UT Blog

Sille Vadi is a valued food blogger and an award-winning cake master who works at the Institute of Cultural Research and Fine Arts at the University of Tartu. If you speak some Estonian, check out her popular food blog.

It seems to be quite a simple question, at least for Estonians. Almost everyone would reply at once: sauerkraut, roast pork, and blood sausage. And maybe not so much the taste, but rather the smell of gingerbread and clementines. Then I started to think whether the taste scale is still wider than that. That’s why I decided to carry out a kind of sociological inquiry and asked my friends, colleagues and acquaintances: What does Christmas taste and smell like to you?

To me Christmas smells probably most like a blown-out candle, or rather a mixture of smells of blown-out candles, fir tree and clementine peels. It reminds me of this peculiar, a bit sad, and bittersweet feeling from childhood, when candles were blown out, smoke was curling into the air and there was Christmas night outside the windows.

People who shared their thoughts with me brought up several tastes and smells.
On this basis Christmas seem to taste like: sauerkraut, roast pork, blood sausage, lingonberry jam, hazelnuts (with the shells on), (red) apples, pickled pumpkin, (pickled) fish, roast duck with apples, stuffed eggs, cranberry juice, clementines, crispy ham, potato salad, thick fruit soup with whipped cream, meat pie with raisins, dried fruit loaf cake, pickled cucumbers. Continue reading →