The fashionistas converge on Mumbai, and we wonder what they will eat.
Mumbai is celebrating its first haute couture fashion week next week. If all the talk of crème de la crème makes you peckish, you should know what the crème de la crème themselves turn to when they’re ready to eat.
Luxury foods are hardly a novelty. But because they are made in such small quantities and believed by aficionados to be as near perfection as humans are allowed to tread, tasting them is akin to a religious experience, a sign of membership in the blessed elect. Which is like wearing truly high fashion: bespoke, not off-the-rack, Valentino and Galliano.
So what are the billionaires and the beautiful eating?
Beluga caviar, of course. It can cost $5,000 a kg for this most prized variety, which is the roe (eggs) of sturgeon from the Caspian Sea, fish which can weigh up to 2 tonnes when fully grown (plutocrats of the deep). Their eggs are the largest in the caviar class. The paler the colour of the roe, the costlier it is.
Truffles — no surprise. Nobody grows them; they have to be found in woodlands in the right season by prospectors with specially trained pigs or dogs who sniff them out from under the ground.
The costliest are white truffles, tiny raw slivers of which are used to add flavour to pasta, salads, meats, foie gras, and so on.
More From This Section
Foie gras is a French delicacy, most appallingly made. Literally, it means “fat liver”. The liver belongs to a duck or goose which has been fattened by force-feeding. This involves pushing a mash of grain and fat down the bird’s neck. It is fed until its liver swells as much as 12 times. Then the bird is slaughtered, and its liver becomes foie gras.
Being tender and fatty makes Kobe beef prized. Like the birds, a special breed of cattle only in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, are fed on grain and beer to make their meat flavourful and soft, not lean and marbled like ordinary beef.
Indian fashionistas know about saffron, the priciest spice in the world and one of the oldest. It takes between 70,000 and 200,000 flowers, picked by hand, to make one pound of the spice. It goes, for example, into traditional sweets which may then be decorated with silver or gold foil — a positively Mughal display.
Thankfully such things are used in tiny amounts, because more would not only be ruinously expensive, it would also be toxic.
Crème de la crème: Sauteed foie gras with veal hearts.
