Newspaper Article

Black Gold

Reviewed by Phyllis Richman

2002

Overview

That wasn't always so. [Inga Saffron] illustrates the vicissitudes of taste, pointing out that before the 1860s, European fishermen threw their caviar to the pigs. Even in Russia, caviar was considered a food of denial: It was what one ate on meatless Fridays. In fact, over the centuries caviar ricocheted from trash food to delicacy. As Saffron sums it up, \"Myths are one of the key ingredients of caviar. Stripped of its shroud of legend and tradition, caviar would just be fish eggs.\" Meet Magomed, \"a dark, wiry man, [who] always arrived at my door wearing a tracksuit and looking a little sweaty and unshaven, as if he had spent the night on the train with a traveling soccer team.\" Magomed was Saffron's caviar supplier in the 1990s, a wild moment in sturgeon history when in Moscow the roe was sold everywhere, even by sidewalk peddlers. Magomed brought her caviar in tins the size of cookie jars. He was the one who provided Saffron her first taste of \"the good stuff.\" And encountering her description, the reader might wish to have sprung for that spoonful of beluga after all: \"The salty-buttery richness filled my mouth, nuclear in its intensity. . . . But it was the physical sensation, the way the firm casings of the eggs gave way as they popped against my tongue and cheek that dominated the experience.\"

• Publisher: WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post
• Subject: Books-titles / Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World's Most Coveted Delicacy / Fish / History / Nonfiction / Saffron, Inga / Seafood