Word: caviar
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...record label for Tommy Roe: "Caviar...
Until now, that is. Attacking this problem of economics and national pride with chemistry, researchers at the Soviet Academy of Sciences have found a way to make a caviar substitute out of milk, and the Ministry of Fisheries has opened a pilot production line in Moscow to try it out. Located in a corner of a large fish processing plant on the banks of the Moscow Canal, the line is a 60-ft. stretch of stainless-steel tanks, plunging pistons and gurgling agitators, ending in a conveyor belt that delivers small jars labeled CAVIAR-PROTEIN-FRESH. Although the facility turns...
Soviet scientists had been trying to find a suitably cheap, protein-based caviar substitute for more than a decade. Most sturgeons-huge fish that can weigh more than 1,000 lbs.-are caught in the Caspian Sea. But as a result of a drop in water level and rising industrial pollution at the Russian end of the sea, the Soviet sturgeon catch has been dwindling, while Iran's production has remained steady. After experimenting with other possible bases for a caviar substitute, the Russian chemists settled on casein, a protein found in curdled milk. Explains Chemist Vladimir Tolstogouzov: "Soybean...
...mechanically agitated until the mixture emerges as a mound of little white pellets. The pellets are then laced with quantities of sturgeon sperm (for authentic taste), bathed with tannin extracted from tea leaves and stems (for color) and finally given a salty bath (the same preservative used on natural caviar...
Connoisseurs find the product slightly mushy, even when consumed with vodka. But at $5.90 a lb., compared with $24.50 for the real thing, there has been nothing soft about initial sales of the fake caviar. At the Okean (Ocean) fish store on Moscow's Prospekt Mira, where the pilot plant's output is sold, every scrap of the entire daily production sells out in only two hours...