A Mouthful of Black Pearls
Very few single words in the English language are instantly evocative of wealth, privilege, and a taste of bliss all at once. (Phrases don’t count—not even ‘oysters Rockefeller’ or ‘Peel me a grape.’) It is a select gathering, a verbal hall of fame, and one of the oldest established and least likely members is the oily, processed fish egg.
Caviar. You see? The very mention of the word has you mentally rubbing shoulders with the rich and knees with the beautiful as you sample the most consistently popular luxury food in the world. Caviar has been receiving superb reviews for more than 2,000 years. Aristotle wrote about it in the fourth century BC, and writers have been salivating in print every since, from Rabelais and Shakespeare to Evelyn Waugh and every cookery expert who has that redeeming streak of extravagance that saves us from a life filled with meatloaf recipes.
Unlike many ancient titbits—larks’ tongues, flamingo brains, roasted swan, peacock breasts, and dozens of other dishes that have become extinct as a result of changing tastes or changing laws—caviar has survived to be with us still. Not with many of us, it’s true, but then if it were as available and inexpensive as spareribs or hamburger, half the pleasure of eating it would be lost: an order of caviar on a sesame-seed bun, hold the relish, is somehow lacking in cachet and would certainly take away from the delightful, almost guilty feeling of elitism that adds so much to the enjoyment of every slippery spoonful.
A great deal of what is optimistically classified as caviar is, strictly speaking, nothing of the sort. It may be processed fish roe and it may have an agreeable taste, but it will have come from lumpfish, salmon, white fish, cod, or one of several other pregnant members of the fish family. In the United States, as long as the name of the parent fish appears somewhere on the can or jar, the processed roe can be sold as caviar. In France, where matters of the stomach are treated with the utmost gravity, the definition of caviar is as precise and rigorously enforced as the definition of champagne: only the roe of the sturgeon qualifies as caviar.
Fate and man have not been kind to the sturgeon. Until the turn of the century, it was still swimming in the Hudson River and in rivers throughout Europe. Since then, overfishing and pollution have practically wiped it out, and with a few isolated exceptions, the only bodies of water where it is still found in significant numbers are the Caspian and Black Seas and the Gironde River in France. And to add to the sturgeon’s misfortunes, the Caspian Sea is shrinking. (The Russians, who eat more caviar than anyone else, are trying to do something about it, but refilling a sea is a lengthy business.)
Of the surviving sturgeon, the two best known are the beluga and the sevruga—the largest and smallest members of the species and the names to look for when you’re feeling sufficiently prosperous. The beluga can reach a length of fifteen feet and weigh over a thousand pounds, and twenty percent or more of its body weight can be made up of roe. Beluga eggs are the largest and are a long time in the making; it takes twenty years before the female is mature enough to produce them. The sevruga weighs in at about fifty pounds, matures in seven years and produces the smallest eggs.
If it were enough simply to catch the sturgeon and extract the eggs, caviar would be considerably less expensive, but it would taste nothing like it does. Roe, even sturgeon roe, is fairly bland stuff. What transforms it into caviar is the way it is processed, and that takes enough dexterity and knowledge to justify calling it an art.
More than a dozen separate operations have to be carried out within the space of about fifteen minutes: any longer, and the roe will deteriorate beyond the stage at which it can be made into caviar. First, the sturgeon is knocked out—not killed, as this would make the deterioration take place even faster—and then the eggs are removed, sieved, washed and drained to prepare them for the attentions of one of those mythical figures who, like great wine makers, can improve dramatically on nature’s raw materials.
The grader, or taster, or, as he should properly be called, the master of caviar, has literally minutes to make decisions that will determine the taste and the price of the eggs heaped in front of him. He sniffs, he tastes, he looks, he feels with the tips of his fingers. He grades the eggs according to size, colour, firmness, bouquet, and flavour, and finally makes the most important decision of all: how much, or how little, salt is needed to ripen the roe into caviar without overpowering the subtle combination of taste and texture.
The highest-quality eggs receive the minimum amount of salt, less than five percent in relation to the amount of roe, and can be described as malossol caviar. (Malossol means ‘little salt’ in Russian but can mean considerably more than a little in the USA, where, once again, the laws of description are less stringent.) After salting, the eggs are shaken on sieves until dry and packed in cans that are small enough—two kilos, or just over four pounds—to prevent the weight of the eggs on top from bursting those on the bottom. And then the caviar starts its refrigerated journey from the Caspian Sea to the small number of favoured establishments around the world whose clients can afford to pay $5 or more a mouthful.
In fact, when you consider the scarcity of sturgeon, the years it takes for the female to produce her eggs, the enormous skill required for processing and the difficulties of transportation, it is easy to see why caviar is one of the three most expensive edible items in the world (saffron and truffles being the other two). Looked at in terms of dollars and ounces, it should be given the serious consideration of a major investment, the difference being that this will taste better than your holdings in IBM or the Monet hanging in your bedroom.
