Herring roes in season, fried, are fine. There may be many other fish eggs which are palatable, but the top of them all is, of course, caviar, the eggs of the sturgeon. And a well-known fish shop in Dublin quotes the smallest container, jar or tin as priced at £49.95. This month's National Geo- graphic magazine has an article on the Caspian Sea, in which oil is the most important feature; but it also deals with fish, including the sturgeon, the value of which is diminishing, largely, it is said, due to poaching. The fish is landed; the process from then is surgical. The operators wear white boots, smocks, caps, masks; they wash their hands and pull on rubber gloves. The fish is opened, the eggs scooped out and removed to a sink where they are placed on a sieve. The mass is gently massaged and the eggs, minus any other tissue, fall through onto a finer screen. Then, in a smaller, cold room these are weighed and the requisite amount of salt - checked from a chart - is added and gently kneaded into the roe. If you knead too long, the operator is quoted as saying, the eggs turn into pulp. If not long enough, the caviar will be immature. "It comes from experience."
The caviar is put into tins and refrigerated for a day or so and then is picked up and on its way to Europe and Asia. This was from the variety of fish known as chalbash, and would sell for about $630 (about £459). Better caviar comes from the sturgeon species known as beluga. That would sell for over $1,000 per lb (about £727). The National Geographic writer Robert Cullen tells us that during Soviet times fishing limits were strictly enforced. But no longer, and sturgeon stocks have fallen drastically. In the early 1980s the Soviet Union had sturgeon catches of 20,000 to 26,000 tons per year; these days the catch for all Caspian Sea nations is about 3,000 tons. Poachers are largely to blame, also pollution. There are now five countries bordering the Caspian, where there used to be two. The Soviet break-up, we are told, left regional economies in tatters and also spurred the biggest oil rush of the past quarter-century.
A splendid, detailed map goes with this May issue of the magazine. Pictures of the horny-backed sturgeon, biggest being the beluga, which can carry 200 lbs of roe "that a US caviar retailer can sell for $250,000".