The Perfect Meal

by John Baxter

“. . . caviar.”

  I grew up with no concept of caviar, except as a symbol of luxury and excess. Before arriving in Europe, I’d not only never tasted it. I hadn’t even seen it. This was hardly surprising, coming from a country where any food not recognizably derived from a sheep, cow, pig, or chicken was regarded as Satan’s work.

  If any had been offered, I might have reacted like Tom Hanks in the film Big. A twelve-year-old boy in the body of a man, he retains his juvenile prejudices against new flavors. At his first taste of caviar, he spits it out in disgust. But, then, Proust didn’t like it, either. Some pleasures are not simply wasted on the young but incomprehensible to them. Can anyone enjoy caviar who does not also relish cunnilingus?

  As puberty invades the body, so do new appetites. Bitter, salt, and spicy no longer repel. Olives, oysters, and anchovies, wine and whiskey, reveal their attractions. The first experience of alcohol is a male rite of passage, since it marks the moment at which you no longer want to spit it out. In theory, the stronger the brew, the more firmly it cements your maturity. Americans favor whiskey, “that bitter liquor that only men drink,” though I tend to Samuel Johnson’s opinion that “claret is the liquor for boys, port for men, but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.” In Australia, we just got beer. In that, one sees one of the many essential differences between my native country and the wider world of drinking.

  Returning (from London) to France not long after I moved there, I ate a quick lunch at the seafood bar in London’s Heathrow airport. A refrigerated cabinet behind the counter was stacked with small, flat cans. I remembered my new wife’s murmured confession.

  “Tell me about the caviar,” I said to the waitress.

  Her manner changed. No longer just a man enjoying a smoked salmon sandwich and a glass of chardonnay, I displayed Aspirations.

  On the counter she placed three cans, as seductively colored as poker chips: sky blue, orange red, and deep oceanic green.

  “Beluga, Osetra, and Sevruga,” she said.

  With the help of pictures in a brochure, she explained the three types: pea-size Beluga, golden Sevruga, and small, gray Osetra.

  “They come in four ounces and twelve ounces.”

  “How much for the four ounces of Sevruga?”

  I’ve forgotten what I paid, but in 1990 Beluga sold for thirty-two dollars an ounce in New York, Osetra was thirteen dollars, and Sevruga, ten dollars, so my four ounces of Sevruga probably cost about forty dollars. At the time, it seemed a lot. The waitress obviously thought so, too, since the caviar came with a warm smile and, more practically, a Styrofoam traveling pack with dry ice inside to keep it cold. You never got that kind of attention with baked beans.

  As a coming-home gift, the little can could not have been more successful.

  “Caviar!” Marie-Dominique hugged me. “It’s so long since I had any!”

  “We can eat it tonight.”

  “Oh, we can’t have it tonight.”

  “Why not? I’m curious to know what it tastes like.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said, placing it into the fridge. “Let’s save it for the weekend.”

  By Saturday, it was already apparent that dinner would be an Event. The table was set with candlesticks, the best Limoges china, linen napkins rather than paper, and a wine cooler. As a final touch, Marie-Dominique had unearthed an ancient spoon from the depths of the china cupboard.

  “It belonged to my great-grandfather.”

  The spoon’s bowl was molded of some beige organic substance.

  “What’s it made of?”

  “Deerhorn. You never serve caviar with metal.”

  That evening, the lights of the dining room were dimmed, the candles lit. The tiny can nestled in ice beside a bowl of crème fraîche and a metal dish with something wrapped in a napkin. I peeked. Fat bite-size pancakes, blinis, warm from the oven. Almost the last thing brought to the table was a bottle of vodka, straight from the freezer and coated so thick in frost that the label was unreadable. A single green stalk floated in the clear spirit: the herb Anthoxanthum nitens, or bison grass.

  Cracking the cap of the vodka, Marie-Dominique filled two tiny glasses—more treasures from her grandparents. The spirit was so close to freezing it poured syrup-thick.

  “Nasdrovia,” she said.

  We downed the vodka at the same instant. It flooded the mouth with a delicious freshness, followed by a burst of alcohol heat as it trickled down the throat.

