#62 Lithuania
- Jen
- Jul 13, 2023
- 3 min read
Traditional Lithuanian food is hearty; heavy on meat, dairy and potatoes.
The dish that comes up on every list of Lithuanian food that Google spits out is a fine example to showcase the above sentence. Cepelinai are large potato dumplings, formed into the shape of zeppelins (hence the name) using a dough combining raw grated potato and cooked mashed potato. The dough is usually filled with minced pork, and served swimming in a creamy bacon sauce. These potato airships are notoriously difficult to make as balancing the starch and water content in the potato casing can be tricky for first timers. Get it wrong and cepelinai won’t survive the boiling.
When Asta, my Lithuanian friend, arrives at my house one Sunday in April, it’s 10°C and drizzly, not really the sort of weather you’d typically pair with a cold soup, but cepelinai are probably best left to trained professionals; I did not want to risk the embarrassment of serving disintegrating dumplings.
Šaltibarščiai is Lithuania’s gazpacho, a cold soup and one of Lithuania’s traditional summer (and lighter) dishes. The soup itself requires no cooking whatsoever and can be thrown together in a matter of minutes. The process simply consists of combining grated pickled beetroot with kefir (a slightly sour fermented milk drink, great for the gut microbiome) and cucumber, dill and spring onion. It’s often served with hard boiled eggs and warm boiled potatoes with butter and dill.
What a joy it is mixing a bowl of that vibrantly coloured šaltibarščiari. And what a joy it is eating it. It’s creamy, slightly sour and the contrast between the fridge-cold soup and the warm, buttery potatoes is heavenly. There aren’t too many dishes that sit in the area of overlap between filling and refreshing in the Venn diagram of foodstuffs, but this soup is one of those few concoctions. I love pink soup!
(Such was Asta’s pleasure with my šaltibarščiai that she sent her Mum a picture of the soup and it got her seal of approval too; high praise indeed.)
The pickled beetroot and kefir were purchased from a Polish supermarket, where I was spoilt with several varieties of jarred pickled beetroot to choose from.
I’m also spoilt to have a local Danish bakery, where I picked up a wonderful loaf of Danish dark rye bread to go with the soup, as this is also the favoured type of bread across the Baltic sea, where it may have cumin or caraway seeds kneaded in. In Lithuania, the bread is often sliced and fried and served with a cheese sauce to make a popular bar snack called kepta duona, which pairs excellently with beer.
Asta explains to me that Lithuania is mostly covered by lush forest. People of the Baltic lands love spending time outdoors and much of the food in this area reflects the culture of being out in nature. Every late summer/autumn, people flock to the forests to forage for mushrooms and berries like bilberries and raspberries, which are made into jams to last the winter months.
Cucumbers, cabbages and beetroots have also traditionally been preserved to survive cold winters, resulting in plenty of jars of crunchy, sour pickles, which are the perfect partner for Lithuanian sausage: skilandis is a traditional dried and cold-smoked pork sausage, flavoured with garlic.
Whilst on my recent travels to Italy’s Veneto region, I met another Lithuanian, a lovely lady, can’t remember her name, she was the free walking tour guide in Venice. She had very little enthusiasm towards sweet bakes and desserts from her homeland, but, to be fair, living in the region home to tiramisu could well be clouding her judgement.
Tiffin, or ‘rocky road’ if we’re speaking in Americanisms and adding marshmallows*, is one of my favourite ever things, ever: melted chocolate, sometimes with some butter and golden syrup, poured over broken biscuits and set in the fridge to create a great big chocolaty biscuit slab.
*Such a waste of space that could instead be utilised by Mini Eggs, fudge, bits of Crunchie, etc.
Tinginys is similar to tiffin or rocky road (basically a biscuit fridge cake), the main difference being the cement. Instead of melted chocolate, in tinginys the biscuits are bound with a mixture of butter, cocoa powder and condensed milk. The resulting product remains slightly gooey even straight from the fridge. Obviously, it’s delicious (and naturally I had three pieces), but, if we’re being picky, which I do enjoy to be, tinginys’ condensed milk base doesn’t quite have the rich chocolatiness I’m after. The basic recipe could be elevated to a really luxurious treat with the addition of some dark chocolate chunks, and maybe a few sour cherries and hazelnuts (apparently Lithuania can boast several varieties of hazelnut).
It was such a joy to share this one with a real life Lithuanian. Thanks for coming Asta 😊
Who wants to joint me for…SCOTLAND?!
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