\u201cDon\u2019t be scared of the Lithuanian people, they\u2019re crying on the inside.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A young man told my uncle Louie that right before their plane landed in Vilnius<\/strong>. It was only an hour flight from Helsinki<\/strong> but they shared a row and got to talking. As often happens with Louie, a trained existential psychologist, they came to the topic of psychic dread. The young man said Lithuanians have plenty, you can see it on their faces. After all, they\u2019ve been dragged through some shit.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n A short list of their historic trauma sounds like this: <\/p>\n\n\n\n It wasn\u2019t until The Simpsons<\/em> started airing regularly that Lithuanians had control over their country\u2019s destiny. Earlier this year, Lithuania’s oldest person, a man named Juozas Mereckas<\/a>, died at 109 years old. He was born in the Russian Empire and lived long enough to see a banner reading \u201cPutin the Hague is Waiting for You\u201d hung over downtown Vilnius. That\u2019s a lot of change in eight generations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n My uncle’s maternal grandparents, my great-grandparents, were born in Lithuania but left before the Soviets occupied the country and died before the Soviets left. A part of the reason we\u2019re here is to get in touch with that family history. A big piece of that history is food. When she immigrated, my great grandmother ran a deli in South Philly<\/strong> all the way through the Depression. That\u2019s probably ground zero for our familial food obsession.<\/mark> My mom got it, she\u2019s living testament to the effectiveness of the Culinary Revolution in 1960s America and the best cook I know. My uncle got it too, he was a professional banquet chef for years who still finds more joy in kitchen prep than anyone I\u2019ve ever met. And then there’s me, a bonafide hedonist, pleasure seeker, duck l\u2019orange eater, gizzard gobbler, TrippaAdvisor, offal obsessive, etc.<\/mark> I learned from them, and I do my best in the kitchen but really where I shine is sitting at the table or behind a keyboard writing about sitting at the table. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So what the fuck does a Lithuanian table taste like? <\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s what me and Louie were there to find out. There is, of course, the image of a Lithuanian table covered in potato dumplings, cold beetroot soup, sour cream, pork crackling, and stuffed cabbage rolls. This is the image I have had in my head since I was a kid, the image my mother\u2019s own cabbage rolls would conjure. It\u2019s the image that numerous restaurants catered to tourists in downtown Vilnius would have you believe is the beginning and the end of their cuisine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I love this type of food. It\u2019s delicious and the restaurants serving it are often great. Some also do their best to expand definitions, with menus like the one at Lokys<\/strong> explaining gastronomical variance between regions. Still, in a country of 3 million people that received 1.1 million foreign visitors<\/a> in 2023, tourists have an undue influence on the culinary narrative. In their endless wisdom they often want something authentic, but also easily digestible. And while \u201ctraditional\u201d Lithuanian food is extremely hard to digest, and potatoes are actually native to South America, it is easy to wrap your head around an Eastern European country eating nothing but. Boiled, fried, stewed, shredded, with sour cream, without, whatever. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The truth is more complicated than potatoes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Cepelinai<\/em> for instance, crowned the national dish of Lithuania, has roots in the Jewish traditional food kugelis, and was probably created by the Litvak (Jewish Lithuanians) community<\/a> in the early 1900s. For people who don\u2019t know, cepelinai are fist-size dumplings made from raw potatoes that are shredded, dehydrated, boiled, stuffed, and reformed in the spitting image of a flying zeppelin.<\/mark> You see this dish at every pub and restaurant, you can buy them frozen at the grocery store, grandmothers spend hours making them for Sunday dinner. They\u2019re inescapably linked to the gastronomic identity of the country but their existence begs the question, who is Lithuanian? Pagans? Catholics? Orthodox? Jews? Is a country not made from the population that lives there? That would have been about 10% Jewish before WWII, it\u2019s less than 1% now. Most Lithuanians don\u2019t know the Jewish history of cepelinai<\/em>, and acknowledging it might mean reckoning with their own history as Nazi collaborators, something the country doesn\u2019t seem prepared to do.<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n History shapes a table, just like migration and politics do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n