  Taking a blini, she added a dab of crème fraîche, then scooped some caviar with the horn spoon. So did I. At the same instant, we popped the morsels in our mouths. On palates cleansed by the vodka, the tiny eggs ruptured—multiple explosions of delight.

  Aaaaah! Now I understood.

  This, then, is the secret of caviar. It’s not good because it costs a lot; it costs a lot because it’s good. When Edward Fitzgerald mused in his Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, “I often wonder what the Vintners buy / One half so precious as the Goods they sell,” he articulated a thought all of us share on learning that something that gives us pleasure can be had for mere money. Caviar excited just this reaction. Five dollars a teaspoonful? Is that all? I’d have paid double. Triple.

  I wasn’t alone in experiencing this reaction. News of an embassy reception in New York or Washington will attract a flood of celebrities who attend solely for the caviar. Larry McMurtry describes one such event in his novel Cadillac Jack.

  In three minutes, we were standing next to the velvet ropes, directly in front of the tureen of caviar. I could not get over the avidity of the crowd. Even those who were glassy-eyed from the heat and the crush were trembling with eagerness. Ten seconds later the ropes were removed. It was as if the roof had opened, dropping about five hundred people directly onto a feast. I had no sensation of moving at all, but in an instant Boss and I were at the caviar bowl. I stood directly behind her, functioning like a rear bumper. While people were trying to reach around us, Boss and her peers were eating caviar. One of her peers was Sir Cripps Crisp. “Beastly,” Sir Cripps said, while heaping himself another wedge.

  McMurtry doesn’t exaggerate. Art critic Robert Hughes sneered about “Warhol and the Inter/view crowd at the tub of caviar in the [Iranian] consulate, like pigeons around a birdbath.”

  Caviar isn’t a single product but several. The best is Golden, from the eggs of the Sterlet sturgeon. Once common in Russia and Asia Minor, the Sterlet now survives only on the Caspian coast of Iran. Its caviar almost never reaches the West. When it does, connoisseurs fall on it. In the 1970s, during the rule of the Shah, the certainty of Sterlet at Iranian receptions drew every celebrity in New York or Washington.

  Until the 1910s, the best European and American hotels served only Sterlet. But after World War I, supplies dwindled. Any arriving in the United States usually did so by mistake, included in a shipment of the more common Beluga or Sevruga. In 1915, a one-kilo can fell into the hands of Antoine Dadone, who ran Vendôme Table Delicacies on Madison Avenue. He’d just learned from the Russian consul, Mr. Tretiakoff, that, because of the war, all exports of caviar would cease. Dadone sent a pound of Sterlet to Tretiakoff with his compliments. Shortly after, Tretiakoff advised Dadone that the embargo would not apply to Vendôme, whom he promised to keep supplied from his personal stock, shipped in under diplomatic cover.

  In 1937, another can of Sterlet arrived at Vendôme, in a consignment of Beluga from Astrakhan. Beluga was selling for fifteen dollars a pound; add two zeros for today’s prices. For the Sterlet, Dadone asked a preposterous fifty dollars—two months’ rent on the average house.

  “Who would pay such a sum?” demanded a journalist.

  Dadone shrugged. “Who buys diamonds at Cartier?”

  A British officer, after capturing a Nazi headquarters during World War II, found a refrigerator filled with cans of caviar. Deciding that his men deserved a taste of this luxury, he gave one to the mess sergeant. The man returned almost immediately. “Excuse me, sir,” he sai
d, “but this blackberry jam tastes of fish.”

  Stories like this bolster the fear in some people that they won’t “get” caviar, that it requires a cultivated palate. We say of something too good for the public that it would be offering “caviar to the general.” In fact, an appreciation of caviar is independent of class or character. The first time Louis XV of France tasted it, he spat it out. Yet in the 1980s, tiny snack stalls scattered around Moscow’s Red Square offered only two things: a sugary ice cream and a slice of rye bread topped with a heaped spoonful of caviar. Both cost the same—in those days, about twenty-five cents—and sold equally well. And you would never suspect from her poetry that Sylvia Plath, while working at Mademoiselle magazine in her student days, haunted buffets at press lunches, gorging on caviar. “Under cover of the clinking of water goblets and silverware and bone china,” she wrote in her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, “I paved my plate with chicken slices. Then I covered the chicken slices with caviar thickly as if I were spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread. Then I picked up the chicken slices in my fingers one by one, rolled them so the caviar wouldn’t ooze off and ate them.”

