Apparently, truffles grow wild in Virginia.
A letter to the editor of The Horticulturist, and Journal of rural art and rural taste, in 1857.
I thought of you, to-day, when I received from the Professor of Chemistry of Georgetown College, a great and valuable vegetable curiosity—the greater, perhaps, in America, in the shape of an enormous Truffle found in Virginia. I showed ito Mr. Mason, Commissioner of Patents, and produced quite a sensation, as they had published in their report for 1854 only an account of the Piedmontese truffles, not dreaming that they existed so close at hand. We may now hope to have Strasburg pies as soon as some American makes the fois gras. My Virginia Truffle weighs one pound eleven ounces, dried, giving double that weight green. It would have sold, in Covent Garden Market, for nine dollars !
One pound 11 ounces is 765 grams.
However, it appears that a completely different fungus, Wolfiporia cocos, was sometimes called "truffle." It was locally called "tuckahoe" or "Indian bread."
>The sclerotium (a hardened mass of underground mycelium) of this fungus has been known for several hundred years as “tuckahoe” or “Indian bread.” The word “tuckahoe” – rendered variously as tockawhoughe, tawkee, or tuckah – has its origin in an Algonquin language and means “it is round.” White settlers of the British colonies called this sizable sclerotium “Indian bread” because some native Americans dug it up and roasted it or ground it into meal...In the final analysis “tuckahoe “ is an Anglicized word of native American origin that refers to the sclerotium of the fungus Wolfiporia cocos, which appears as an oblong underground mass with a hard, scaly brown covering. It grows up to the size of a bowling ball, resembles a coconut, smells faintly of mushroom, and is edible when cooked.
Sounds like it's right up there with "mangoes," which it took me forever to discover is an old regional term for bell peppers/capsicums.
