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Italian Caviar by Peggy Polk
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Saving the Fish that Lays the Golden Eggs
"... the play, I remember, pleas'd not the million, 'twas caviary to the general." Hamlet's speech to the players, Act 2, Scene 2.
To Shakespeare, caviar was a metaphor for something so special it appealed only to the refined tastes of the rich and powerful of the Elizabethan world. Not much has changed. Four-hundred years later, the glistening gray-black roe best eaten on a slice of toast and butter with a squeeze of lemon as its only seasoning is still a taste most of the world cannot afford to acquire. If anything, it has become even more of a delicacy in recent years, available in smaller and smaller quantities.
The most highly valued caviar is the spawn of the sturgeon Acipenseridae. known as the "king of fish." A prehistoric relic, sturgeon is one of the most ancient surviving vertebrates, highly edible and well worth preserving even without the bonus of its roe.
The sturgeon species that produce the best quality caviar were once common to the rivers of Europe and North America, including the Po. No longer. The fish is now so seriously threatened by overfishing, pollution and the effects of political upheavals in Iran and the former Soviet Union on the prime Caspian sturgeon that whether sturgeon survives at all may depend on the advances of aquaculture, led by a pioneering firm in northern Italy.
Scientists in the scientists mastered the difficult operation of hatching sturgeon artifically in the 1980s, using the great white sturgeon Acipenser transmontanus collected in the wild from the Columbia River in the Northwest and California's Sacramento River. The Columbia is second only to the Caspian in its sturgeon population.
More recently, Agroittica Lombarda S.p.A. in Italy, one of Europe's largest aquaculture enterprises, has scored another even more significant breakthrough. It has succeeded not only in breeding Acipenser transmontanus imported from the United States but also in producing caviar in commercial quantities in the estuaries of the Po Valley.
Sturgeon is particularly vulnerable to overfishing because of its slow growth to maturity. The fish may live from 80 to 100 years in the wild, and females can reach weights of 1,000 pounds and more, but they take from 12 to 20 years to begin spawning. Like salmon, sturgeon are anadromous, living in the sea and migrating into rivers to spawn where pollution, dam-building and other industrialization puts them at risk.
When poachers catch and kill young sturgeon, they not only wind up with an inferior quality of caviar, they also decimate future generations. Sturgeon farmers avoid killing the fish that lays the golden eggs by performing a Caesarean operation to strip them of their roe and then returning them to the waters to spawn again.
Among caviars, it is the large and glistening grey beluga eggs, produced by the Huso sturgeon that is prized -- and priced -- above all others. But there is another source of perfectly respectable, if less elegant, caviar that is just beginning to be tapped in the United States. It comes from sturgeon's humbler cousin, the paddlefish (Polyodontidae). As a conservation measure, many states had banned the sale of paddlefish roe, but some exemptions are now being granted, and it is being marketed successfully in Montana and North Dakota with profits going to support conservation and community improvements.
Peggy Polk
For more information about this product, contact: Agroittica Lombarda Spa, 25012 Viadana di Calvisano (BS), Tel. 030/9686991, Fax 030/968433.
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