Caviar : The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World's Most Coveted Delicacy

Rating:
Summary: Culinary and Historical
Review: A reader does not have to have the infatuation with caviar the author has, nor for that matter even have tasted the roe of various fish to enjoy this book. You must have a serious gastronomic love, or perhaps lust, for a given dish to even begin to match the writer's rapturous relationship with a food that persons either love or find impossible to understand. The extreme reactions to the food are easier to classify once you have read how the food is prepared and how much of what is passed off today as various forms of caviar is fraudulent, or worse, likely to make you ill. The days of sturgeon that weigh as much as the car in your driveway are forever gone. What has replaced these mammoth living fossils are a few hapless fish that have survived destructive fishing and pollution, and finally farm-bred fish that are meticulously cared for in massive tanks.

The irony of caviar's longevity is that is was maintained well in to the 20th Century by the worst practitioner of production, The Former Soviet Union. The same persons that could not match wheat production during the time of the Czars, build a car, or produce the correct number of bicycles managed to keep the cash crop of caviar healthy for decades. This food that is largely thought of as Russian has been on tables for centuries and did not find its home in the Caspian Sea until after the sturgeon had been decimated elsewhere. Germany was once a large source and The United States was the foremost producer internationally until the turn of the 20th century, when after a scant 30 years with ruthless efficiency the fish stocks were destroyed here in the US. Another irony is that as the fish are being relegated to farms they once again are finding their homes in California.

Inga Saffron does a wonderful job of explaining the history of the fish and the world as it existed as sturgeon populations waxed and waned. She shares stories of major caviar producing areas on the shores of New Jersey that are so broken down as to not even qualify as ghost towns, nature having reclaimed those areas that once were internationally known. She also shares the roles of scientists who attempt to develop methods to protect fishing stocks, identify smugglers, and keep these fish that were once a plentiful behemoth from becoming extinct. There are also interesting consequences that result from the work of science. Using the same methods to identify the caviar sold in New York City in the 1990's as they use to track smugglers, science documented that one third of the caviar being sold was not what it claimed to be. New Yorkers had a one in three chance of being defrauded.

The same economic incentive that has lead to the near extinction of the sturgeon is what will keep the species alive. What is a new danger for these fish is that they are no longer the most important economic interest in areas of production as they historically were. Where once they were as valuable as gold they know have lost their place to oil. One scientist suggested embryos of the fish be frozen and reintroduced to the planet in a century after the oil has been exhausted.

Hopefully for the benefit of these remarkable creatures caviar will keep its mystique and its cachet. There are no longer artificial market forces to keep the roe rare just as DeBeers keeps diamonds precious by their monopoly. It costs a fortune to produce sturgeon on farms; hopefully people will continue to buy caviar at prices that persons who don't share the author's passion will ever understand.

Rating:
Summary: WHERE HAVE ALL THE STURGEON GONE, LONG TIME PASSING
Review: From the famous Petrossian company, you can get 1.75 ounces of caviar from the increasingly rare Russian Beluga sturgeon, for $170. If you are bargain hunting, you can get the caviar from the white sturgeon for $88. If you are poverty stricken, Petrossian has condescended to sell salmon roe for about a ninth the cost of the white sturgeon, but salmon roe (which the Petrossian catalogue insists is "sometimes referred to as red caviar") just isn't caviar, and caviar lovers know it. Inga Saffron is a caviar lover, and shows it in _Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World's Most Coveted Delicacy_ (Broadway Books). She is architecture critic for _The Philadelphia Inquirer_, and was its Moscow correspondent from 1994 to 1998, when she was able to do a bit of cloak-and-dagger research into the dark alleys of the caviar trade. Her love is tempered by worry; the surprising history of humans' involvement with sturgeon has not done the sturgeon much good at all, and soon the sturgeon may not be doing any good for connoisseurs, no matter how wealthy.

The sturgeon is one of those organisms that Darwin called "living fossils." Some species have remained the same over the past 250 million years, but the past two hundred years that have given sturgeon real problems. Before that, they were not valued as food, but with the industrial revolution came better preservation and also a wealthy class that liked luxuries. Sturgeon were fished clean from the German Elbe River and the American Delaware River by the early 1900s. The stock in the Caspian sea rebounded some during the years of revolution and war in the first part of the twentieth century, and the Communists were well aware of the potential of caviar to bring cash. They controlled almost all the caviar supply by 1927, and they really controlled it, making sure it stayed a luxury. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the caviar cartel was ended and poaching began. Capitalism has been deadly for the last sturgeon populations. Thousands of poachers who needed the money swarmed onto the Volga, prices tumbled, and so the poachers had to increase their take to keep going.

