Prince Philip enjoyed fresh truffles in the palace, McGrady said, was at Christmas – as part of the annual Harrods gift hamper.
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