Baltic Christmas Day 17 - Searching for a taste of home

It’s across the Atlantic to the UK today on Day 17 of 24 Days of a Baltic Christmas. Please welcome back Margaret Drummond, with her post on Kūčios in London, then and now!

“Searching for a taste of home....” Kūčios in London then and now.

When I was a child growing up in London in the 60’s, my parents were friendly with a fair number of Lithuanian families in the city. Actually, my parents were probably acquainted with every Lithuanian family living in the capital, because in those days there were just 1,000 of us living in London- and only 4,000 altogether in the UK. Most, like my dad, were Displaced Persons who arrived after World War II, with a few “old Lithuanians,”- people whose parents had come between the wars.  We grew used to explaining- “no not the Balkan- the Baltic States,” “no we’re not Polish,” and “no, my dad is not a Russian spy”- this last comment to the girl at school who asked me that very question! We clustered around the Lithuanian Church in Hackney. Dad would pop into the club in Victoria Park to hear the news, any news about what was happening in Lithuania, to borrow books, papers, records from friends who had obtained them somehow and to hear the gossip. Someone who had heard from his sister in Chicago that a cousin in Vilnius had heard that in Gaiziunai......You get the picture. They soldiered on. They had their church, the choir, there was a Saturday school, the Scouts, the dance group, Sodyba in Hampshire, and of course the weekly newspaper printed in West London. However, it was hard, especially for the older people, to retain what they had remembered, or thought they remembered, about the country they had left so long ago.  

However, since Independence and Lithuania’s accession to the European Union in 2004, times have changed! London now has the largest population of ethnic Lithuanians outside the Republic of Lithuania – with approximately 100,000 Lithuanian residents, the majority residing in the eastern boroughs of Newham, Redbridge and Barking and Dagenham where I grew up and where I still live today. With that wave of migration came a new form of Lithuanian culture, one that differed from the one my dad and his friends remembered, but one with some traditions that were familiar all the same.

Take Kūčios. Years ago, when no one had ever heard of Lithuania, my parents would struggle to find things for Christmas Eve. Firstly, there was the problem of whether my sister and I would even eat anything. The texture of salted herring proved very difficult to sell as did the acidity of beets and gherkins- and then there was the much greater problem of actually finding the necessary items in the shops.

Some years there would be a quick trip to Baltic Stores on Hackney Road run by Mr. Juras. Given the fact that his suppliers were mostly behind the Iron Curtain, the availability of products and their practicality for a small family were always unpredictable. 

“Juras has salted herrings,” my dad would announce excitedly, after attending Mass at St Casimir’s, “but they come in a big catering tin and need soaking.” Often it was judged too inconvenient to go off and buy such items. How many herrings would the four of us consume when my sister and I would only eat them reluctantly? And we also lived in an area rich in Jewish delis. You could get almost anything at the deli, and our lovely 2^nd-generation Litvak neighbours would recommend where to go and even offer recipes. Then it transpired that the fishmonger next to the deli did special orders on Christmas Eve for Polish customers, and just before Christmas he would go off to Billingsgate with a pocket full of orders from those in the know.

Later in the Eighties we attended an authentic Kūčios at Headley Park and discovered that our version of Kūčios had been but a pale imitation of the real thing; the drive for authenticity became even more competitive. I remember one year at Headley, someone had even gone as far as to snare a fearsome pike from a local lake, hunter-gatherer style. Fishmongers were strictly for softies. We attempted to make poppy seed milk with an old-fashioned pestle and mortar like our grandmothers had done, and poured this over the little biscuits we baked using recipes from the one or two Lithuanian cookery books we possessed- recipes which began “Take twenty-four large eggs.....” We sought out strange grains in health-food shops to eat with honey, and just like our grandmothers who spent hours slaving in their kitchens getting it right in the inter-war years when most farms had neither electricity nor running water, so did we in the West spend the weeks before Christmas Eve running ourselves ragged, tracking down suitable items for the table in a bid to make it all as authentic, as traditional, as possible. Ironic, really…. our cousins on the other side of the Curtain spent their lives carrying their string bags in the hope of suddenly finding something in short supply and bemoaning the fact that there was nothing to buy in the shops, and here we were, scouring East London shops in a bid keep it all alive.

But that is all in the past.

