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

by Inga Saffron

In the tradition of Cod and 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Food, Russia, Food History, Food Writing, Microhistory

288 pages, Paperback

Published October 14, 2003

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tracing the beginnings of the sturgeon's roe eaten by fishermen and others during religious feasts when meat was not allowed to an icon in luxury and wealth. The author covers the journey of how caviar was made through the years, the challenges of transporting barrels of the delicate and easily perishable eggs, and how the demand from the rising middle class resulted in over-fishing and poaching. Sturgeons were over-fished in the Volga, the Caspian, the Delaware and Hudson Rivers and the Elbe before the thoughts of farming them took root.

Caviar has been used by the Communists to bring in much needed cash into the USSR, but upon the collapse of the regime, so too did the careful controls on sturgeon farming and harvesting collapse into one of chaos. Caviar companies had to compete against emerging producers of cheaper forms of caviar, from paddlefish, white sturgeon, salmon and even trout.

From pig feed to the table of kings, this is a fascinating study into the tiny, glistening, black slightly pearls of fish roe.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars

[Eugene Kernes · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful example of an unsustainable income. The history and reasons behind what determines the fate of the fish that produces caviar is extraordinarily well written in this book. The sturgeon which produces most of the caviar is an ancient fish that survived two mass extinction events, has become endanger within roughly three centuries of human fishing. Saffron shows the story of the caviar and the sturgeon from the fish’s life cycle, historic and modern consumers, caviar corporations, poachers, and government.

When caviar became popular in other countries, the sturgeon in many lakes have been fished clean. The sturgeon was meant to feed local populations, not global. Caviar has been on a wild historic ride from peasants having a lot of caviar and feeding caviar to the pigs, to being a delicacy only afforded by the most powerful, to being mass produced for mass consumption in many countries. Although the beginnings of caviar are spotty at best, how many countries learned to make and eat caviar is detailed in the book.

Most sturgeon types spawn in fresh water lakes while live in the sea. The best caviar apparently comes from a mature female sturgeon, but now the sturgeon’s life ends in its juvenile stage. Naturally, they spawn very infrequently and even thought they produce many fish eggs, only a few of those eggs will make a sturgeon. Even fewer will survive to adulthood. The sturgeon can no longer sustain their population and satiate human desire as few sturgeons are able to spawn the next generation.

The few legal dealers of caviar take great pride in being able to sell legally and do their best to stay within the restriction, but poachers have no restrictions. Legal sellers and producers of caviar have a hard time competing with poachers due to the poacher’s lower price, even if the poachers’ quality is much lower. Legal producers of caviar stay within the limit of the amount of sturgeon catches, but the sturgeon population is in decline due to the amount of illegal sturgeon catches which far exceed the quotas and the ability of the sturgeon to reproduce.

A very lucrative caviar trade incentivized a mass number of poachers. The quotas placed on the sturgeon had increased the price further. Many poachers get away with wrong certificates or bribing officials to make genuine certificates. For others, farming sturgeon and harvesting the caviar is the only source of income. Communities which used to farm sturgeon for sustenance, see no other income source, forcing them to believe that the sturgeon declining population is more of a myth.

One of the few resources which communist Russia managed well was caviar. When the communist took over Russia, they noticed that the sturgeon population was in decline, and imposed a ban on open-sea fishing. As they were able to credibly threaten those who broke the ban, there were few poachers. Once the communist regime ended, the new government privatized the fishing industry, creating competition which caused over fishing of the sturgeon. Due to multiple nations having control of parts of the same location where the sturgeon is, a ban on sturgeon fishing is difficult. The international methods have not fared well, but there is some restrain on poachers. A way that poachers have been able to overcome quotas is discarding male sturgeon as they are not the producers of caviar, while not counting the discarded fish in the quota.

Even though the species is on the extinction list, there is hope for the sturgeon for the same reason which caused its rapid decline, caviar. As there is great profit in sturgeon’s caviar, there are ways to sustain the population via farming or using a hatchery. A hatchery helps sturgeon grow and sends them to the sea, while sturgeon being farmed at kept in pools. There are various types of sturgeon and which creates genetic variations which is kept in the hatchery process while only a few types of sturgeon are being farmed. Farming is profitable when there are huge restrictions on sturgeon fishing, while hatcheries rely on commercial fishing for revenue. Due to human desire to have caviar, the sturgeon may be kept from extinction via human intervention but that is not without its costs and risk.

[Greg]

I accidentally insulted Inga last year at Bloomsday in Philadelphia where she was reading a passage from Ulysses. After agreeing that we both like The Magic Mountain, I opined on what I saw as a recent and tiresome trend in nonfiction where the title is a single word and there's a subtitle that says "This, that, and How it Just Might Save the World." On the spot and trying to gin up an example, I came up with a book about canned anchovies, their strange history, and how they just might save the world.

Inga went "Hmm." Before long I realized that I had very nearly recited the title of her book from almost 20 years ago, which was, in fact, sitting on my book shelf to be read shortly. I had thus primed myself to stick my foot in my mouth in front of a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, whom I had not been expecting to meet that day or ever. The only respite I could find from my embarrassment was in watching her retirement well-wishes for Stu Bykofsky at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Because clearly someone who tells a colleague "Good riddance" at his retirement can't fault others for expressing their own opinions.

