Latvia
Grey peas with bacon, dark rye and a bitter-black herbal liqueur — butter-rich Baltic peasant cooking, deeply seasonal.
Wander into Riga's Central Market — five zeppelin hangars turned food halls — and the smell is smoked fish, dark bread and dill. Latvian cooking is Baltic peasant food at heart: pork, potatoes, rye and dairy, rich with butter and lightly spiced. The dish to order is pelēkie zirņi ar speķi, grey peas fried with bacon and onion, so central it counts as a national emblem.
Bread means rupjmaize, a dense, faintly sweet-sour rye that turns up even as a creamy dessert soup layered with whipped cream. Summer brings cold beetroot soup, shocking pink and cooled with soured milk; midsummer brings Jāņu siers, a caraway-flecked cheese eaten at the solstice bonfires. And nearly everything can be chased with Rīgas Melnais balzams, a jet-black herbal bitter at 45%, taken neat or stirred into coffee against the cold.
- Pelēkie zirņi ar speķi (grey peas with bacon)
- Rupjmaize (dark rye bread)
- Karbonāde (breaded pork cutlet)
- Aukstā zupa (cold beetroot soup)
- Jāņu siers (caraway cheese)
- Sklandrausis (rye-crust carrot-potato pie)
- Rīgas Melnais balzams (herbal bitters)
