Fish roe comes from any fish and varies wildly in taste and texture. Caviar however is the lightly salted roe of sturgeon prepared from a freshly caught female. And it is fast disappearing.

Saffron (what a name for an epicurean!) starts off with a description of how sturgeon are caught today and how caviar is prepared. Because makers can pack it in vacuum sealed tin cans, the roe doesn't need to be salted as heavily as it did two hundred years ago to be turned into caviar. What began as a dish Russian peasants would eat with bread soon became a delicacy. Cossacks, free men who recognized the Tzar but refused to remain serfs, were given exclusive rights to produce and sell caviar in Astrakhan and the surroundings of the Volga delta where the river throws itself into the Caspian sea.

When the communists took over, caviar became a source of hard currency so they promptly took over the industry, guarding it as jealously as De Beers did the diamond trade. It worked up to a point, and poaching could never threaten the sturgeon under communist rule. However authoritarian regimes do not foster debates and when Stalin decided to dam the Volga he destroyed the sturgeon's spawning areas. The canals built to help the sturgeon swim around the dams didn't work and the population began declining.

When the communist system fell apart, free wheeling capitalism was in and caviar was big money. Poaching was rampant involving private homes and shady Russian mafia type characters. (Saffron's description of the illicit international caviar trade was particularly interesting to me because of the last book I reviewed, "Illicit" by Moses Naim, which is all about how world trade is being almost hijacked by crooks and thugs.)

Caviar prices fell, catches increased, but the population was not renewing itself and the Caspian population decline turned into a collapse. The best caviar no longer comes from Russia, but from Iran.

The sturgeon as a group of species is safe, but the species living in the Caspian, such as the Beluga, are fast disappearing. They cannot survive without help. Caviar is a luxury and we can certainly live without it, but luxuries give our life meaning and purpose. Losing caviar would be losing one of those little things that makes life worthwhile.

Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

I know nothing about caviar or sturgeon, but subject matter aside, this is one of the most well-written boutique histories I've ever read (and I've read many of them). Saffron's writing is fantastically engaging. This is no dry academic text; I felt as though I were reading a book of fiction in terms of its readability and sense of adventure. I was constantly laughing or smiling or worrying along with the author. Let's hope Saffron continues to write boutique histories!

I have been served red, black and gray caviar at "Slava", possibly the best restaurant in Moscow...and I STILL didn't like it. (Our Russian friends gladly accepted our serving like it was gold.)

This is a great, little story about caviar and the history of this delicacy and the great fish that supplies it. The sturgeon, of which there are several varieties, is an ancient animal, predating the dinosaurs. It has remained essentially unchanged because there was no reason for evolutionary modifications. It can grow to incredible sizes and the eggs sacs are astounding.

In Russia, though, the sturgeon nears extinction as the race to capture as much caviar as possible continues. In that country, it is an art - the capture, gutting, creating, selling of this product. THe author gives us first-hand experiences as we fish with the natives, suffer their increasingly declining catches and commiserate in their gloom. Then there are history lessons on both biological and cultural paths. The ending is not upbeat.. For the fish to regenerate we must rethink our ideas about what constitutes a delicacy. One problem is the low price of caviar - so low it no longer constitutes a "delicacy". A good and timely book.

I had the mixed fortune to read this book in a Puerto Rican resort, about a million miles away from where caviar is bought or sold, but Saffron's vivid description of this delicacy more than compensated for its physical absence. Caviar is one of those few foods which changes form when put in the mouth - the fish eggs pop like bubbles as soon as they're on the tongue - and in this sense it is not unlike chocolate (which melts in the mouth) for its sensual appeal. Caviar goes back to the Black sea, wherein beluga has been farmed for thousands of years (Herodotus gets quoted along the way). Sadly, the actual stocks of Russian caviar are so badly depleted that they are close to extermination; for decent, ethical fish eggs one has to go to the American farm-raised sturgeon or, as a further compromise, for lesser stuff such as salmon eggs. There are interesting chapters on the cultural emergence of caviar as a delicacy; sadder ones on the sudden eruption of strip-farming in the early 1990s. Best enjoyed with a glass or two of champagne.

A reader does not have to have the infatuation with caviar the author has, nor for that matter even have tasted the roe of various fish to enjoy this book. You must have a serious gastronomic love, or perhaps lust, for a given dish to even begin to match the writer's rapturous relationship with a food that persons either love or find impossible to understand. The extreme reactions to the food are easier to classify once you have read how the food is prepared and how much of what is passed off today as various forms of caviar is fraudulent, or worse, likely to make you ill. The days of sturgeon that weigh as much as the car in your driveway are forever gone. What has replaced these mammoth living fossils are a few hapless fish that have survived destructive fishing and pollution, and finally farm-bred fish that are meticulously cared for in massive tanks.

The irony of caviar's longevity is that is was maintained well in to the 20th Century by the worst practitioner of production, The Former Soviet Union. The same persons that could not match wheat production during the time of the Czars, build a car, or produce the correct number of bicycles managed to keep the cash crop of caviar healthy for decades. This food that is largely thought of as Russian has been on tables for centuries and did not find its home in the Caspian Sea until after the sturgeon had been decimated elsewhere. Germany was once a large source and The United States was the foremost producer internationally until the turn of the 20th century, when after a scant 30 years with ruthless efficiency the fish stocks were destroyed here in the US. Another irony is that as the fish are being relegated to farms they once again are finding their homes in California.

Inga Saffron does a wonderful job of explaining the history of the fish and the world as it existed as sturgeon populations waxed and waned. She shares stories of major caviar producing areas on the shores of New Jersey that are so broken down as to not even qualify as ghost towns, nature having reclaimed those areas that once were internationally known. She also shares the roles of scientists who attempt to develop methods to protect fishing stocks, identify smugglers, and keep these fish that were once a plentiful behemoth from becoming extinct. There are also interesting consequences that result from the work of science. Using the same methods to identify the caviar sold in New York City in the 1990's as they use to track smugglers, science documented that one third of the caviar being sold was not what it claimed to be. New Yorkers had a one in three chance of being defrauded.

The same economic incentive that has lead to the near extinction of the sturgeon is what will keep the species alive. What is a new danger for these fish is that they are no longer the most important economic interest in areas of production as they historically were. Where once they were as valuable as gold they know have lost their place to oil. One scientist suggested embryos of the fish be frozen and reintroduced to the planet in a century after the oil has been exhausted.

Hopefully for the benefit of these remarkable creatures caviar will keep its mystique and its cachet. There are no longer artificial market forces to keep the roe rare just as DeBeers keeps diamonds precious by their monopoly. It costs a fortune to produce sturgeon on farms; hopefully people will continue to buy caviar at prices that persons who don't share the author's passion will ever understand.