Text: Vafa Zeynalova Photo: Sultana Ahmadbayli

Expensive food is not necessarily tasty. Take caviar: Lali Lobjanidze and Gulnara Mekhtiyeva grew up hating it. Until the break-up of the Soviet Union, Lobjanidze’s mother worked in a caviar-processing factory and the precious delicacy was a daily staple.

“I couldn’t stand it. It was like the ‘White Sun of the Desert’ movie. I was fed up with it,” remembers the 35-year-old programmer, referring to a Soviet cult classic in which a customs official eats caviar every day and ends up loathing it.

Baku native Lobjanidze, though, could not escape caviar: when her mother left her job at the factory, her parents sometimes got it “from fishermen we knew,” she says.

Mekhtiyeva, a 28-year-old social activist also from Baku, recalls how a good friend of her father regularly used to give caviar to her family in three-kilo jars at a time.

“We didn’t particularly like it, so it would sit [in the kitchen] and go bad. Then it became rare,” she recalls. “The last time I tasted it was three years ago, and it was red. I’d bought it in a duty-free shop. It wasn’t anything special.”

Konul Rustamova, a 34-year-old bank official, recalls her father saying that caviar-skeptics did not understand anything about food. Rustamova works in Baku, but hails from Neftchala, one of Azerbaijan’s fishing centers. Caviar was abundant while she was growing up. She still has clear memories of eating black roe with soup at dinner time.

“My father liked to give it as a gift to foreign guests,” says Rustamova. “They would sometimes turn their noses up [in disgust] and we laughed, and said that they didn’t understand anything about food.”