Caviar Through History

For most of its history, caviar was not a luxury. It was what you ate when you lived beside a river full of sturgeon and needed the protein to keep through winter.

The transformation from that to a product weighed by the gram and sold under a CITES code is one of the strangest arcs in the history of food. It runs through Persian physicians, Byzantine monasteries, Russian imperial monopolies, an American export boom almost nobody remembers, a Parisian restaurant, a geopolitical collapse and, finally, a network of freshwater farms across three continents.

Here is how it happened.

The word, and the medicine

The word most likely reaches us from Persian. Khāvyār is generally read as deriving from khāya, egg, and it entered European languages through Turkish havyar and Italian caviale before settling into French and English in the sixteenth century.

Persian physicians prescribed sturgeon roe as a remedy long before anyone served it for pleasure. It appears in medical texts as a treatment for melancholy and as a restorative for strength, a strikingly good guess given what we now know about its protein density and omega-3 content. In parts of the Caspian littoral it was fed to the ill and the elderly rather than to guests.

Aristotle records sturgeon being carried into Greek banquets to the sound of trumpets in the fourth century BCE, which suggests the fish had prestige long before the roe did. The Romans ate it, garlanded it, and reportedly paid heavily for it, though Roman enthusiasm was directed more at the flesh than the eggs.

The Russian centuries

Sturgeon fishing on the Volga is documented from at least the twelfth century, and by the thirteenth, Russian monasteries were significant producers. Caviar was a permitted food on fast days, which made it religiously as well as economically useful, and monastic salting techniques did a great deal to establish the craft.

The imperial turn came later. Under the Tsars, sturgeon caught in the Volga and the Ural were declared the property of the crown. A dedicated fishery served the imperial household, and the very best roe, the pale Beluga, went to the palace by right rather than by purchase.

It is worth being precise about what this changed. The Tsars did not discover caviar. They restricted it. Scarcity was created by decree, and the association between caviar and power was manufactured in exactly the way such associations usually are.

Ivan the Terrible is credited with formalising the crown monopoly in the sixteenth century. By the eighteenth, "malossol", the light salting that preserves the roe while barely touching its flavour, had become the technique that defined quality, and it still does.

The American interlude

Here is the part of the story most people have never heard.

In the late nineteenth century, the United States was the largest caviar producer in the world. The Delaware River and the Hudson supported enormous Atlantic sturgeon populations, and by the 1880s American roe was being shipped to Europe in volume, some of it returning to American tables relabelled as Russian.

It was so plentiful that saloons in New York and Philadelphia put it out free on the bar, on the same logic as salted peanuts: it makes people thirsty, and thirsty people buy beer.

The boom lasted roughly thirty years. Between 1890 and 1910 the Atlantic sturgeon fishery collapsed almost completely, from a peak of several million pounds of roe annually to effectively nothing. Nobody had considered that a fish taking fifteen years to mature could not replace itself at the rate it was being removed.

The same lesson was available in 1900 and had to be learned again ninety years later.

Petrossian, Paris, and the invention of a luxury

In 1920, two brothers from Armenia, Melkoum and Mouchegh Petrossian, arrived in Paris among the wave of émigrés fleeing the Russian revolution. They had eaten caviar all their lives. France had barely encountered it.

Their innovation was not culinary. It was commercial. They negotiated with the new Soviet government for export rights, and then they persuaded French luxury hospitality that this obscure Russian fish egg belonged on its tables. The Hôtel Ritz took it. So did the great restaurants. Within a decade caviar had been installed in the French luxury canon, alongside foie gras and truffle, and the association with celebration that it still carries was set.

The Soviet state, for its part, discovered that caviar was an excellent source of hard currency, and the export trade became a state enterprise run with considerable discipline. Between the 1930s and the 1980s, Caspian catch was managed under a single authority, quotas were enforced, hatcheries restocked the rivers, and the fishery, while heavily exploited, was broadly sustained.

1991, and the fall

The Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. The Caspian Sea, which had had one manager, suddenly had five: Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Iran.

Enforcement did not survive the transition. Within a few years, poaching on the Volga delta was operating at industrial scale, with estimates suggesting illegal catch outweighed the legal quota by a factor of ten or more. At the same time, the great Soviet dam projects on the Volga and the Ural had already severed the sturgeon's route to its spawning gravels, and the hatchery programmes that had compensated for that loss lost their funding.

The numbers are stark. Wild Caspian sturgeon populations fell by more than ninety percent between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s. Beluga, the slowest to mature and the most valuable, fell hardest.

In 1998, CITES listed all sturgeon species, imposing the universal labelling code that any tin crossing a border still carries. In 2005 the United States banned the import of wild Beluga outright. In 2006 CITES suspended most wild Caspian caviar exports.

The trade that had defined caviar for four centuries ended in eight years.

What replaced it

Farming had begun long before it was needed. French research into sturgeon aquaculture started in the 1920s, and by the 1980s the Gironde was producing farmed roe commercially. When the wild trade closed, that experimental sideline became the entire industry.

Today essentially all legally traded caviar is farmed, in France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Israel, Uruguay, the United States, China and elsewhere. It is patient work: broodstock raised for a decade or more, sex determined by ultrasound at two to three years, maturity assessed by biopsy so the harvest lands in the narrow window where texture and flavour peak.

The industry that nearly extinguished the sturgeon is now, in several countries, the one releasing juveniles back into the Danube, the Volga and the Rhine.

What the history actually tells us

Three things, and they are worth carrying to the table.

The prestige was constructed, and that does not make it false. Caviar became a luxury because a Tsar restricted it and two brothers marketed it. But the reason it survived as a luxury when so many manufactured ones did not is that the product genuinely rewards attention. The story got it into the room. The taste kept it there.

Scarcity used to mean depletion. Now it means time. For most of the twentieth century a rare tin meant a fish that should not have been taken. Today a rare tin means fifteen years of feeding, oxygenating and waiting. That is a fundamental change in what the price represents, and it is the most important thing to have happened to caviar in a century.

The lesson has now been taught twice. The Delaware in 1900 and the Caspian in 2000 are the same story at a ninety-year interval. What is different this time is that the industry responded by building an alternative rather than moving to the next river.

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From the Volga to your table

When you open a tin now, the chain behind it looks nothing like the one behind a tin opened in 1930. No Caspian, no state monopoly, no wild fish. Instead: a pond in Aquitaine or Lombardy or Uruguay, a cohort scanned by ultrasound, a master deciding on the day that this batch is ready, and a code on the lid that will tell you all of it if you ask.

That is a better story than the one it replaced. It took a near-extinction to get here, which is not a comfortable thing to say about a delicacy, but it is the truth of what is in the tin.

Two hundred million years of a fish that outlived the dinosaurs, seven hundred years of people learning how to salt its eggs, and about thirty years of learning how not to run out.

Our collection is entirely farmed and fully traceable. Read our guide to reading a tin, or explore the sturgeon behind each variety.