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Eat To Live: Home-grown caviar, French-style
By Julia Watson
Whatever foods you associate with France, I'll bet caviar isn't one of them.
Yet Aquitaine, the old fashioned name for the region around Bordeaux that produced that superlative example of the female gender, Queen Eleanor, is a major source.
Sturgeon are thought to have existed long before the dinosaurs. There are 24 species around the world with three related adjuncts, and nearly all of them are endangered.
It's the females of course that produce the valuable eggs, and in the wild beluga, sevruga and oscietra sturgeon take up to 20 years to become mature enough to do it. The period is quicker in the colder waters of Siberia, where a baeri sturgeon can make eggs from the age of 7.
Though some species grow no larger than 90 centimeters (35.4 inches), most reach 2 meters (6.5 feet) and weigh at least 80 kilos (176 pounds), with the beluga from the Caspian Sea that can live up to 100 years of age measuring up to 9 meters (29.5 feet) long and 1,500 kilos (3,307 pounds) in weight.
It's the acipenser baeri of Russia that the French have focused on raising in Southwest France.
Between 1920 and 1950 fishermen in the Gironde estuary near Bordeaux could catch around 5 tons a year of wild Acipenser sturio sturgeon. But stocks dwindled almost into extinction, a state of affairs that would have dismayed Louis XVI's minister Jean Baptiste Colbert who, in the mid-18th century, opened a caviar business of his own on the Gironde.
These days establishments for farmed sturgeon have sprung up across the area, some with temperature-controlled ponds and state-of-the-art technology brought in to coddle these sensitive creatures.
One of them is a massive enterprise with its own hatchery and three rearing farms created from three independent caviar producing companies to form the prime producer of caviar in Europe.
It's an expensive business, which accounts for the price of the finished product. Young sturgeon are moved from the hatchery at four months to the rearing farms. Then follows a seven- to eight-year wait before the first eggs are produced.
Somehow caviar is an unexpected item to find on a French menu. Yet according to André Launay in his book "Caviare and After," the 15th-century writer Rabelais wrote about it, so presumably he must have eaten it. It gets a mention, too, in the 1741 edition of "La Dictionnaire du Commerce."
At La Turpina in Bordeaux, nominated last year by the trade magazine "Restaurant" as one of the world's top 50 restaurants, it has a section to itself. Chef Jean-Pierre Xiradakis serves it up with potatoes or with scrambled eggs.
What a shame it's so expensive. While a one-ounce serving contains about 70 calories -- a lot for two tablespoons of anything -- it is packed with 47 different minerals and vitamins, from calcium, iron and magnesium to vitamins A and E.
If you could afford a pound of caviar, it would set you back a goodly part of your salary -- and 1,188 calories.
A dinner-party favorite of the post-war 50s involved tossing a boiled egg per person, a can of jellied consommé, a teaspoon of curry powder and a good dollop of mayonnaise into a blender, whizzing it all up, pouring it into a soufflé dish and allowing it to set. Then, before serving, a caviar substitute of lumpfish roe for those who couldn't afford the real thing was spooned in a collar around the edge of the bowl and the whole served up with hot toast points. It deserves a revival.
But since there is, in fact, no substitute for the real thing, here is a recipe for Poor Man's Caviar, made with eggplant and so called because its seeds are supposed to look like caviar -- a bit of a stretch. But a good dip.
-- 1 medium eggplant
-- 1 clove garlic, cracked away from the skin
-- squeeze of lemon juice
-- salt and pepper to taste
-- handful of flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped
-- dribble of good olive oil
-- Roast eggplant over an open flame on the stovetop, turning as it blackens.
-- Pop into a paper bag to steam and cool for 20 minutes.
-- Tear off the skin carefully then put into a blender with all the ingredients except the oil.
-- Spoon into a serving dish, dribble the oil over the top and serve with hot strips of pita or some warm crusty bread.
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