Caviar

In paris, there was a great gourmet who had Cartier construct a little gold ball which he wore on the other end of his watch chain. He would go to one of the good restaurants, have his plate heaped with caviar, and then drop the golden sphere from a foot above the plate. If it passed through the caviar without effort, he pronounced it first rate. If the ball got stuck in its passage and did not reach the bottom of the plate, he sent the plate and the black stuff back to the kitchen.

I have never been quite this fussy when eating caviar, though I do not blame the gentleman for performing the ritual. Caviar has always been within my reach, since I was born into the hotel trade and raised therein. It was available in various grades in all the cold-food departments of the many establishments for which I worked.

The best caviar I ever found was in the old Ritz in New York, and to avail myself of some, I and several busboys in the Banquet Department invented a system of thievery which worked very well for a while. The garde manger, as the man in charge of caviar and other delicatessen is called, carefully weighed the cans of caviar, before and after each banquet. We overcame this problem by burying in the bottom of the can some object – usually a silver peppermill – which equaled in weight a large coffee cup of the stuff. The caviar was later enjoyed, in a corner of the magnificent Ritz ballroom, under a darkened crystal chandelier against priceless tapestry, and with some millionaire's leftover wine. Like all stolen things, it tasted wonderful. Those were the best caviar days I can remember.

Caviar is to dining what a sable coat is to a girl in evening dress. In those days of maîtres d'hotel who were properly trained and knew their business, it was a compulsory item on the menu of any consequence. There was no escape. A birthday, a christening, New Year's Christmas, a marriage, an engagement, a dinner of state – every occasion demanded it.

Even today, it is not just snobbism that demands caviar, but, like the rites that go with High Mass, the solemn preparations of crepes suzette, the flaming swords with lamb skewered on them, the serving of caviar makes for drama: the wheeling in of wagons, the blocks of ice in the shapes of swans, bears, turtles. (I have seen caviar served buried in the midriffs of reclining ice nudes bedded in ferns and roses.) All is silent except the gypsies' violins and the popping of champagne corks.

The people who sit at adjoining tables suddenly also must have caviar. The maître d'hotel pushes back his cuffs and, with the smallest spoon in the establishment, carefully digs out a pigeon's-egg-sized portion and places it on your plate, at $7.50.

• • •

As a young man, I had a cozy picture about caviar production. In my mind's eye, I saw the broad mouth of a river, which I comfortably called The Malossol; in it a lot of big Russkies, with beards like in Boris Godounov, were singing boat songs and wading and carefully lifting immense sturgeons out of the water while relieving them gently of their eggs with a soft, sluicy swish and then putting them back again, like milked cows let out to pasture. This tableau was in the style and colors of Chagall, and quite pleasant. I ate my caviar in relaxed, uncomplicated gourmand fashion.

I got straightened out after reading a journal devoted to the facts of life – a sturgeon's life, that is. After the sturgeon are caught, they are clubbed and their bellies slit open to remove the ovarian sac that contains the roe. The ovaries are then gently forced through a sieve of fine threads on a wooden frame to separate the eggs from the sac. The eggs are then processed with varying degrees of salt. The salting is done under directions of a nastavnic, a master taster. There aren't many of these masters around today, and caviar buyers swear that they can tell who prepared the roe just by rolling a sample of the eggs around on their tongues.

This rolling the eggs around the tongue is comparable to the wine-tasting legend, according to which a lover of a certain vintage can tell which barrel the wine (continued on page 100) Caviar (continued from page 42) comes from. I have at one time had the great pleasure of looking on as a blindfolded connoisseur was asked to decide whether the wine in a certain bottle was red or white – and he couldn't tell.

To make caviar, a lady sturgeon is needed, first of all. This fish, known to ichthyologists as genus acipenser, has twenty different species, varying widely in size and weight. The sterlet sturgeon never grows larger than three feet, while the giant beluga can get up to twenty-four feet in length, weigh in at one ton and live to be three hundred years old. They mature in about fourteen years, and when caught, give up to three million-odd eggs.

Sturgeon live out most of their lives at the bottom of the sea, nosing around on the sofa-soft sea floor for the snails, tiny crabs and small fishes on which they must feed because of their toothlessness. In the spring, they go up large rivers to spawn and they sometimes do so later in the year as well for some mysterious reason. Today, almost all caviar comes from sturgeon that manage to survive in the Caspian Sea. The best for caviar are found in the southern, sweet water, the Iranian portion of the sea.

But the Caspian Sea wasn't always the only source of sturgeon. Before 1900 caviar was exported from the United States to Europe, competing favorably with the Russian product. The American caviar industry was centered in the East, but sturgeon were found as far west as the Sacramento River in California, and caviar for export was sold in San Francisco. Almost all of the United States caviar was sent to Europe, since Americans had to little taste for it at that time that caviar sandwiches were given away free in saloons with a glass of nickel beer, as they are given away today on planes, along with free cocktails.

