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

Saffron, Inga

 
9780767906234: Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World's Most Coveted Delicacy
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0767906233 ISBN 13: 9780767906234
Verlag: Broadway Books, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

Traces the history of the popular luxury gourmet delicacy, caviar's odyssey from humble peasant food to culinary extravagance, the complex industry it spawned, and the consequences of marketing such a rare commodity.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Covering foreign affairs and domestic culture, Inga Saffron has been a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer for fifteen years and served as the newspaper's Moscow correspondent from 1994 through 1998. Currently the Inquirer's architecture critic, she lives in Philadelphia.

Aus dem Klappentext

In the tradition of Cod and Olives: a fascinating journey into the hidden history, culture, and commerce of caviar.

Once merely a substitute for meat during religious fasts, today caviar is an icon of luxury and wealth. In Caviar, Inga Saffron tells, for the first time, the story of how the virgin eggs of the prehistoric-looking, bottom-feeding sturgeon were transformed from a humble peasant food into a czar's delicacy and ultimately a coveted status symbol for a rising middle class. She explores how the glistening black eggs became the epitome of culinary extravagance, while taking us on a revealing excursion into the murky world of caviar on the banks of the Volga River and Caspian Sea in Russia, the Elbe in Europe, and the Hudson and Delaware Rivers in the United States. At the same time, Saffron describes the complex industry caviar has spawned, illustrating the unfortunate consequences of mass marketing such a rare commodity.

The story of caviar has long been one of conflict, crisis, extravagant claims, and colorful characters, such as the Greek sea captain who first discovered the secret method of transporting the perishable delicacy to Europe, the canny German businessmen who encountered a wealth of untapped sturgeon in American waters, the Russian Communists who created a sophisticated cartel to market caviar to an affluent Western clientele, the dirt-poor poachers who eked out a living from sturgeon in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse and the caviar Mafia that has risen in their wake, and the committed scientists who sacrificed their careers to keep caviar on our tables.
Filled with lore and intrigue, Caviar is a captivating work of culinary, natural, and cultural history.

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Part One -- The Invention of Caviar

1 How to Catch a Sturgeon

The Khazars believe that deep in the inky blackness of the Caspian Sea there is an eyeless fish that, like a clock, marks the only correct time in the universe.
--Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

According to all the usual rules of evolution, the sturgeon should be extinct already.

Sturgeon are in no hurry to reproduce. They take almost as long as a human being to reach sexual maturity. While a single fish may carry millions of eggs in its belly, the odds are that only a single hatchling will survive into adulthood. That lone offspring will then have to risk its life to reproduce. Swimming upriver along the same course its parents took, the young sturgeon will ramble leisurely through narrow channels where even the least enterprising of its human predators can easily pluck it from the water.

It was not always this way. The sturgeon had already been making its way up the earth's rivers for 250 million years when human beings first appeared. Sturgeon are older than the dinosaurs. They were already ancient when such bony fish as the perch, cod, and striped bass began to appear. Yet, even as the earth cooled, dinosaurs veered into extinction, and mammals came to dominate the land, the dogged sturgeon somehow kept plodding along. It remains a big, slow-moving beast, sweetly curious about the goings-on above its head and lumpenly passive when it runs into danger. Scientists call the fish a living fossil because the sturgeon have changed little over the millennia. A sturgeon caught today could fit more or less neatly into a petrified impression left by its Jurassic counterpart.

Today sturgeon live exclusively in the waters of the Northern Hemisphere. Most sturgeon are anadromous, which means they make their homes in the sea and commute to rivers to spawn. They are usually most comfortable someplace between the two, in the brackish deltas and tidal estuaries where salt water and fresh water collide. These mildly saline border zones nourish immense numbers of small creatures such as worms and crayfish, which keep the bottom-feeding sturgeon well fed. The Caspian's fame as the ideal home for sturgeon is due to the fact that it is more of a salty lake than a real sea. The northern portion of the Caspian, where the Volga spills into the sea, is unusually shallow and warm, and contains the highest concentration of sturgeon in the world.

The sturgeon still looks like an animal that might have cavorted with the dinosaurs. Young sturgeon have a puppy-like cuteness, as well as a curious nature, but with age their features grow more jowly, bloated, and monstrous in size. Perhaps as compensation for its passive nature, the sturgeon's grayish tree trunk of a body is sheathed in a protective bony mantle. Five rows of hard plates, or scutes, run along its sides and spine like ranges of tiny mountains, each peak rising to a point sharp enough to inflict a painful wound on less hard-bodied creatures. To complete their menacing image, sturgeon have big sharklike tails that can deliver a powerful blow.