Now in East London you can get everything, and not just in tiny corner shops but in large ethnic supermarkets like Lituanica* in Beckton.  I discovered this culinary palace a few years ago, and this year the management was kind enough to allow me to take some photos to show the variety we now have here in London after all those years of making do. The Lituanica company started in Ireland 20 years ago and has been trading in the UK for the last 15 years. With a number of branches in the London’s East End, the traditional area for Lithuanian settlement, there are also stores further afield in places like Birmingham and Bedford. Lituanica is now the UK’s oldest importer of Eastern European food and its leading wholesaler. The complex in Beckton which I visited also boasts a cosy restaurant, selling authentic ethnic food and delicious coffee & cake, a hairdresser’s, a beauty salon and a wonderfully eclectic bookshop. Sadly, my parents are no longer here to see it but if they were, surely, they would be quite overwhelmed. My Dutch mum used to talk about the early days of her marriage, spent in a bed-sit in Notting Hill Gate, a stone’s throw from Lithuanian House. In those days, she used to say, you couldn’t get salami or even coffee easily in England.

When I visited this year it was too early for my Kūčios shopping, but later this month I will be returning for some herring salad in beetroot and Kedainiai cucumbers which really are the best in the world- well I would say that as that’s where my ancestral roots are- and I shall also buy some of their excellent rye bread to serve with my homemade mushroom soup.  However, I shall still go down the road to the Kosher deli for the salted herrings- the oily ones are not to my taste and those salty Bismarck ones remind me of Christmases past and the special trips we had to make to source them.

Christmas biscuits

And therein lies the nub of the matter. Everyone wants to recreate that Christmas magic that is so special to their own individual family, but how much have tastes and customs changed since my dad left his farmhouse in the forest nearly 75 years ago? Was he striving to recreate that special Kūčios moment for me all those years ago, the same one his mother created for him? Things have moved on everywhere.  How much did tastes and expectations change in Lithuania during the years of Soviet rule? Indeed, how well did our parents remember how and what our grandparents cooked for Kūčios?  And haven’t our palates also changed even in the last twenty or so years in the West?  Lituanica is a taste of home for modern Lithuanians but for those of us who have been longer in the UK, it is best viewed as a holiday to rediscover our roots, rather than a place to find old favourites from the past. Most of those Lithuanian brands are probably thirty or so years old- and modern. Instant Kisielius and ready-made poppy seed milk. Would my močiutė have approved? But then why not, if it makes life a whole lot easier? And I also wonder about the older generation back in the Baltics, today’s grandparents, who grew up under Soviet rule. Do they too hanker after the taste of home?  If you’ve ever seen the film “Goodbye Lenin” and remember the saga of the Spreewaldgurken – where the main character hunts for old East German versions of his mother’s favourite food before they all disappear - you will understand my point.

However, whether you want to celebrate Kūčios as they do today in Lithuania, or if you want to re-create that do-it-yourself version that you experienced as a child, Lituanica is really a top find and like the other new Baltic stores in my area is beautifully clean and reasonably priced with helpful and polite staff. Interestingly it is on a site next door to an Asian supermarket and opposite a Chinese one. Do many customers visit all three just to browse?  Lithuanians are the new kids on the block in our area. Being so close to the Thames there has long been a significant Chinese community in the area and for the last fifty years our suburbs have become a favourite spot for first- and second-generation families with roots in the Indian sub-continent.…….. East London is, and always has been a melting pot, and on a Friday or a Saturday night residents of all ethnicities will “go out for an Indian” or “go out for a Chinese.” So maybe Baltic cuisine will be the next big thing. Cepelinai anyone?

* Special thanks to the staff at Lituanica in Beckton who were so hospitable. You can find out more about them at https://lituanica.co.uk/

Ačiū, Margaret! It is definitely easier to find Latvian foodstuffs and similar products here in the US as well, if not in a shop, then online. However, I still wish for a store like Lituanica, where I could buy authentic rye bread, yeast cakes (instead of active dry) for baking, pelēkie zirņi (grey peas), not to mention things like pīrāgi and piparkūkas! It is exactly as you pointed out – I could make everything from scratch, but the time required (not to mention things don’t usually turn out exactly as I remember they should), makes it impractical in today’s world.

Margaret Drummond grew up in a Dutch/Lithuanian home in London. She is a translator and retired teacher and is interested in how cultures merge and change. You can read last year’s contribution to this blog here: “On the pitfalls of buying a carp for Christmas.” You can also sometimes find her on CafeLit and on the Central and Eastern European Review blog.

Coming up tomorrow, on Day 18 of a Baltic Christmas… Rīga in the winter!