It doesn’t take much truffle to make a difference to all sorts of foods: charcuterie; garnish; timbales; soufflés. Escoffier even cooked them in Champagne for some of his more select diners.

For the 2010 festive season, when Isigny Sainte-Mère launched its Camembert with Truffles, regional paper Ouest-France interviewed director general Daniel Delahaye. He remembers truffles being added to Camemberts by the Paris crèmiers for years: “They’d cut the cheese in two and slip in some truffle pieces, so why didn’t we do that?” he told journalists.

After quite a few trial runs, the cooperative developed a 150g Camembert with truffles: buyers in France and Japan were bowled over by the results and “…the orders started rolling in for Christmas,” beamed deputy director general Luc Lesénécal. The cooperative ordered 400 kilos of truffle and made a limited run of 100,000 small Camemberts, retailing at between seven and nine euros. “We repeated last year’s success with truffles, when we a limited run of truffles in butter and Isigny creme fraiche” Luc explained. “You take a simple plate of fresh pasta, put some truffled crème fraîche on them: you’ll be talking about nothing else for a while!”

For now, the production run is short when compared to Isigny Sainte-Mère’s total output of 12 million. “Using truffles builds our image of high quality products,” Daniel Delahaye added. “We have already successfully created a classic combination of Camembert and Calvados, which now sells a million cheeses a year.” So are truffles going to enjoy the spirited success of Calvados? Sud-Ouest seemed to think it was a possibility.