Salads & Sides

While Communist-style cooking in the Baltics wasn’t exactly known for its salads and vegetable dishes, times have changed. I have a bee in my bonnet about the labelling of Eastern European food as ‘heavy’ and just ‘meat and potatoes’. This is inaccurate, not only in light of all the culinary changes now taking place, but also historically. In the past, fruit and vegetables, both harvested and foraged, were widely appreciated and creatively used in kitchens across the Baltic States, as evidenced by an early-nineteenth-century recipe book published in Lithuania that was one of the first vegetarian cookbooks.