Round the World in Eighty Dishes by Lesley Blanch

Author:Lesley Blanch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: COOKING / General
ISBN: 9781909808713
Publisher: Grub Street Publishing
Published: 2013-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

POOR MAN’S CAVIAR

(FROM ROUMANIA)

(FOR 4)

The Danube, as one of the great rivers of Europe, runs through several different countries on its way to the Black Sea. As it flows through Vienna they call it the Blue Danube, though it always looks like a muddy grey to me. When it reaches ‘The Iron Gates’, a narrow rock defile which guards the entrance to Roumania, the Danube becomes a deep green; but as it widens out to the delta country, becoming a mighty, slow-moving waterway recalling the Mississippi, it becomes a thick yellowish expanse, bordered by sandbanks and endless steppes, or prairies, where there is no sign of man. At Vylkove, on the Black Sea, which really is a dark inky colour, though named Black for its treacherous nature as much as its hue, it merges into salt lagoons, like tropic mangrove-swamp country, where the fishermen live by preparing caviar, that very rare expensive delicacy that is exported all over the world but which only the rich can afford to buy. Caviar is supposed to be a Russian speciality, the finest coming from Beluga, on the Caspian Sea. I have one Russian friend who left the country very young, during the Revolution, in a great hurry, leaving all her belongings behind. But she managed to snatch up her favourite little gold caviar spoon, and to keep it for years. It was only during a particularly bad spell that she was at last compelled to sell it. Now fortunately in a position to buy caviar from time to time, she tells me that somehow it never tastes the same since it is no longer eaten with a golden spoon.

I too, have had some opportunities to eat caviar in an exceptional way—in bulk, that is. When we were en poste in Sofia, immediately after the war, the Russian generals used to give splendid parties where they served wash-bowls full of caviar—the best Beluga. I had the sensation of plunging headlong into such richness. Vodka flowed, and afterwards there was dancing, that exuberant rubber-bouncing of the Cossacks: gopaks, and all kinds of stamping, savage, and joyous rhythms that are in the Russian blood. I remember trying to teach some Cossack officers Sir Roger de Coverley, from which they made their own sort of furiante; excellent for shaking off the effects of over-eating.

The kind of caviar that comes from Valçov is very good indeed, and almost as recherché. Although the fishermen have to work hard to catch the huge sturgeon whose eggs are in fact what we know as caviar, they are much too poor to eat any of it themselves. The eggs are cut out of the fish, roughly washed in the stream, salted, packed in tins, put on ice (no refrigerators there), and rushed to the train. In summer the heat in this part of Roumania, known as the Dobrudja, is fierce. Yet in winter there are sometimes snow-storms, and wolves howling round. I know, for I have seen and heard both.

In summer, when

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