Caviar

If you’ve shopped for caviar and been shocked at prices, you will appreciate the irony that, in the nineteenth century, it was very affordable. And in fact, large quantities of American caviar were exported to Europe! Then recently, we enjoyed decades of importing caviar from the Beluga sturgeon of Russia and Iran. And, just as we mastered the lingo—“beluga,” “osetra,” “sevruga,” “malossol,” and “pressed”—the marketplace changed again. For a while the U.N. banned exporting caviar from wild, over-fished—and now endangered—Beluga sturgeon from the Caspian and Black seas.