Caviar, the Incredible, Edible Egg

Assouline & Ting of Philadelphia has commissioned renowned Philadelphia artist Mardi-Jo Cohen to design handcrafted spoons and bowls for serving its Caviar.

Once upon a time in Russia, caviar was humble peasant food, eaten by the bowlful at home. When the Caspian Sea’s sturgeon's eggs became a tsar's pleasure, caviar turned into a marker of great wealth. In the last decade, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its state-run and regulated caviar industry, Russian caviar turned into a mass-marketed delicacy for the middle classes, though it is not clear how long such plenitude can continue.

While much mystique surrounds caviar, eating caviar is actually very simple. “This is one food from nature,” says purveyor Joel Assouline of Caviar Assouline in Philadelphia, PA, “ to which little or nothing should be added. Open the fresh jar, have a spoon ready, and here you go!”

Caviar is the salted roe, or eggs, of several species of sturgeon (of which, by recent DNA identification, there are 27), and when it comes from the waters of the Caspian Sea, it is traditionally divided into three types: beluga, ossetra, and sevruga. A beluga sturgeon can weigh as much as 1,800 pounds and produces the largest of the eggs, currently selling for approximately $60 an ounce. These have a mild but rich, almost buttery taste on the palette. Royal Beluga, at about $70 per ounce, has the same taste hallmarks, but is more powerful and more prized, and not so easily available. Ossetra, at approximately $50, has a smaller egg with a golden cast, and has a complex, sophisticated, nutty taste. Sevruga, the smallest grained, is about $35 per ounce and is darker, saltier, and stronger in taste.

Since late in 2000 when the United States lifted its embargo on goods from Iran, not only pistachio nuts and Persian rugs have been available, but the highly prized Iranian caviar – from beluga that spawn naturally and not via hatcheries – from the Caspian Sea. The Iranian government has far stricter caviar quota and quality control than the Russians, so the supply is quite limited, and the United States is still largely dependent upon Russian caviar coming in. But if Inga Saffron's recent book, Caviar: the Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World's Most Coveted Delicacy, is correct, the problems of Russian overfishing, poaching, barely enforced quotas, loose quality control, and a sorely diminished supply of sturgeon may signal a day when the taste of wild caviar will be no more than a dim memory.

America Went First

This happened once before, surprisingly in America. America at first disdained the sturgeon on which the Indians thrived so happily, and sturgeon was fed only to slaves. But post-Civil War enterprise saw knowledgeable German immigrants turn the roe from Delaware River sturgeon into an American Caviar Rush as short and intense as the California Gold Rush. In the 1880's, a small town in New Jersey was packing 15 trains a day with caviar from the bounty of Delaware River sturgeon, headed first to New York and then to all the European capitals. By the 1890s, however, the catch had fallen from 5 million pounds to 2 million, and soon after, was depleted. At the Academy of Natural Sciences, in Philadelphia, in the ichthyolgy section of the basement vaults, there is one incredibly huge Delaware River sturgeon, stuffed. It's a cautionary tale.

This past decade – the 10 years that shook the caviar world – has seen private upstart Russian companies seize the fishing boats, the sturgeon nets, the hatcheries and the canning factories. So, all the caviar that recently flooded the market and gave America its trendy caviar bars and private parties with triangles of warm toast and crystal bowls of black pearls? Thank the poachers who swarmed the tangled banks of the Volga to pillage in the middle of the night. They made caviar in their kitchens using polluted Volga waters, and sold it to middlemen who sold it to caviar smugglers who stuffed 60-kilogram-sized tins into large suitcases and brought them to New York, where a single suitcase could bring in $20,000. By the time the caviar was repacked into small jars, the roe was worth over $100,000.

Smoke and Mirrors

Caviar aficionados will be dismayed to learn that behind the inexpensive caviar of the 90s were the lies, scams, and bribes, the amateur and professional smugglers, the forged health certificates and faked labels, and the airline attendants, customs officers and inspectors on the wrong side of the law. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents report that smugglers' claims about freshness were hard to believe when the caviar was first frozen rock-solid, then subjected to steppe-like heat, followed by the tundra-like cold of the underbelly of an airplane for 10 hours, and finally the all-day rigors of travel in the back of an Isuzu pick-up.

All photos, courtesy of Caviar Assouline, Philadelphia

Such confusion, plus new customs rulings, led to the demise of several big New York caviar firms, as well as the closing of Dieckmann and Hansen, the oldest caviar house in the world. One big importer, Petrossian, stayed scrupulously clean, as did one small one, Caviar Assouline. Joel Assouline, a Frenchman, came to Philadelphia in 1981 and was first a restaurateur, then a food purveyor specializing in impeccable caviar. The Petrossian family had first come from Armenia to Russia, where they made their living by cultivating silkworms, and then fled to Paris after the Russian Revolution. In 1920, the last two Petrossian brothers were finally able to get out of Russia, but not before making a deal and paying cash for two tons of lightly salted caviar. When the Russian caviar arrived eight months later, snug in its linden barrels, hotelier Cesar Ritz eagerly took a ton for his fashionable Ritz on Place Vendome, and the rest is caviar history, if not caviar myth.

