The opera composer Gioachino Rossini is said to have described truffles as the "Mozart of mushrooms". But the much-quoted saying was attributed to the composer, who died in Paris in 1868, by the German entertainment writer Eduard Maria Oettinger.

Oettinger mixed fiction and truth in a Rossini novel in 1845. He also made up a letter in which Rossini allegedly reported to his wife that he had spontaneously created a truffle salad at a dinner at the banker Rothschild's house. Oettinger copied the recipe for these "Truffes du Piemont à la Rossini" from a book on mushrooms published in Paris in 1832. Whether the salad was really invented by Rossini, we do not know.

Rossini's alleged statement that he cried only three times in his life is also famous: He would have cried when his first opera flopped, when a truffled roast turkey fell into the water during a boat trip and when he heard the violinist Paganini play for the first time. No one knows if the composer, known for his wit and his love of food, really said that.