Less aromatic than white truffles, black diamonds have a rougher, nut-like exterior and are usually found in cooked dishes.

BBC: Hunting for the world��s most expensive fungus

The obsession of the novel's characters with degrees of skin colour, or the lack thereof, threatens to force the heroine, a near-white black, to call off her planned marriage to a white jazz musician and instead to encourage the crude advances of a nut-brown man with three daughters.

ECONOMIST: Dorothy West