As with anything natural, delicate, and perishable, it is critically important to find a supplier you can trust, and one who sells enough caviar to take the trouble to store it properly. There are no special offers on caviar and it always pays to buy from the best houses, such as Petrossian in New York or Fortnum’s in London. Providing you look like a genuine purchaser and not someone in search of a quick snack, you might be allowed to taste before you buy. Ironically, the suppliers who are confident enough about their caviar to offer this pleasant service are the ones whose advice you can trust without the free trial.
Buy only as much as you’re going to eat, and once you’ve bought the caviar, don’t go back to the office, drop into a bar, or dawdle through the park to look at the girls. Go straight home and put your caviar in the fridge. In its sealed container, it will keep for about four weeks. Once opened, it will, in theory, keep for a couple of days; in practice, however, there are never any leftovers.
You now have to make a series of choices. They may seem small, but they will make the difference between your caviar being the treat it should be or an expensive disappointment, and at the top of the list is your choice of companion.
Some people can be ruled out at once. Gastronomic philistines who have ketchup with everything are best left to wallow in their vice at a hotdog stand. Your boss and your friendly IRS inspector should be excluded because they will both assume you’re making far too much money. Business contacts will think you’re trying to impress them, and will eat more than their fair share. Relatives don’t deserve it. The choices narrow down to an intimate friend, or the one person in life you love above all others, who is, of course, yourself. Dinner for one when caviar is on the menu is a dinner you will remember.
And what should you drink with it? The tradition is Russian or Polish vodka, the bottle frozen in a block of ice so that the vodka is so cold it stings. But don’t be tempted to experiment with the flavoured vodkas; they will fight with the taste of the caviar and usually win. Personally, I prefer a very dry champagne. There is something nicely symmetrical about not only eating bubbles but drinking them as well.
The preparation and serving of the caviar itself is often absurdly complicated. You will frequently see people piling their plates with ingredients that will either disguise or obliterate the very flavour they have paid for so dearly in the first place. On go the dollops of sour cream, the slivers of anchovy, the chopped capers and onion and hard-boiled eggs, and what are you left with? It might taste good, but it won’t taste of caviar.
The best way to eat caviar is the simplest way: straight. If you’re going to eat it from a plate, chill the plate. If you’re going to eat it from the container, put the can or jar in a bed of crushed ice. Thin toast with unsalted butter, blinis, or a drop or two of lemon juice are optional, but there are no options when it comes to the method of transport that will take the caviar on the last leg of its journey into your mouth. It has to be a spoon.
You will see people—very often the same people who smother their caviar with irrelevancies like chopped onion and egg—using a knife to grind the mixture onto a piece of toast as though they were making a peanut butter sandwich. They are vandals. The whole point of caviar, the reason it is so difficult and expensive to process and ship, is that the eggs must arrive in your mouth unbroken. Only then, as you crush them between your tongue and your palate, do you experience that tiny savoury explosion that all the fuss is about. If the eggs have already been broken by the pressure of a knife, the high point of a mouthful of caviar has taken place on the toast instead of on your tongue. So it has to be a spoon.
Caviar addicts will debate the respective merits of spoons with the passion that is common to many participants in life’s arcane little rituals. Strangely enough, the spoon that all fortunate babies have in their mouths at birth—the silver spoon—is one to avoid, as it can impart a slightly metallic taste. Otherwise, take your pick: gold, ivory, wood, mother-of-pearl, horn or—my favourites—those short plastic spoons you can get in handfuls from the deli. They are easy to manage, they are soft and have no sharp edges that might puncture the eggs; they are functional, hygienic and disposable. They have no after taste, and they are often free. I recommend them.
Your final decision is where and when to spoil yourself, and here you will begin to appreciate one of the less obvious virtues of caviar. It is, in the best sense of the word, a convenience food. You can eat it in bed without having to go through any dangerous contortions with knife and fork. You can eat it in the back of your limousine as you come home from the office (a one-ounce jar, consumed slowly, as it should be, with pauses for drink and contemplation, will last you from Wall Street to Park Avenue). You can eat it sitting on the floor in front of a log fire, or while relaxing in a warm bath. It doesn’t need an elaborate table setting or a thousand-dollar dinner jacket. Caviar does itself justice without any trimmings.
It is a food for good times and bad times, a reward for triumphs and a consolation for disasters. It will taste wonderful on the day you make your first million, and maybe even better as a final defiant gesture before bankruptcy; at the beginning of a love affair, or at the end. There is always an excuse for caviar, and if you can’t immediately think of one, you can eat it simply for reasons of health. There is a rumour that caviar is good for you.
At seventy-four calories an ounce, it would cost you tens of thousands of dollars before you started putting on weight. Caviar is reputed to be an aphrodisiac, a remedy for hangovers and a restorative for overtaxed livers. It contains forty-seven minerals and vitamins, and the female sturgeon’s only mistake in producing an otherwise faultless delicacy is that the sodium count is a little high. But what the hell. Nobody’s perfect.