But alas, caviar lovers, I must now sadden your hearts. Photographs taken from on high show that there is doom all around us. From the Caspian Sea to Astrakhan, the center of the Russian caviar industry, the water is evaporating, leaving only immense mud flats. The Volga is being diverted for other purposes; there are huge dams, and no one has bothered about installing fish ladders. In the other rivers of Russia, the royal fish is being killed off by industrial pollution. Like the American buffalo, the sturgeon seems to be headed for the museum, and caviar for near extinction.

I don't know any of my young friends that would cross the street to get it anyway, and when they take a canape of it from a tray at a cocktail party they wear a disgusted look, and ask whether there is a towel handy to wipe their hands on.

Although it is a "health food," maybe it is on the way out with the rococo way of life, with the old things, with kings and queens, monocles and sabres, Lubitsch films and Winterhalter ladies, agreeable afternoon seductions and the good wines of yesterday. So I shall examine it with tristesse – a last look before I step into the frozen food locker and close the door after myself.

• • •

In France once, traveling off the high roads, I came to the city of Auch and met a man there who had the Guide Michelin in his hands, who told me that he followed this guide on his holidays. The way a man follows the races, he visited hotels and restaurants, to check on the quality and to complain if it was not as stated. His name was Michel Brodsky; he was a Russian of advanced years and not the most optimistic of people.

He showed me the book with the red cover, and he said, "You know the editors of this guide on eating, marching with the times, have become much less demanding than they were once; in fact, they now are disposed to great tolerance, so much so, that the mere fact that a restaurant which offer its clientele a washroom that has a seat on its toilet is immediately awarded a star."

In the city of Auch, Monsieur Brodsky pointed out a small hotel especially recommended by the GuideThis place was the target of his critical interest: one of those ancient establishment of beaten exterior, in a side street, solid and sombre, and of cozy warmth when you enter it. It had its good clientele, this old hotel. Soon, Monsieur Brodsky, with pad and pencil, was at the caviar, at the table next to me; he knocked on his glass with his caviar knife and the half-deaf maître d'hotel came running and went through a Marcel Marceau act of agony in listening to the complaint and miming his apologies and concerns. Finally, he offered to take the Blinis that had been served with the caviar back to the kitchen. Monsieur Brodsky, however, said that it was hopeless, for the cook who had turned out these would certainly not win a prize with his next attempt. Monsieur Brodsky said to me, "Look at it: it's a pancake, not a Blini."

Blini is to caviar what ham is to hamand eggs. In Russia, caviar has always been an important part of life. Before the revolution caviar was eaten mostly during the two-week period before Lent, with Blinis that were made of buckwheat mixed with white Flour, sugar, salt and yeast to make a mixture that was left overnight to rise. The batter was then poured into hot cast-iron pans which had been lightly brushed with a feather dipped in grease. The pancakes – the size of a teacup saucer – were brought to the table where everyone's plate held some melted butter. With this, sour cream at room temperature and caviar – either fresh or pressed, sturgeon or salmon, depending on the financial status of the family – was served. In those days, too, the children took red caviar sandwiches to school with them, if they were lucky enough to have parents who could afford to send them to school.

There are few people who know about caviar in America; oh, there is a Romanoff, or an Obolensky who knows, but not many others. In America, caviar is served with an assortment of chopped-up onions, whites of eggs, yellows of eggs – and that is quite all right, if you want to kill the taste of it. I like it plain, with lemon only, and, of course, with those little thin Blinis, which no one knows how to make any more. You have trouble getting them even in the best restaurants in Paris; and the Russians of the old school, who kept up tradition – alas, they are passing away, and with them the old-fashioned Russian restaurants. The young Russians don't care; they all become scientists.

There is one cardinal rule about eating caviar at a restaurant. Always go to places where a lot of it is consumed, for once a can is opened, it is the most perishable of articles and it quickly becomes not only unpalatable, but turns dangerous. Caviar poisioning, while an elegant fashion of dying, is not pleasant.

• • •

The world of caviar eaters is small, and sooner or later you run into a fellow devotee. I met Monsieur Brodsky again in the bar of the good ship S.S. United States. The conversation was of caviar.

"You can eat the price of your passage in caviar on this ship alone. It is free; have some," said Monsieur Brodsky. "They buy eight thousand pounds a year for this ship. They run after you with it; it is the only place where you must say – 'Please, no more caviar.' You can have it at every meal and you get it until the farewell dinner whether you want it or not."

"Caviar?" said the steward in the bar.

"These, of course," said Monsieur Brodsky, "are not the eggs of the sterlet that were reserved for the Czar. These are a grade below, but very good stuff."

