Zane Bārbale-Louva (Louw) has been living in Cape Town, the capital of the Republic of South Africa, for ten years. She said that a handful of Latvians, about ten people, get together on St. John’s Day, the celebration of the proclamation of Latvia’s independence, but at Christmas she indulges in the food prepared by her mother-in-law, who is a local. Meanwhile, she misses the Latvian flavors in South Africa: “On Latvian holidays, we usually divide what each of us will bring. Here, in Cape Town, you can buy something similar to St. John’s cheese, that is, cheese with hemp. There are others who like to make rasola, but two ladies specialize in baking cottage cheese.”
In South Africa, you can’t buy kefir and cottage cheese, so sometimes, if possible, you make your own cottage cheese. Dill is also missing. However, sour cream can be found if you look hard.
Ieva Dexter from the Latvian Society of Oregon on the West Coast of the USA admitted that the longing for the taste of Latvia is seasonal: “As soon as summer comes, you want St. John’s cheese and rye bread, meanwhile at Christmas they ask for bacon pies, and you can already bake them yourself. We also have stores where you can buy rye bread and the necessary ingredients for St. John’s cheese. It’s not like there’s nothing, we don’t live on the moon. You can satisfy Latvian taste buds.”
Gingerbread in Australia.
Photo: Collection of the “Latvians in the World” Museum
Meanwhile, in Australia, where one of the world’s few cafes dedicated to Latvian cuisine has found its home – Melbourne’s Latvian House cafe “Rīga”, which has been operating for about 70 years, shares the Latvian taste not only with local Latvians – sometimes even completely random passers-by come to feast here.
As Linda Drēziņš, the owner of the cafe, said, pies on Saturdays are a tradition: “You can’t buy pies anywhere else, and there are few people who know how to bake them. On Saturdays, when you drive in our yard, the whole neighborhood smells of pies. Our traditional Latvian dishes are probably not like in Latvia, because we make it from the products that are available with us. We have a wide range of products, but sour cream and butter are not like in Latvia.”
You can get both filled pancakes and sauerkraut with sausages at the Latvian cafe in Melbourne.
At Christmas, when summer is in full swing on this continent, warm dishes will not be served, but herring in fur and cold soup will be available, because, it turns out, kefir is freely available here.
As the owner of the Latvian cafe in Melbourne explained, from time to time they hold various master classes, where people learn how to cook Latvian dishes, the recipes being passed down from generation to generation.
In order to preserve the Latvian flavors, cooking master classes are also held in Oregon from time to time. In autumn, Ieva Dexter said, there was probably the most unusual one – a galert master class.
“Galert’s master classes were walking on very thin ice,”
she said, explaining that it is a nostalgic dish for older people and that Latvians in America used to cook it for holidays in the fifties and sixties, but the younger generation is quite surprised. “It was interesting to look at young people who covered their noses and ears. The reaction to a pot full of pig’s snout and bones was interesting… I don’t know if they will ever get excited about making gelert at home, but I would like to say that the gelert master class was a success.”
Ieva Dexter knew how to say that there are people who prepare and serve galerta on the table on Thanksgiving.
Meanwhile, Aigars Opihtins, a baker with 40 years of experience, when asked why rye bread is so special that it cannot be baked abroad like at home, explained: “Everything can be bought in stores, but while traveling around the world, I have baked bread in Latvian communities – one thing is missing – it’s not a real oven. Fired with spruce wood, with maple leaves for bread underneath. It’s baked with Latvian flour, Latvian yeast, but the sweet, holy oven, in which we shoot cookies… it doesn’t exist. Only then does the real rye bread come out.”
Aigars has baked bread in America, England, Denmark and other places in the world, but it is not the real rye bread, that foreign bread lacks the real taste of Latvia.
As stated by Guna Dancīte, curator of the collection of the Museum and Research Center “Latvies in the World”, the true taste of Latvians is really bread, sometimes pies, sauerkraut: “By interviewing people, we have realized that it doesn’t matter what continent a person is on, the Latvian taste is what brought from Latvia, especially in the fifties of the last century [gados] there was a lack of smokes in exile, and another thing is mushrooms and mushrooming.”
Food is a language and a way to pave the way for Latvianness far away from Latvia, because not everyone can and wants to dance, sing, but eating is a sacred thing.
Latvian stand at the Immigrants’ Exhibition in São Paulo in 1989.
Photo: Collection of the “Latvians in the World” Museum
2023-12-25 05:26:55
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