Comely Caviar

Mike Whitmarsh is responding to a report that eating fish and chips makes you a bad lover by taking to Plymouth’s Barbican quarter and challenging a few fishermen and passers-by to try caviar instead. The egg-popping public are more amused at the question than the spoonful of black shiny spheres over-lumped onto a cracker! The term caviar is also used for substitute products such as lumpfish, roe from salmon and trout and vegetarian or vegan varieties such as from aubergine.

Real caviar is sold in tins so purchasers know it has not been pasturised. Caviar is fish eggs typically from wild sturgeon, fish of the Caspian or Black Sea and the rivers that flow into them. The fresh eggs or salt-cured roe of the Acipenseridae family typically gives Beluga, Ossetra and Sveruga caviar and is of high value commercially. Overfishing and dwindling stocks led to Russia imposing an outright ban on sturgeon fishing in 2008 for three years to allow native stocks to recover. Aquaculture and new ways of harvesting the roes without killing the fish have improved the outlook for the sturgeon, a fish that dates to the era of the dinosaurs. So oysters with caviar or fish and chips?