by Ethan Cary

Created on: December 20, 2009

As long as man has been on earth, so has caviar.  Caviar comes from the salted roe (or eggs) of the sturgeon fish (also called paddlefish) which has been on earth for 250 million years.   The word is derived from the Turkish word Khavyar which means egg, and the English word “caviar” was first seen in print in 1591.  The diet of Europe and the Middle East has contained caviar through all of recorded time.  The long and interesting history of caviar intertwines the record of man on earth. 

The sturgeon is a saltwater fish that moves to the freshwater to spawn.  They are indigenous to the Black and Caspian Seas between Europe and Asia but are also found off the coast of the United States in the Pacific Northwest and the Southern Atlantic coasts.  The average sturgeon weighs about 60 pounds and the meat of the fish (as well as the harvested egg) is very appetizing.

In the United States in1873, a German immigrant by the name of Henry Schacht began exporting caviar to Europe.  At that time the waters off the east coast of America were filled with sturgeon and by the end of the 19th century the United States was the leading exporter of caviar in the world.  Much of this caviar was sent right back to America and marketed as the quality Russian caviar because caviar from the rivers of Russia was thought to be the best in the world.  By the turn of the century, most of the ‘Russian caviar” sold in Europe actually came from the United States!  The state of Pennsylvania issued a statement confirming this finding in 1900.

Because of the high demand for caviar in Europe, over-fishing in the United States pushed the sturgeon to almost become extinct.  This caused the price of caviar to go through the roof and the Russians again became the major source of the world’s caviar.   After World War I, most of the caviar came from the Caspian and Black Sea.  By the 1960’s, the price of caviar was so high that other less expensive fish were used as a source for eggs. 

The Russians saw huge profitability in selling caviar and limited the supply of exported caviar in order to maintain high prices.  By doing this, unlike the Americans, they maintained the supply of sturgeon and were able to obtain a corner on the market.  The Russians also used salmon, lumpfish, tuna, and the whitefish as sources for roe because they were much cheaper.  The purists

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