  Marie-Dominique and I were enjoying caviar in the twilight of availability. The female sturgeon can’t be “milked” like the salmon. She must die before her eggs can be extracted, washed, sieved, and packed, sometimes lightly salted, into cans.

  I was haunted by a scrap of film showing Russian fishermen netting a giant sturgeon. Thrashing sluggishly in the muddy water, she looked clumsy and unthreatening, dumbly unaware of the precious few kilos in her belly, for which she would shortly be slaughtered. What if, for every kilo of butter, a cow had to die? Would we enjoy our croissant au beurre or buttered toast quite so much? On the evidence of the sturgeon and caviar, it appears we would relish it all the more.

  In the 1990s, the Soviet Union and Iran both gave belated thought to the dwindling sturgeon population and severely limited caviar sales overseas. In 2005, the United States banned Caspian caviar altogether. From 450 tons a year, Russia’s exports fell to 87 tons in 2007, all from non-Caspian fisheries, and Iran’s to 45 tons from a 1997 peak of 105 tons. Prices in the West soared to £9,000 a kilo—about €15,000.

  We can gauge caviar’s growing rarity from the way it’s packaged. Until the 1890s, it was shipped in wooden casks holding three or four kilos, similar to those used for oysters. As supplies dwindled and prices rose, the packers moved to porcelain jars of about half that volume. In the early twentieth century, these gave way to one-kilo cylindrical cans, with a wide rubber band to keep the unpasteurized contents airtight. Today, although French producers still use these, the trickle of Russian caviar reaching the West does so in smaller batches. “On a grey Brussels morning to the Marché Matinale,” described a 2005 British newspaper report, “clandestine traders sell smuggled, wild caviar from the boots of their cars for the bargain price of €50 to €80 per 100g can.”

  To fill the vacuum, all sorts of products annexed the name. The purée of eggplant known for centuries around the Mediterranean as baba ghanoush was renamed caviar d’aubergine, and a salsa with black beans and black-eyed peas became “Texas caviar.” Tapioca, the starch of the cassava root, usually sold in pearl form, was touted as “vegetable caviar.”

  In supermarkets, jars of red and black fish eggs promised the delights of sturgeon caviar at a fraction of the price. They came from the lumpfish, otherwise known as the sea toad. One look at this morose bottom-feeder was enough to convince anyone that it could never produce anything so subtle as caviar. Skeptics put lumpfish eggs in a strainer and ran cold water over them. The black or red dye sluiced out, and with it all flavor. The remaining eggs, tiny and transparent, tasted of nothing at all.

  A New York restaurant startled everyone by offering caviar with ice cream and chocolate syrup. The “Golden Opulence Sundae” came in a crystal goblet with an 18-carat-gold spoon. The dish included five scoops of ice cream made from the world’s most expensive ingredients, wrapped in sheets of edible gold leaf, and topped with a dish of Grand Passion caviar, a form of what was described as “American Golden dessert caviar,” sweetened and infused with passion fruit, orange, and Armagnac. The Golden Opulence sold for $1,000, which made it, for a while, the world’s most expensive dessert.

  Mixing caviar with fruit sounded like the worst waste since Jermaine Jackson, brother of Michael, while staying in a Swiss hotel, doused a bowl of Beluga with ketchup. However, a little research unmasked American Golden Dessert caviar as something much less precious. It came from the whitefish, a cousin of the salmon, common in the Great Lakes. Retailing at eighteen dollars an ounce, whitefish eggs are fat and pink, like those of the salmon, and share the look, though not the taste, of Sterlet. Once you wash off the mucus-like goo that coats them, they’re as bland as the roe of the sea toad.

  At one time, caviar was as common a component of a great meal as foie gras. Escoffier served it liberally, always Golden Sterlet. What a coup if I could somehow find any kind of caviar for my dinner, however imaginary.

  The week I started my quest to create the perfect banquet, Boris had chosen to hang out at Café au Chai de l’Abbaye, on rue Buci. He was in a booth at the back, and reading, or affecting to read—he took no interest in recent news—a copy of Le Monde. While he was reading, I peered more closely at the headlines:

  PRESIDENT DE GAULLE

  ANNOUNCES REFERENDUM

  795 arrests, and 456 injured in overnight rioting.