For both Petrossian and Assouline, the critical element in caviar is freshness. Neither supermarket caviar nor gourmet shop shelf caviar can ever be fresh or first grade. To have a shelf life, these caviar products must be pasteurized, which means they are cooked at a high temperature, altering both taste and texture. Fresh caviar is never pasteurized, must be kept airtight and refrigerated, and has a quick expiration date.

Many people do not know this. A man staying at the five-star hotel next to Caviar Assouline came in to say that he and his wife had just finished the last of a suitcase full of caviar which they'd brought back a year earlier from Russia. At the counter, Odile asked if the caviar he'd bought was pasteurized, but the man had no idea. He recounted how he'd simply filled his suitcase with jars and jars of caviar and bribed his way past a Russian customs official. "Take my overcoat, my watch, anything!" She took his Levi jeans and 10 Milky Way bars. Now the man and his wife were having nightly cravings for caviar. "Wait till he tastes the real thing," Odile thought, smiling. Not everyone, however, loves caviar. When Galileo sent a container to his illegitimate daughter in her Florentine convent, she was sorely disappointed that it was not the cheese from Holland that he usually sent, and she wrote that she "threw the suspicious dark jelly away."

Ideally, sturgeon eggs come straight out of the Caspian Sea to a processing facility at the docks. It is here that the roe should be “cured” in a sea salt brine, where the trick – and experience counts – is knowing just how to mix the brine and just how long to leave the eggs in it. All first grade caviar will be marked “malossol,” meaning “little salt,” with a general range between 2% and 6% sea salt. At Caviar Assouline, the product arrives in 2-10 lb. containers, is briefly stored in refrigerated vaults at 26-32 degrees Fahrenheit and then expertly repacked in glass jars and tins ranging from one to 35 ounces. A 35-oz. tin of royal beluga? $2,450!

Not a bad price if the regulatory agencies are accurate in their assessment that there are fewer than 1,800 mature belugas left in the Volga River. Although Iran and Kazakstan have stabilized their sturgeon population, the fish has long since disappeared from the Adriatic, the Po, the Sea of Azoz, the Danube, the Delaware and the Hudson. The Caspian Sea itself is no longer important to Russia; oil is. Currently, sturgeon are farmed in France and California, but it is tricky, and the gene pools may be too small to insure continuing health. It is one thing to use hatcheries to restock the sea and another to try to raise sturgeon juveniles to maturity. To give beautiful eggs, females must be fed, waste must be filtered, water temperatures must be modulated. Should it be well water or pond water? Should hormones be injected to get the eggs to ripen more quickly? Ponder all that as you participate in homage to the simple egg.

American Caviar Makes a Comeback

Joel Assouline is paying close attention to the alternatives. While his personal favorite caviar is Iranian ossetra, he is now carrying a very reasonably priced line of American caviar and roe from river fish in Tennessee, North Dakota, Montana, Kentucky, and Missouri. He has even taught the Mississippi paddlefish fishermen how to process roe, and has brought them good French salt to do the job. For most of United States history, American caviar was poorly processed and packed, but in the last three years, general know-how has made the Tennessee black sturgeon roe worthy of the White House. The eggs of the Mississippi River hackelback are sweet, buttery, and nutty, while those of Montana’s Yellow River paddlefish taste like Russian sevruga. Assouline is the first to bring in a farm-raised ossetra from Uruguay with DNA that matches the DNA of Caspian Sea ossetra.

It’s not enough to acquire a taste for caviar; it must be served properly or it is wasted. In fact, the only good food to serve with caviar is more caviar! Avoid the chopped egg yolk and onion accompaniments you still see at wedding receptions; this habit developed long ago when much caviar was unfit, and the taste of inferior fish eggs, or eggs that had not been properly refrigerated during transport, had to be masked.

Do serve caviar on warm blini with crème fraiche – but never with Grandma’s silver spoon, since the silver will instantly impart its own bitter flavor into the delicate eggs. Gold is good. So is mother-of-pearl, horn, bone, ceramic, wood, stainless steel and even plastic.

It is said that there are only two drinks for every black pearl: champagne from France (brut only) and vodka. While there’s a poetic symmetry to the “pop” of the caviar eggs and the bubbles of the champagne, experts prefer very high quality vodka to refresh the palette between swallows. And for maximal enjoyment, let each individual egg break slowly, slowly against the roof of the mouth and celebrate one of life's tiniest – but most exquisite – pleasures.

Visit Caviar Assouline & Ting's web site