Anyway, I enjoyed the book. Inga is a better writer than most other writers of non-fiction and one thing that distinguishes this book from the other books that I was complaining about was the presence of the author's perspective, and specifically the author's personal doubts and objections to what the subjects are saying. In so many books the author essentially frames him or herself as the empty-headed learner who can listen to experts and let experts contradict each other, but must not venture their own impressions on these matters.

Not Inga, though. She is very upfront about doubting that certain sources were telling her the truth, or observing that the claims being made didn't seem to reflect reality as she was experiencing it, or that certain subjects seemed cagey for certain unflattering reasons. Reasons that Inga was not too shy to put on the page.

It was a very interesting book and of course depressing.

[N · Rating 3 out of 5]

'I was surprised an endangered species could be so delicious'
A direct quote from Saffron, and part of the reason I've only given this book three stars. I recognize that 18 years have passed since the publishing of this book and the sturgeon's situation may have improved in that time (though I doubt it), but I struggled throughout the book with the author's personal beliefs and intent. This book is a love letter to caviar, and it doesn't shy away from the harm that caviar has caused to an entire species of ancient and fascinating fish, which to some extent I respect, but to another extent I despise.

The book is overall well-researched and the writing is accessible, but it jumps around in time, especially during the second section, on the 1990s. Perhaps that's inevitable, given how complicated of a time that was for the caviar trade, but it did make it difficult at times to keep everything straight in my head.

I'm not a vegetarian, and we all make excuses for ourselves to continue to indulge in things we know are bad (for the environment, for laborers in other countries, for people in our own countries, for our health), but it has been a strange experience to read an entire book with that double-thinking presiding throughout.

[Edward Amato · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a concise introduction to the world of sturgeon and caviar; history, travel, cuisine, ecology, marketing, crime and the future of caviar. A lovely read. I am so glad I ran across this book in one of my neighborhood book exchange stations.

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting read for sure, but I wanted to learn more about the current landscape and farming practices for American caviar, which this barely covers. Some of it is funny, some of it could’ve been edited down, some of it should foster a soprano-style spinoff about the caviar black market.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written and interesting. But every chapter seemed to jump around on the timeline of events which I found annoying.

[Rory McAvinney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really well written and so much research involved in writing this book. I have recommended this book to so many people since!

[Kitty · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a foodie and a marine biologist, this book was fascinating.

[Abe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Way better than Cod, imo

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This showed up in a little free library and after reading Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants and while waiting for The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World to be ready from the library I thought, why not another single subject animal book? Overall interesting. Relatively short, which is good because by the last section I was ready to be done. Caviar! Quite political.

[Peggy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let me start with this:

I don't like caviar, and I think that sturgeon are particularly unattractive fish (there's a reason that so many good Lake Monster stories trace back to this behemoth).

That said, this was a completely fascinating book, part foodie-fetish and part eco-tract.

Whenever I read a book like this, I end up completely bowled over by how much I just don't know/never thought of. Did you know that caviar was once considered poor folks' food? It's true--the upper crust took the flesh of the fish and left the caviar behind as offal, fit only for the lower classes. Did you know that people will pay truly insane prices for a tiny taste of fish eggs? Did you know that sturgeon numbers have dropped to dangerously low levels that may never recover?

All this and more in an interesting and easy read.

[Liv · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book, however, it is very much in my field so I would! It gives an excellent account of the natural history of sturgeons and the history of caviar as a commodity; the involvement of the Russian mafia in the trade, the effects of the trade on the species, efforts to conserve sturgeon in the wild by international NGOs and CITES and the undermining of these efforts in many cases by politicking and discord within/between these organisations, an all too common and sad story still today. Since the book has been published there have been huge strides in captive breeding of sturgeons and non-lethal extraction of the caviar from farmed fish, undoubtedly contributing to the conservation of this species in the wild, along with the greater protection and enforcement. Highly recommend!

[Billy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sad story of human greed and mismanagement. We've basically wiped out most species of sturgeon in the rivers of Europe and North America. The Caspian Sea fishery hung on through the 20th century, but the fall of the Soviet Union has probably doomed the fish here as well. The book is an interesting tale of how caviar came to be a luxury item and how it is caught, made and sold. [DATE FINISHED IS APX.]

[Mia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm a vegetarian un-foodie and the idea of harvesting and eating caviar is nauseating to me, which made it a little hard to get through some sections of this book. The social and political history aspects of the story are fascinating, though--it's always interesting to find out how much backstory there is to foods.

[Karin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting history of caviar and the taste for the delicacy that has devastated sturgeon fisheries in the Caspian and Black Seas in particular and across the world generally. The descriptions of the sturgeon species affected are very eye-opening.

[Malika · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing story of survival (barely) for a culinary delicacy that I've had only a handful of times. Sometimes I couldn't put this book down; other days I was overwhelmed with the detail and history of this sad story. Sturgeon live in a complex and dangerous world. I may never eat caviar again....

[Diana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great read, lots of info, prose style.

[Leandra Cate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh -- I am sorry for the poor sturgeon but can't weep over the loss of caviar.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

interesting, made me hungry

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an examination of the industry related to caviar [fish eggs] as a food. Starts with its discovery and transitions to its production. The author also theorizes about the future of caviar.

[Emily Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once I got into this book, it was really interesting! A little bit hard to get into, but once I got through the first 50 pages I had a hard time putting it down.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

a strangely fascinating story