Caviar

 Caviar is processed, salted, unfertilised roe from sturgeon.

The word caviar entered English in the 16th century via French and Italian, possibly through the Turkish havyar. It comes from the Persian khavyar, usually explained as "egg-bearing". A popular alternative, that it means "cake of power" or "cake of strength", is a folk etymology.

The Russian name for caviar is ikra.

The world's most expensive caviar and, by weight, the most expensive food is Almas. It comes from rare albino sturgeon, aged 60 to 100 years, that swim in the southern Caspian Sea. Guinness World Records gives its price as £20,000 ($34,500) per kg.

Ordinary farmed beluga caviar is far cheaper than Almas. In 2026 UK retailers listed it at roughly £2,800 to £4,925 per kg.

Beluga caviar

In the 19th century America's rivers held so many sturgeon that caviar was served free in bars, because the salty taste made customers thirstier.

A boomtown called Caviar grew up on the Delaware River in southern New Jersey in the 1860s. At its peak it sent 15 train cars of sturgeon roe a day to New York, from where it was shipped to Hamburg. By 1885 German dealers were paying just $9 for a 135-lb keg.

In 2006 the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) halted the international caviar trade of the Caspian and Black Sea countries, including Iran, Kazakhstan and Russia. It was acting because of overfishing and poaching, which had cut Caspian beluga stocks by up to 90 per cent since the late 1970s. The ban was partly lifted in January 2007.

The beluga sturgeon is critically endangered and can take up to 20 years to reach maturity. In 2005 the United States banned imports of beluga caviar from the Caspian and Black Sea basin.

The liner QE2 was reported to get through about a ton of caviar a year.

The German airline Lufthansa was reported in 2013 to buy about 5 per cent of the world's caviar for its first-class passengers.

Michael Douglas was reported to have ordered £12,000-worth for his November 2000 wedding to Catherine Zeta-Jones.

During the filming of Titanic real beluga caviar was used in the first-class dining room sequence. After sampling it, Jonathan Hyde said he "made an acting decision on the spot that Ismay was a big eater."

Sources Daily Mail; Guinness World Records; National Geographic; Science; The Telegraph