Smoked Fish Pâté with Seaweed and Caviar

“Bought a sturgeon from the Cowhichans,” a prospector wrote at Fort Lang-ley on the Fraser River in 1827, “weight 400 pounds, the guts out.” The guts might have included the shiny black sacks of eggs that, processed, we call caviar and that a prospector might well have thrown out because sturgeon roe was once so plentiful on both coasts that America shipped some 100,000 pounds a year of the stuff to Europe.

Coastal Indians would have known what to do with this or any other fish eggs