The Perfect Meal (6 page)

At such a time, in the depths of our first passion, Marie-Dominique murmured, “I have a secret.”

Could there be yet more to discover from this sorceress to whom I was so completely in thrall?

“Tell me.”

She wriggled closer. “I will whisper it.”

She brought her mouth close to my ear. “I love . . .”

I held my breath. What erotic revelation hovered on those delicious lips?

“No, I adore . . .”

Yes? Yes?

“. . . 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.

R
eturning (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.

T
his, 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.”

C
aviar 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 said, “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.”

M
arie-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.