were you to visualize an ideal existence, this might be it: Awaken a mile from Davy Crockett's birthplace, the sun rising over the Blue Ridge Mountains, handily visible from your back porch. Phone for a rare Lagotto Romagnolo truffle-hunting dog to be brought around in an ever available Lexus SUV. Stroll your backyard hazelnut orchard with the happy hound bounding beside you, him sniffing the soft earth for precious Tuber melanosporum, you gathering them up—hardly stressful, since they conveniently grow only inches beneath the ground. Rinse, put in Ziplocs, add rice to absorb moisture, and establish the price you'll charge, about $600 a pound, sometimes more. Try not to fret about the overhead. After all, we're talking bags and rice.

Of course, you must find somebody to buy your harvest, but that's no problem. "I thought the real hard part was going to be the selling," says Tom Michaels, thought to be the only man in America who earns a living selling black Périgord truffles that he's cultivated himself. "They sell themselves."

His personal life isn't bad, either. Michaels's house, that of a divorced man devoid of domestic skills, looks at best like a college dorm room. "Besides being a slob, I'm not organized," he concedes, when I mention that most everything he owns is teetering in piles. On the occasions that his girlfriend, Vicki Blizzard, drives over from Knoxville, Tennessee, she finds it all just fine. "Tom's house is wonderful. He's got that backyard, that view. So what if it's not as pristine as mine. I'm comfortable there."

That's two treasures, a tolerant woman as well as a ready crop of black truffles, one of the most expensive edibles on earth. Long considered a mainstay of French haute cuisine, Tuber melanosporum, a.k.a. the black Périgord truffle, has not always been rare, but it has always been prized.

Black truffles are identified with the culture of French dining, and for good reason, although they were used much earlier by the Greeks and the Romans. Great thinkers among those ancients believed they were formed by thunderclaps, although Plutarch, the wisest of all, declared them to be mud cooked by lightning. Over the years, they have been eaten to gain strength in battle, to cure gout, and of course, as an aphrodisiac.

Until about now, truffles were not part of Tennessee folklore, and they certainly don't figure into the region's culinary traditions. "Most people around here," Michaels points out, "they want to know if you put gravy on truffles." He doesn't claim that his tastes are more refined than those of his neighbors, isn't trying to put himself or his Ph.D. in plant pathology on a pedestal, but he does enjoy his truffles chopped up and stirred into eggs, which is somewhat highbrow. On the other hand, he also admires them shaved over grits. To win the heart of Blizzard, he prepared truffled cheesy chicken breasts.

The black truffle found in Périgord and Provence, and now Chuckey, Tennessee, has dozens of fungal relatives, some of them used in cooking, a few of them not bad at all, none of them its equal in beauty or bouquet. Once cleaned, the black Périgord truffle glitters. Cut open, the veins resemble mica. (When they are cooked, the marbling disappears.) Although the truffle possesses a pleasant crunch, it is treasured not so much for its taste or appearance but for its aroma, which has been likened to bedsheets after a night of abandon, slatterns who disdain to bathe, all that is dark and alluring about the human body and soul. In the middle of the winter growing season, they can be fruity and floral. Later, they become muskier. Michaels remembers handing out samples at a festival, his truffles incorporated into a mushroom-truffle cappuccino: "When I'd be shaving a truffle that was musky, the women, their eyes would roll back. If it was the fruity kind, it was nice but not as high a level of ecstasy. When I talk to women chefs, they seem to like the earthy ones, too, the real ripe ones. I swear there is a gender thing here."