Estonian cooking comes from a northern climate with a short growing season: rye, potatoes, pork, dairy, fish from the Baltic, and whatever the forest provides. It was food designed to survive winter, and the traditional dishes still taste like it.
Rye bread
Rukkileib, dark sourdough rye bread, is the single most important food in the country. Estonians abroad have it posted to them. Children are told not to waste it. It is dense, slightly sweet, sour and keeps for a week, and it accompanies essentially every meal.
There is a national superstition that dropping a piece of bread requires picking it up and kissing it. This is said half in jest and observed almost entirely seriously.
The traditional dishes
Verivorst — blood sausage with barley, served with lingonberry jam — is the Christmas dish, eaten with roast pork and sauerkraut. Sült is meat jelly, another festive staple that visitors approach cautiously. Mulgipuder, from the south, is potato and barley mashed together with fried pork and onion.
From the sea: kilu, Baltic sprats cured in spiced brine and served on black bread with egg, is the classic open sandwich. Smoked and marinated Baltic herring appear everywhere, and smoked fish from Lake Peipus is excellent.
Kama
Kama is a flour of roasted barley, rye, oats and peas, mixed with kefir or buttermilk and eaten as a cold dish or dessert. It is genuinely unusual, tastes like nothing else, and Estonians are very fond of it. There is now kama chocolate, kama ice cream and kama cocktails.
The forest
Foraging is central and taken seriously. Mushrooms — chanterelles, ceps, milkcaps — are picked in quantity in late summer and autumn. Wild berries: blueberries, lingonberries, cloudberries and bog cranberries. Many restaurant menus change with what has just been collected, and Estonians will discuss mushroom spots with the discretion of people protecting a valuable secret.
The new restaurants
Tallinn has developed a serious food scene over the past decade, built on exactly these ingredients treated with modern technique — several restaurants have won international recognition. Telliskivi and the Rotermann quarter concentrate the more informal end, and the covered Balti Jaam market is the best place to eat cheaply and well.
To drink: Vana Tallinn, a sweet dark liqueur that divides opinion sharply, local craft beer, which is very good, and kvass, the fermented rye drink sold from tanks in summer.