Culinary Cultures in Eastern Europe

If you’ve ever visited Latvia, you’ll probably have heard of the chocolate brand Laima. Perhaps you’ll even have seen the Laima Clock, a popular meeting point in central Riga. Laima products have been among Latvia’s most successful exports all the way back to the 1920s. What’s less well...

Russian cuisine, especially festive cuisine, is simply unimaginable without mayonnaise. Salads such as seledka pod šuboj (herring in a fur coat), salat oliv'e (olive salad), krabovyj salat (surimi salad), mimoza (mimosa salad) and many more, as well as meat dishes such as mjaso po franzuski (meat...

This article invites the reader to join a culinary journey through Siberia in the 18th century in a company of ethnographers from Europe and the Russian Empire. For the Russian Empire, the 18th century was a time of great expeditions to explore the vast imperial territory that extended all the way...

It would be almost impossible to imagine the rich history of European café culture without the Vienna coffeehouses or the Paris cafés. By contrast, the Czech capital, Prague, tends to be more associated with the consumption of beer. Yet, in the history of that city, the tradition of the...

The east Galician city of (Lemberg) Lviv had a lively coffeehouse culture during the Habsburg Empire. Poles, Jews and Ukrainians would gather over pots of coffee and tea. As the First World War approached, however, a growing sense of nationalism could also be felt in these otherwise convivial...

The name alone is evocative of family traditions. It carries the promise of delicious cakes and biscuits, particularly in the run-up to Christmas.