Cooking Lessons from the Latvian Countryside

Susan Bell Latvia holds on to its culinary identity by way of these women and their traditional dishes. Susan Bell My sister-in-law Sarah and I are walking through the art nouveau district of Latvia’s capital, Riga—though, more correctly, you might say we are wobbling, having just toasted our arrival with many glasses of Riga Balzams, the country’s famous tar-black botanical digestif.

In fact, every third person on the sidewalk carries a bouquet of flowers, headed to happy hour somewhere.Riga is but a portal to our real destination, the rural town of Aloja, where Sarah completed what she calls a “relatively cushy” Peace Corps service from 1998 to 2000, and which she hasn’t returned to since. She had already learned to cook from the women in Aloja, and she still lived and breathed its flavors, its ethics, and its hardships.Looking back, I can see that she hadn’t fully left Latvia, and instead she was drawing me into it: We drank Balzams and fizzy fermented birch sap, and talked about the famed “fat buns” of Aloja, the speķa pīrāgi, or bacon and onion buns. So while I’m here to finally go to Aloja with her, meet her friends, and taste these dishes she hasn’t stopped talking about for the past 20 years, I’m in addition here to see the country through her eyes.

Ruta Gailīte, the town baker of Aloja, Latvia, at home in her kitchen. Susan Bell Latvia’s history is a complicated and somewhat disturbing roll call of conquests that finally ended in 1991, when it gained its independence from the collapsing Soviet Union.

Susan Bell So I think we are on the right path, out of the city, headed to the sleepy town of Aloja in the Vidzeme region. As we eat in the garden, friends begin to arrive carrying gifts—jars of pickled beets, cheeses, homemade schnapps, beer—some of it in trade for the fish, some provisions for the party to come.

When Sarah arrived in 1999, Latvia had gained its independence from the USSR less than 10 years prior, and people were filled with hope, but joining the world trade midstream has proved to be hard on Aloja. People keep backyard chickens; why not a backyard cow?In her kitchen, Ruta feeds wood into the firebox of her cepeškrāsns, the traditional Latvian wood stove that is the centerpiece of her house.

In the meantime, she moves her pan of dishwater aside, and sautés cubes of bacon fat. Onions on the stovetop’s hot spot until they melt and shimmer, then pours them over a pot of cooked pelēkie zirņi , the large brown pea that is the pride of Latvia. I’m allergic to the food from the store.” Given Ruta’s meager 100-euro-per-month pension, her optimism is inspiring. “A single cake,” she boasts, “pays for two months’ worth of firewood!” As if on cue, a woman calls to Ruta from the doorway and drops off a box of garden vegetables in the foyer. And they don’t have the teeth anymore for almonds.” After feeding split logs into the fire to raise the oven temperature, Ruta sits on a wooden bench in front of her oven, pops in the pan of speķa pīrāgi, and stays there to monitor them—the only time today she has stopped moving.

On hers sits a huge vase of flowers—tiger lilies and wild roses and dianthus the size of golf balls, so fresh they’re still damp. Breathing.Wearing leopard-print pants and a pair of reading glasses perched on her cropped gray-blond head, she slices her goat cheeses into thick slabs for us to try, telling me that she has 60 goats, 38 of them milkers, and is building a new cheesemaking facility. All of the cheeses I taste in Latvia are fresh, none of them aged, and Līga’s goat cheese is by far the best of them: creamy and sweet, its goaty muskiness just an innuendo.

Līga has generously offered to host a party for us and a crew of Sarah’s Aloja friends from her Peace Corps days, and she has assembled an impressive array of dishes, already stacked high on her brick stovetop. She needs no further prompting to show me and Sarah her “babies,” as she calls the goats, and we head to the barn, an airy wooden structure newly built on top of a centuries-old split-rock foundation.

So anxious is the group to connect with Līga that I imagine she could leap onto her back from the rafters and crowd-surf around the barn. “As I milk them,” Līga says, “we talk. They’re my best friends.” Then she yelps suddenly, slapping at one particularly naughty gray-beard, who has snuck over and begun to nibble on the loose end of Sarah’s belt. “They’re also a bunch of hooligans.” Back in the kitchen, I help Līga bring food outside to the table, which has been set with a delicate lace tablecloth and a vase of fresh flowers.

Līga sprays a handful of chopped dill on the tiny hot dogs one of Sarah’s friends has brought—which Liga’s 5-year-old grandson Rodgrigo snatches in handfuls from the bowl.