Dr. Rimvydas Laužikas A Brief Overview of Lithuanian Gastronomic History
The origins of contemporary Lithuanian cuisine reach back deep in time. Lithuania’s first inhabitants arrived about twelve or thirteen millennia ago. About six or seven thousand years ago, they started to farm and raise livestock. About a thousand years ago, they created a state that became known as the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. You may begin to wonder why we are looking so far back. Gastronomy is a cultural tradition that tends to be particularly conservative. Usually, we eat the things that our parents liked to eat, and they, in turn, liked what their grandparents ate. In contemporary Lithuanian gastronomy, there are various traditions with roots that date back several millennia. Not everyone grasps this, so let’s start from the beginning. We’ve ascertained that gastronomic culture is a part of general human culture. Our culinary traditions, like all forms of culture, have two main strata: local and borrowed. Local Lithuanian food culture is based on the foods produced by settled inhabitants who practiced farming and animal husbandry—it has changed very little during the past several thousand years. Local culinary traditions (and their conservativeness) were shaped by technology and prevailing natural conditions. As far as natural conditions go, there are two geographic zones that can help us classify gastronomic traditions as “ours” and “not-ours.” Vines are cultivated in the southern zone; apple trees in the northern zone. Vines do not grow in our country, but apple trees can be widely cultivated in Lithuania. From this point of view, we are very similar to most northern European countries. The principal food ingredients in this northern zone are meat, grains, milk and dairy products, and wild edibles. There is a general hierarchy that can be applied to these basic foods: meat is at the very top, and wild edibles are at the bottom. Through all eras of culinary history, all people who could afford to eat meat in large quantities did so. Wild edibles were considered poor people’s food, because cultured people ate cultivated foods (from the garden, ploughed field, or livestock shed) and wild people ate wild foods (from the forests, lakes, and rivers.) For this reason, meat dishes, especially those prepared with high-quality meat (such as beef rouladen or suktinukai) were considered prestige foods. No less prestigious were the foods that required large amounts of milk in their production, such as cheese, cottage cheese, sour cream, and butter. Milk products were the preferred food “enhancers.” People could eat plain pancakes, or they could enhance them and make
14 Taste Lithuania