There is at least one researcher who is experimenting with "milking" the eggs from a live fish without killing it, so that she might bear again. That might be a hope for the sturgeon, as might be the plan to make caviar from the paddlefish, a Mississippi River relative of the sturgeon. White sturgeon are being raised in California, and Siberian sturgeon in France. Sturgeon farming is up against more problems than salmon farming; for one thing, sturgeons take ten years to mature sexually, so investors are looking at ten years of no profit and even no income. An attempt to farm sturgeon on the Volga means that huge quantities of sturgeon manure go downstream, and undoubtedly some of the farm-bred varieties will escape and breed with the wild fish, changing genes and spreading disease. Such attempts at environmental rescue have the potential to cause as many problems as poaching itself. Saffron writes, "In humanity's feeble attempts to protect and preserve the plodding sturgeon, we are reminded that we can't help altering the natural world even when we try our best to rescue it." This is a detailed, colorful history of a unique product, and a sadly less-than-unique report on human greed and ecological improvidence.

Rating:
Summary: WHERE HAVE ALL THE STURGEON GONE, LONG TIME PASSING
Review: From the time that the TV series, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, hit the small screens viewers were invited to indulge themselves in the "caviar dreams" of the wealthy. I suppose it was due in part to this reference that I have always been intrigued by this delicacy of delicacies.

Caviar, the book, is an enjoyable read that leads the reader through the very interesting history of caviar, the food, from its surprisingly humble origins in Russia to its New World presence and industry.

The book also tells the sad plight of the sturgeon, the huge fish from which the finest caviar in the world is harvested, and how this "living fossil" is now in danger of becoming extinct and that in order to sate the lust that the super rich have, not only for the taste of caviar but for its prestige as well.

Interestingly, I found that the sturgeon story has some similarities to the tragedy of the near extinction of the American Bison. Whereas in all too many cases the buffalo was slaughtered only for its tongue, the sturgeon is taken not so much for its meat which is consumed for food, but for its primary and, comparatively, small contribution in its eggs.

A truly fascinating story, read it with a big dish of beluga and crackers or, better yet, save the sturgeon and read it like I did with a coke and some pretzels. I couldn't have afforded even a small dish of beluga anyway.

Rating:
Summary: A Luxuriously Gooey Read
Review: I had the mixed fortune to read this book in a Puerto Rican resort, about a million miles away from where caviar is bought or sold, but Saffron's vivid description of this delicacy more than compensated for its physical absence. Caviar is one of those few foods which changes form when put in the mouth - the fish eggs pop like bubbles as soon as they're on the tongue - and in this sense it is not unlike chocolate (which melts in the mouth) for its sensual appeal. Caviar goes back to the Black sea, wherein beluga has been farmed for thousands of years (Herodotus gets quoted along the way). Sadly, the actual stocks of Russian caviar are so badly depleted that they are close to extermination; for decent, ethical fish eggs one has to go to the American farm-raised sturgeon or, as a further compromise, for lesser stuff such as salmon eggs. There are interesting chapters on the cultural emergence of caviar as a delicacy; sadder ones on the sudden eruption of strip-farming in the early 1990s. Best enjoyed with a glass or two of champagne.

Rating:
Summary: Hate caviar and still gave it five stars
Review: I have been served red, black and gray caviar at "Slava", possibly the best restaurant in Moscow...and I STILL didn't like it. (Our Russian friends gladly accepted our serving like it was gold.)

This is a great, little story about caviar and the history of this delicacy and the great fish that supplies it. The sturgeon, of which there are several varieties, is an ancient animal, predating the dinosaurs. It has remained essentially unchanged because there was no reason for evolutionary modifications. It can grow to incredible sizes and the eggs sacs are astounding.

In Russia, though, the sturgeon nears extinction as the race to capture as much caviar as possible continues. In that country, it is an art - the capture, gutting, creating, selling of this product. THe author gives us first-hand experiences as we fish with the natives, suffer their increasingly declining catches and commiserate in their gloom. Then there are history lessons on both biological and cultural paths. The ending is not upbeat.. For the fish to regenerate we must rethink our ideas about what constitutes a delicacy. One problem is the low price of caviar - so low it no longer constitutes a "delicacy". A good and timely book.