  The paper was dated May 24, 1968.

  I glanced around the café. “Did the soixante-huitards meet here?”

  It wasn’t impossible. The Chai has a long political tradition. During the 1930s, it was a favorite with the émigrés who lived in rented rooms along rue Jacob. Many were on the run from informers and assassins sent by Franco, Stalin, or the secret police of half a dozen Balkan monarchies. A big mirror on the rear wall reflects the whole café and the sidewalk outside. If you sit in the rear booth, with your back to the door, you can see everyone in the mirror, but unless you move your head slightly, to show your reflection, you’re invisible. Boris obviously knew this, since he had chosen just this spot in which to sit.

  “I heard this story . . .” I began.

  “I hate stories.”

  Ignoring him, I went on: “A Russian princess in the 1920s is driving through Charente—”

  “Oh, the fisherman and the sturgeon.”

  “Yes. What do you think?”

  “Probably true.”

  “Really? We’re talking about the same one? A Russian princess just happens to be driving across a river in France when a fisherman hooks a sturgeon—?”

  “—and to her horror, he rips out the insides, including the caviar, and throws them away. You doubt it?”

  “Well, it’s a bit coincidental.”

  “The unlikely is almost always true. Nobody has taken the trouble to make it plausible. It’s the obvious you need to worry about. Anyway, I’m told they even kept the princess’s parasol. It’s in the local museum.”

  “But . . . sturgeon in France?”

  “There are sturgeon all over the world, or used to be. I expect the river was the Gironde. Lots of sturgeon there. And Russians settled in that region after the revolution—those that got out with any money. It reminded them of the Black Sea.”

  “And French sturgeon really produced caviar?”

  “Why not? French and Russian cows both make milk. Why shouldn’t French and Russian sturgeon make caviar?”

  “Then why isn’t it sold?”

  “What makes you think it isn’t?”

  “Have you ever tasted it?”

  “Of course. So have you, probably. When French growers first started producing, all the snob restaurateurs turned up their noses. So they routed their product through a cannery in Odessa. Once it had Cyrillic on the lid, the grosses têtes couldn’t get enough.”

  Later that summer, Marie-Dominique and I went in search of French caviar along
the lazy rivers of Charente.

  Even with directions, the fishery took some finding—probably by intention. For more than an hour, we cruised narrow country lanes where two cars could barely pass and the trees arched over the road, a tunnel of green that protected us from the worst of the southern sun. The voice on the GPS unit seldom let up. In two hundred meters, turn left, then right. At the roundabout, take the second exit . . .

  Our route dwindled down to a rutted dirt lane running parallel to a narrow river—the Isle, which flowed eventually into the Dordogne. After a kilometer, it petered out in a potholed dirt parking lot. A big nineteenth-century house filled the space between us and the river. Opposite was a more recent and nondescript two-story brick building. Only a small printed sign on its front door, “No Caviar for Sale,” told us we’d arrived.

  Boris was right. French caviar did exist, but only just. By the time the French realized the commercial potential of sturgeon, the Gironde was the sole river that still had a population. Growers imported Russian sturgeon and bred them with the local fish. Now there were fisheries scattered around southwest France and northern Spain, producing about fifty tons of caviar a year.

  “There’s not a lot going on at the moment,” said the manager as he showed us around the building. “It isn’t the season. They grow through the summer, and we harvest between October and April.”

  Occasionally, women passed us, dressed like lab technicians in white coats and plastic hair caps. They regarded us without warmth. Freeloaders must be an occupational hazard.

  “You’ll want to see them,” said the manager, and led us out into the sun.

  The ponds, more than twenty, each as shallow as a children’s wading pool, filled the space between the road and the river. The bottoms of most were painted blue or white, though a few were black, making it hard to see the sturgeon that swam sinuously, dark-backed and velvety.

  I reached down toward the cool water, then pulled my hand back.

  “They don’t bite,” said the manager. “No teeth. They’re bottom-feeders. Not like salmon. More like sharks. No real skeletons. Their bones are . . .” He made a flexing motion with his hands, as if bending an invisible rubber hose back and forth. Never use words when a gesture will do.