We found the same small tins in a nearby supermarket selling for $30, and big tins of generic malossol for $25. “I don’t know nothing,” the manager said nervously when we asked him where he had got them. “I just sell. I only been in business three years. You should ask M & I International Food, down the street. They’ve been in business for years.” 

      The people in Brighton Beach were instinctively unhelpful. It was a hassle finding someone who was willing to give us change for the parking meter, let alone anyone who would tell us where he got his caviar. The M & I International Food market had three other brands in glass jars, so we could see the eggs. One said Russian Caviar malossol packaged for export. Another said Russian Caviar from the Joint Stock Company, Astrkahn. The third said zernistaya caviar from the Caspian Sea. Zernistaya simply means that the eggs are separate; they have not been mashed.  I asked the woman behind the counter what kind of sturgeon the zernistaya was from. “This is beluga,” she said. How do you know when the species isn’t identified ? I asked. “From size of  eggs,” she said. “Such big eggs are beluga.” Vadim explained to me that caviar has traditionally been identified from the size and color of the eggs, but that this is completely unreliable. Big eggs could be kaluga, or even American white sturgeon if it was a scam, besides which the egg size varies with the age of the fish : they are smaller when the fish is young, reach their peak size at middle age, and shrink again as the fish grows old.

      The woman suggested we talk to the manager, who assured us the caviar was beluga and that he had the papers to prove it. We asked to see them, and the manager said, “Let me call my boss,” and he disappeared. We waited half an hour. Still no manager and no boss. “How can this caviar go through Customs without species name ?” Vadim asked. “That’s why he disappeared. He was put out to have to deal with us but was unusually polite, still polite. He didn’t say any bad words yet. He was pretending to help us and he disappeared.”

       We went into a fish store across the street. It was selling for $70 113-gram jars of  grey-black caviar that the girl behind the counter said was beluga, and for $45 bigger yellow-green caviar that she said was ossetra from Astrakhan. I asked where she got it from. “My business is only to sell,” she snapped. She was a feisty young woman from Azberbajan. The manager came over. “It’s coming like this from wholesaler,” he explained, and refused to give us the wholesaler’s name. “As long as you’re asking for official documents, where is your journalist card ?” the girl asked. “Why are you asking these questions ? Do you want to bring agent ?”

      “This big yellow-green stuff is definitely not ossetra from Astrakhan,” Vadim told me when we were back on the street. “This is exactly the type of caviar that should be tested with molecular method.”

***

       And this was definitely not the milieu in which I wanted to sample what I had already decided would be my last taste of caviar. I had already begun to educate my palate with the fresh, absolutely delicious caviar at Caviarteria. Eric Sobel had brought us small dishes of beluga, sevruga and ossetra. “Beluga eggs are big and creamy,” he explained, “and when they break, their liquid is clear and greyish, as is the liquid of sevruga, but sevruga eggs are saltier and they are the smallest. Ossetra eggs are more brownish, nutty, and firmer-grained, and their liquid is yellow. You don’t need a DNA test. Anybody with a tongue and two eyes can differentiate them.”

      According to Caviar : The Resource Book, by V.I. Sternin and published in Moscow, you can tell ordinary fish caviar that has been dyed black by “the absence of the melting feel in the mouth and the noticeable ‘pop’ of the eggs.... Beluga never pops.... [The popping leaves] an obvious taste of egg membrane; and sometimes the strong presence of introduced flavors.” Ossetra, especially from the Caspian, can have a grassy or muddy off-taste which contributes to its distinctive “nutty” bouquet. “The interior viscosity of the eggs is important to the ‘mouth-feel.’ The best caviars feel like a pleasantly viscous liquid.” Equally important is the “exterior viscosity”: “the eggs should roll down a gently sloping surface.”