It is the sturgeon's huge sloping head that seems to mark it as a holdover of another time. The head is out of all proportion to the rest of its body. When viewed from the top or sides, the sturgeon's snout may look no more unusual than a shark's head. But the sturgeon has no powerful jaws to open, no dagger teeth with which to rip its food to shreds. The sturgeon's mouth is tucked far under its chin, close to its belly, and there is not a single tooth inside. Skimming over the sea floor, the sturgeon extends its soft blubbery lips like a hose to vacuum up larvae and mollusks embedded in the silt. Four fat whiskers under its chin act as sensors to identify the choice morsels. Without them, this half-blind, ancient creature would hardly know what its toothless mouth was up to.

Despite its antiquated, tubular mouth, the sturgeon is a machine designed for eating. The word sturgeon comes from the German verb stsrer, which means "to root." After nosing around up to its eyeballs in the mud, the sturgeon uses its powerful tail to swoosh the food toward its mouth. It swallows everything whole, even clams in their shells. Sturgeon are opportunistic feeders, happy to stray from their standard diet when something interesting comes along. The bigger sturgeon, such as the beluga, will sometimes go after herring, ducks, even baby seals, while the Pacific Ocean's white sturgeon routinely dines on dead salmon that float downriver after spawning. Sometimes after a frenzy of feeding, the sturgeon will leap joyfully out of the water, like a shimmering phantom from the deep, frightening the life out of fishermen in small boats.

So far, scientists have identified twenty-seven species of sturgeon in the Acipenser order. The number is a subject of dispute because scientists are always arguing over what actually constitutes a distinct sturgeon species. The fish that produces osetra caviar, for instance, is called the Russian sturgeon by the Russians and the Persian sturgeon by the Iranians, but scientists now suspect they are the same species, Acipenser gueldenstaedtii. The gueldenstaedtii also shows up in the Black Sea, off the coasts of Romania and Ukraine. The Romanians call it nisetru, while it's just plain Russian sturgeon to the Ukrainians. The two other sturgeon species famed for their caviar, the beluga and the stellate, the mother of sevruga, also happen to be found in both the Caspian and Black Seas.

Many people think a sturgeon is just a sturgeon, but the twenty-seven varieties vary enormously in appearance and size. The beluga, or Huso huso, can easily weigh a ton, making it the largest freshwater fish on earth. As it ages, it takes on the aerodynamic proportions of a blimp. Its elongated snout becomes rounder and less pronounced. At the opposite extreme is the svelte sterlet, the Acipenser ruthenus, which rarely weighs more than twelve pounds. The sterlet is the only Russian sturgeon that does not venture into the sea. Celebrated for its flesh rather than its eggs, the yard-long fish is still caught in the rivers of Eastern Europe, central Russia, and Siberia.

Because the sturgeon always returns to the same place to spawn, certain species are found only in a single river basin. The Adriatic sturgeon exists only in the Adriatic along the coasts of Italy, Greece, and Albania. The few remaining specimens of the common European sturgeon inhabit the Mediterranean regions of France and Spain. The Atlantic sturgeon is native to the East Coast of the United States. The Pacific white sturgeon, which nearly rivals the beluga in size, spends all its time in the waters of California, Washington, and British Columbia, trying to satisfy its voracious appetite.

The sturgeon's constant eating makes for a big fish. Since sturgeon never really stop growing, the older ones tend to be immense. The beluga, which may live more than a century, will swell in girth until it is as big around as a man's hug and twice as long as a pickup truck. The largest beluga on record weighed 4,570 pounds and stretched twenty-eight feet. Caught in 1736, it was an empty, presumably male. But some thirty years later, Cossacks on the Ural River recorded a female beluga weighing a mere 2,520 pounds. She reportedly yielded an impressive nine hundred pounds of roe, which would have made her worth half a million dollars at today's prices.

North American varieties of sturgeon can also attain similar gargantuan proportions. A Pacific white sturgeon, the Acipenser transmontanus, pulled from the Fraser River near Vancouver in the 1890s tipped the scale at 1,600 pounds, and measured eighteen feet from nose to tail, longer than the dinghy the fishermen used to catch it. The averages are even more impressive than the extremes: in the 1860s, the typical white...

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Verlag
Broadway Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767906233
ISBN 13 
9780767906234
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
270
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Verantwortliche Person
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