Caviar grading is an extremely specialized skill and requires many, many years of practice. The freshness of the fish, its size, the size and shape of the eggs and the fish's spawning time are all factors entering into the indefinable sense of taste that it takes an expert years to acquire.

After the caviar has been graded, it is stored in cans and kept under refrigeration until enough cans have accumulated to make up a shipment. The cans are sealed with a band of rubber which keeps air out and yet permits a little movement of the tops so that the caviar eggs don't get pressed too tightly against the can top and break, releasing the oil inside them.

For shipping purposes, three of the cans are sewn into a cloth sack. Eighteen of these sacks are then put into racks inside huge wooden kegs. The sacks and the kegs are always surrounded with ice, since caviar must be kept at a temperature of between 28° and 32° Fahrenheit.

During the war years, when refrigerated ships weren't available, no caviar came to the U.S. from Russia or Iran. Right after the war ended, an enterprising American importer filled the hold of a liberty ship with ice, loaded it up with caviar kegs packed right on the ice and brought it back to the caviar-starved gourments of America.

The most common types of caviar are those from the beluga sturgeon, which have the largest eggs, and are preferred by Americans; the schipp and osetrina types, with medium-sized eggs from sturgeon that are usually less than half the size of the beluga; and the tiny eggs that come from the sevruga sturgeon, a comparatively small fish that only grows to a length of five feet. Europeans generally like the smaller sizes of caviar. The very special rare green-gold caviar that the Czar, Stalin and the Shah ate came from the bellies of the sterlet,sterlin, and only a handful of other people have ever tasted it.

Within each type of caviar, there are also a number of variations possible. The color of the caviar, for example, may range from light gray to coal black, depending upon how close to the spawning period the fish were caught. The closer to spawning, the more gray the caviar becomes.

I was becoming gray too, for we had had several vodkas and a great deal of the ship's supply of caviar. The steward came, with a new tray.

"Would you care for a little more caviar, sir?" he asked.

"No, thank you."

To change the subject I started to talk about Tolstoi. "A great lover of caviar," said Monsieur Brodsky, so I got up and we walked to the little restaurant that is decorated with blue velvet and crystal chandeliers – and there on the table, in ice, was a can of caviar.

The rare black stuff that is so costly and so very delicious is brought to the United States in quantities of seventy tons a year. When you imagine all the people who can afford it – from the Oscar Award dinners in California, the state dinners for both our allies and enemies at the various embassies, the servings at countless de luxe restaurants all through America, the gourmet dinners offered in the sky by all the airlines and on board the ships that go to sea, and the millions of cocktail parties from La Jolla to Southamption – then seventy tons a year seems little. That it isn't more is due to the fact that most caviar is served with those abominable little teaspoons. Seventy tons a year is indeed but a small mound of black goodies for the richest nation on earth. I am speaking, of course, of the de luxe caviar, malossol, which means "slightly salted." There are lesser grades, which do not come within the calculation of the true caviar lover. They come in miserable little glass pots with metal covers. Year in, year out, in sun and snow, they frame salami and pastrami in the windows of delicatessen shops, together with pickle jars and smoked herrings. This kind is buckshot size, black glue that causes your teeth to stick together and locks your jaws, and is sold in great volume.

What many true caviar lovers call the very best, better even than malossol, is the slightly less expensive pressed caviar. Aristotle Onassis, a true caviar expert, eats this by preference. It is a staple in his diet, and is kept at all restaurants and nightclubs he frequents.

The Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, where Ari has his meals, is one of the last great restaurants. At a dinner given there by a Texan, the menu started with baked potatoes, hollowed out and filled with caviar, and very good.

Christian Dior used to put caviar on the bottom of small dishes and then have an egg cooked over them and serve the whole cold as an hors d'oeuvre.

I have a preference for fresh caviar, and will shamelessly attend a dinner party of awful people to partake of it, if I know the hostess has enough big serving spoons. Madame Vandable, the wife of the owner of Maxim's of Paris and an outspoken woman, once said: "Mon Dieu, Ludwig. You eat the stuff as if it were porridge." She is kind enough to send me a can of it packed in ice on my birthdays.

I met my caviar friend Brodsky again at the Pavilion Restaurant in New York, which Guide Michelin or not, I consider the best French restaurant in the world, better than any on the Continent. Its maniacal proprietor, Monsieur Henri Soulé has a passion for caviar, its service, its treatment, and he commands the best.

"Ah," says Monsieur Soulé, "no one knows what one suffers running a quality restaurant. You know the fish you see here swam yesterday in the Mediterranean. Today it is here. It has come from France to America, by jet through Customs, with a health certificate like you or I. Un poisson français. Alas, it was not always that way. At one time there was no caviar to be had – imagine!"

