I have been trying to get a little more in touch with my cultural background, the big problem is while I am a mutt, I am half Latvian. If you haven't heard of it I am not completely surprised, it is a small Baltic country, that was part of the USSR after World War II and did not become independent again until 1991. Its language is one of I believe two surviving languages in its family, which contains Old Prussian, as such it is very hard to practice speaking it, or even find places to learn the language.
I will say I have been blessed to have had several wonderful Latvian delicacies, I honestly think Pirags should have taken the world by storm. These Latvian traveling biscuits, which consist of a bit of dough wrapped around a cooked and rendered mixture of spices, onions, bacon and ham, wonderful when warm, frozen or basically anywhere in between. Piparkukas honestly in my opinion put all other gingerbread cookies to shame.
But anyway onto the Rye bread, today I received a shipment of Latvian rye bread from Storye and have gleefully been nibbling on it all afternoon with assorted teas. The combination is incredible. The rye flavors offset strong teas just enough to stand out and not be overwhelmed, while the teas can also stand up to the rye. The biggest difference I have noticed is even drinking a lot of strong tea, when just accompanied by a slice, with maybe a bit of butter, I don't get the horrible hunger pangs that normally come along with a lot of strong tea.
A really odd blend of East meets west, that works wonderfully in my opinion. But I could be biased as since I discovered Latvian rye, both the Storye and home made Latvian rye from a friend of my grandmothers and mothers, I have really been asking myself why all that other stuff I see in stores can be called rye bread.
2 comments:
Adam, it is more of a Near East meets Far East! :-)
Hektor in terms of location yes, but I was going more off of the culture type. Latvia is considered a Western Culture ( though I am starting to thing the definitions of Western Culture v. Eastern Culture v any other culture, are starting to be more and more blurred).
Also while I do not know quite how to classify Russia, in the US when the term Near East is used, its a replacement for "Middle East" so a Near East culture would be Arabic, Egyptian, Pakistani, Iranian, etc.... Quite different than Latvian culture in my mind. ( Another reason why I went with Western).
Post a Comment