July 18 - National Caviar Day
Although today is National Caviar Day, it’s National Ice Cream Day too, which seems like kind of a fishy coincidence since ice cream and caviar are a none-too-tasty combination. But since I know little about caviar and lots about ice cream, I thought I’d do a little research. Here’s what I found out.
Caviar is salted fish roe (eggs); but not all salted fish roe is caviar, however. Caviar refers very specifically to the salted roe of sturgeon. However, the word caviar can be used appropriately in tandem with the name of another fish—for example, salmon caviar, whitefish caviar, or trout caviar.
While the standalone word caviar on a tin or a menu denotes sturgeon caviar, today’s “consumers and purveyors are too sophisticated to be so brief,” according to one gourmet magazine, which said, “Knowledgeable gourmets demand at least two modifying words preceding caviar to designate provenance as well as fish species, such as Iranian Osetra, American whitefish, California sturgeon…and now, farmed versus wild.”
Well, la-dee-dah, I’m one “consumer and purveyor” who has never tasted caviar (the one-word or two-word variety) of any kind. Perhaps today I should be adventuresome and try some of the little (and expensive) raw fish eggs that others drool by.