For years after the Russian revolution, the caviar industry remained at a complete halt. The operation of the grading and processing plants had been in the hands of a few non-Russian companies, the European caviar "houses" which, like the great merchant banking houses, had dynasties. But the revolution ended all that and the non-Russian interests were all expropriated. In 1924, the caviar industry slowly began to function again, under government ownership.

"Have you been in Russia lately?" asked Monsieur Brodsky of Monsieur Soulé. When you ask him something that has nothing to do with food or the serving thereof, he turns deaf and runs away from your table, to cut up some meat on the heated silver service wagon. He was gone, sharpening two knives.

My friend Brodsky fell back into the subject of caviar again. "Today," he said, "the export of Soviet caviar is the responsibility of Prodintorg, the huge Soviet food trust." He then went on to explain the intricacies and operations of the caviar business ...

The foreign caviar houses, which are the wholesalers of the trade, can only get their Russian caviar through Prodintorg. Until 1953, when the Iranians went into business for themselves, persian caviar was also a Soviet monopoly, marketed only under a Russian label, and the Russians acted as does any capitalist monopoly – setting and maintaining prices at the highest level they felt the market could bear. Indeed, the way the Soviets ran the caviar trade bore a close resemblance to the kind of control the South African diamond monopoly still exerts over the world diamond trade. When the Soviet-Iran agreement was still in effect, the Russians even controlled the price and distribution of caviar in Iran itself, and no caviar was available there except that marketed under a Russian label, even though it may have come from the shores of Iran itself.

The problem of price is just as pressing for a Russian or Iranian party-giver as for an American, since unpressed fresh sturgeon caviar is nearly as expensive in the two countries that produce it as in the countries that just eat it up, at $7.50 a spoonful, or at $36 a pound, which is what it sells for in a gourmet shop here. It is understandable why in the one and only fancy food store in Moscow, located in Ulitsa Gorkova, comparatively few people buy fresh sturgeon caviar, since it costs ninety rubles a pound, two hundred times the cost of bread. Red salmon caviar is far less expensive, of course, and comes packed in cellophane or plastic bags. In Iran, too, caviar is very expensive, selling for about $25 per pound in American money. But it isn't the cost alone that keeps Persian consumption of caviar down at a low level. Khaviar has never been as popular a dish there as in the Soviet Union, Europe or in present-day America.

On the other hand, caviar can be found on the menu of almost every Russian restaurant. It's rarely served very elegantly in the Soviet Union and is generally brought to the table in a small round glass dish, set in a silver-plated metal holder. The caviar itself varies greatly in quality, depending on the restaurant and the area of the country, but it is almost always of the sevruga variety, the cheapest type. Obviously, the Soviet reserve their more expensive, best-quality caviar either for export or for the use of high Soviet officials, although the Russian bureaucrats are showing a good deal more austerity about food and drink now than they did a few years ago, when an unlimited amount of caviar and vodka was s.o.p. at all official Soviet parties.

Now, however, the Russians face stiff competition from the Iranian product. The caviar houses in Paris, Hamburg, London and New York have begun to import more and more Persian caviar and less and less from Russia. The entire Iranian industry is nationalized, although there is some bootlegging of caviar in the large cities. The Iranians are exporting more than one hundred and fifty tons a year and rapidly learning the intricacies of the trade.

I said: "So the outlook is bright."

"The outlook!" Brodsky said. "What's an outlook today? On the one hand you have the lakes and rivers being polluted and the fish dying out; on the other hand you have an increase in caviar production. One goes crazy figuring out this world."

I called for a cigar. "We'll think about cigars," said Brodsky. "I suppose you smoke good Havana cigars – and there is another problem, Fidel Castro. How long is that going to go on? Maybe suddenly there will be no more cigars, maybe suddenly there will be no more caviar. Now if one could talk to Khrushchev and say 'Listen – what if you get to the moon, and meanwhile down here all the caviar is drying up and you lose the monopoly? Why don't you divert a few scientists to look after the problems of the sturgeon?'"

Another caviar friend passed our table, Mr. Gilbert Miller, connoisseur of food and wine, and a man who can afford both. He sat down at a table across from ours. He studied the card and asked for caviar.

He said: "This is the place for it in New York, you know."

I got up and started to leave as Brodsky said to Gilbert Miller: "You like caviar?"

"Very much," said Mr. Miller.

"Caviar is my specialty," said Monsieur Brodsky. "Incidentally, have you observed that the two most costly delicacies in the world are black caviar and truffles. My family was in the caviar business before the revolution; we supplied caviar to the Czar, to all the first families in Russia and to the great restaurants. Every Russian knew Michel Brodsky and Son, Fournisseurs to the Imperial Family. Our truck rolled in and out of the Kremlin and to the summer palace and the winter palace. Rasputin ate our caviar for breakfast, lunch and dinner – and so did Chaliapin. I will tell you all about caviar," said Michel Brodsky.