       According to an article in the Times last year, each type of caviar has its own way of bursting between the tongue and the roof of the mouth. “Caviar never tastes the same. Its flavor varies from fish to fish, region to region, season to season. That is part of its allure.” The market had been “glutted with stale, substandard caviar shipped before more stringent import regulations took effect last April.” A significant amount has been coming from China, and a growing amout from farm-raised sturgeon in Russia and France. Caviar is rated by the Iranian grading system : there are triple 0, double 0, and 0 beluga; A and B-rated ossetra; and Sevruga 1 and 2. The Times food critic Florence Fabriquant is even more instructive. “Fresh caviar,” she writes, “should glisten upon close inspection. The eggs should be luminous, pert-looking, and consistent in size and color. If you notice a difference in size or color, it is a tip-off that other caviar has been mixed in. It should smell fishy. The grains should be firm but not rubbery or tough. Smashed grains may mean that the caviar has been mishandled or frozen. Hard grains mean that it has been pasteurized, which destroys its integrity. The best way to eat it is with a small bone or mother-of-pearl spoon. Metal spoons impart a metallic tang. Slip the caviar into your mouth. As it sits on your tongue, pull a little air into your mouth, close your eyes, and without hesitation crush the eggs by forcing them against the roof of your mouth. The immediate taste should be oceanic. The middle sensations should evoke earthy things like fruit, nuts, even truffles. The final sensation should be a slight brininess, tinged with the sort of coppery nuance of a Belon oyster. The overall impression is the balance of the disparate sensations in the mouth. The final equation lingers; don’t rush to a conclusion.”

      At what point in time, I asked Vadim, did caviar begin to inspire such prose, did it  become  associated truffles, champagne,  and other indulgences of people of wealth and taste ? He told me that a good history of caviar has yet to be written. There is archaeological evidence that Greek colonists along the Sea of Azov were eating sturgeons by the second century, B.C.. The Romans ate Adriatic sturgeons, and presumably their roe. In England, all sturgeons belonged to the king, so caviar never took off until quite recently. Russians didn’t get into it until Ivan the Terrible conquered the lower Volga, so the sturgeons there were blissfully undisturbed until the early sixteenth century because the Muslims along the river didn’t care for them any more than Jews did. Caviar was consumed by Russian peasants as well aristocrats; it didn’t have any particular cachet. Even in the darkest days of the Soviet period, caviar was readily available and was considered no more of a delicacy than vodka. It didn’t become popular in Europe until the nineteenth century, with the industrial revolution and the expansion of transatlantic trade. The Hansen Company opened offices in New York and St. Petersburg. The days when sturgeon running up the Hudson and the Columbia had been so thick that Indians had trouble paddling their canoes were soon over. So great was the love of caviar in France  that its industry collapsed due to lack of native product by the l950s.  

       Thus informed, I was ready for my Last Taste. This took place at Petrossian’s, the famous restaurant on 58th and 6th Avenue whose caviar, Vadim told me, is absolutely reliable. You get what you pay for, and the beluga is triple 0, the sevurga first class, and the ossetra grade A. Present were Vadim and, to render  third and fourth opinions, a photographer from a magazine that celebrates the rich and famous, who himself has a highly-developed taste for the good life, and a savvy and attractive young woman from the magazine’s advertising department. The photographer and his companion had been to a party and were already a little drunk. A tree with small dishes of the Big Three was brought on, with tall, thin glasses of chilled Stolichnaya to wash it down with. As the photographer inserted a spoonful of beluga into his mouth, he quoted the opening paragraph of Lolita about “the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap at three on the teeth,” and he pronounced caviar “the ultimate indulgence, more than coke.” His companion, who was at first put off by the thought that the eggs had been “ripped out of the belly of a living mother,” found the beluga “liquid and buttery. I couldn’t cherish its texture. It melted in my mouth before I could relish its crunchiness.” Unlike most Americans, who as Vadim remarked, “like everything big” and tend to go for beluga (which is generally considered the top of the line in caviar), we  decided we liked the smaller eggs best. The ossetra wasn’t crunchy either, but more velvety and fishy. The sevruga was brinier, stronger, more aggressive. Vadim like the ossetra best, and the rest of us concurred : the ossetra was arguably better in this particular instance. One of us (I won’t say who), after the fifth round of Stolys, suggested that there was “definitely a sexual dimension, a cunnilingual element” to the ingestion of caviar. “You know what it really tastes like ?” he proposed. “Pussy.” 

        Apart from the advertising woman, who said demurely she wouldn’t know, the rest of the table, the waiter, and the two young men splurging on caviar at the next table all thought there was something to this analogy, however off-color (which is actually not so off-the-wall considering the lipids and amino acids these rich reproductive fluids probably share). Our neighbors, who described themselves as “dot.coms,” were in a euphoric daze, celebrating what one of them said had been “the best day in our careers.” They were in “direct-access trading, providing customers with execution systems that allow them to compete with traders like Morgan Stanley.” 

      Vadim was in a less decadent and celebratory mood.  “I have  one thing to say to elitist public,” he declared. “There has been some recent hype about caviar, but it’s over : there is no caviar. You’re extinguishing one of the oldest species in the world. Wake up.”