CAVIAR BEGAN TO GAIN its modern cachet in the 1700s, when Catherine the Great began serving the ploughman’s treat to her court guests with gold and mother-of-pearl spoons. Enterprising traders began cooling barrels of caviar on ice and shipping them from southern Russia to Europe, a complicated process that made the final product fantastically expensive. The European upper and middle classes, newly fat on the Industrial Revolution and hungry for status symbols, concluded that something so costly and so beloved by Russian royalty must be worth having—and bought it whether they liked it or not.

Caviar has been said to cure influenza and impotence, and to taste of ancient seas, power, wealth, and dreams. “It’s an amazing palate experience,” says Rick Moonen, a Las-Vegas-based chef who helped draw attention to sturgeon overfishing in the early 2000s. “The first thing your mouth realizes is the saltiness—that’s the bell ringing, telling your palate to wake up—and then all of a sudden you get these fish oils popping against the roof of your mouth, all these marine nuances, almost fruity, nutty flavors. There’s a savoriness in the oil that just makes your mouth go nuts.”

The quality of the caviar is often apparent in the aftertaste, says Moonen. If paddlefish caviar is carefully prepared, it can be a delicacy. But low-quality paddlefish caviar, like the kind Steve Nichols learned to prepare with door screens and five-gallon plastic buckets, tends to taste too strongly of its origins. “The taste that lingers isn’t oceanic—it’s more like blue-green algae, a lake-water taste,” says Moonen. Still, paddlefish roe usually looks and tastes enough like its Russian cousins to fool a casual customer.

While wealthy European industrialists clamored for caviar, Russian customs regulations frustrated many traders. Inga Saffron, in her book Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World’s Most Coveted Delicacy, writes that in the late 1800s, a German cooper named Johannes Dieckmann tried making caviar with sturgeon roe from the nearby Elbe River. After a bit of trial and error, he had a product almost indistinguishable from fine Russian caviar. It was a hit, but the supply didn’t last: The Elbe was already polluted by nearby factories, and the stressed native sturgeon couldn’t take the fishing pressure. Between 1888 and 1900, the sturgeon catch from the Elbe dropped by half, and by the end of the 20th century they were extinct in Germany.

The sturgeon in the Elbe, like most other sturgeon and paddlefish, were primarily filter feeders, with a prominent snout and gaping, toothless mouth. All sturgeon grow very slowly, usually taking decades to reach reproductive age, but they keep growing until they die. Beluga sturgeon, the largest sturgeon and one of the largest fish in the world, can live to be more than 100 years old, and the oldest weigh more than a ton.

With this fearsome size comes vulnerability. Sturgeon aren’t particularly easy to catch, since they tend to hang quietly in the depths of rivers, but once caught they’re docile, rarely putting up a fight. And like any slow-growing, slow-maturing species, the loss of just a few individuals can send the entire species into decline. “An unfished population of sturgeon or paddlefish is like an old-growth forest,” says Stony Brook University biologist Ellen Pikitch, who has studied sturgeon around the world. “There are a lot of old trees in there—and when you take them out, it takes them a long time to regenerate.”

When the Elbe sturgeon crashed, Dieckmann, undaunted, looked for a new supply. He found it across the Atlantic.

While Europeans were serving Russian caviar with champagne and oysters, American colonists were throwing sturgeon eggs to their pigs. The fish were abundant in U.S. waters, and Indians ate both sturgeon meat and roe, but European settlers preferred shad. Sturgeon, they thought, were oily, ugly pests with a habit of tearing up fishing nets.

By the mid-1800s, though, newer immigrants were happy to buy cheap sturgeon meat (in New York, it was nicknamed “Albany beef”), and a few entrepreneurs started marketing salt-cured roe to wealthy Philadelphians. Shad fishermen, hearing of the demand, switched to sturgeon, and when Dieckmann’s descendants arrived at the mouth of the Delaware River, they found a nascent caviar boomtown. They quickly signed up suppliers, taught them the finer points of the craft, and began shipping American caviar to Hamburg. For the next twenty years, the town of Caviar, New Jersey, produced more caviar than anywhere in the world.

And then, suddenly, the rush was over. The Atlantic sturgeon, like their cousins on the Elbe, couldn’t withstand heavy fishing pressure. They simply didn’t grow quickly enough, or reproduce often enough, to replace the thousands of fish dragged out of the river each year. At first, rising caviar prices made it easy for sturgeon fishermen to ignore their dwindling catches, but by 1900, their nets were almost empty. Most abandoned the sturgeon trade, and the town of Caviar slowly rotted into the beach. Today, Atlantic sturgeon and most other North American sturgeon are threatened or endangered species.

It was the first American caviar boom, but perhaps not the last.

After the American boom ran its course, the international caviar trade swung back to Russia. When Johannes Dieckmann’s firm opened a new office in Astrakhan, on the banks of the Volga River near the Caspian Sea, in 1902, history appeared poised to repeat itself: Caspian fishermen, who had been supplying caviar to the domestic market for centuries, were complaining about shrinking sturgeon catches. With international demand rising, Dieckmann’s manager predicted, a Caspian sturgeon crash was inevitable. What he didn’t predict, however, was the Russian Revolution.

The Soviet Union, recognizing the value of the caviar trade, nationalized and regulated the Caspian fishery in the 1920s. Sturgeon populations, which had benefited from the relative lack of fishing during World War I and the revolution, began to stabilize. When the Soviet Union dammed the Volga River in the 1950s, sturgeon populations dove once again. This time, the fish were rescued not by war but by Soviet researchers, who had spent years perfecting hatchery techniques. They spawned and released millions of young sturgeon into the Caspian watershed. Over the decades that followed, a tightly controlled fishery supplied the world with high-quality—and high-priced—Russian caviar.

In the mid-1990s, “Spanky” DeFriese was in prison, and the Osage River was quiet. But the Caspian Sea was not. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Caspian fishing rights were divided among five independent states, none of which did much to rein in the caviar trade. Caviar poaching on the Caspian had always been lucrative; now it was lucrative and easy. Soon, the Russian mafia took control of the trade, and flooded the international market with illegal and often low-quality caviar. A study of the New York City caviar market in the mid-1990s found that almost 20 percent of the caviar on store shelves was mislabeled.

Sturgeon populations crashed, and this time, there was no revolution to stop the freefall. The Caspian sturgeon situation became so dire that in 1998, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) regulated all international sales of sturgeon and paddlefish and their products. A recent followup study of caviar sold in New York City showed that since the restrictions, mislabeling has declined to about 10 percent. CITES, however, still considers the sturgeon family to be the most endangered group of species in the world.

With few fish left to catch, and international trade restrictions taking hold, Caspian Sea caviar became ever more rare and expensive. Yet the global hunger for caviar didn’t ease among the world’s wealthy, and it didn’t ease among the immigrants who arrived in the United States after the Soviet collapse.