eating, drinking

Traditional Estonian cuisine meant meat, bread and potatoes. The meat was usually pork, the bread was brown and the potatoes were boiled. To be charitable, let's call it the hearty fare of hard-working peasants.

Fortunately this bears no resemblance to what is available in Tallinn today. The range of cuisines is world-class - French, Italian, Indian, Asian, even African - plus, of course Russian. Estonia has a large Russian minority and excellent restaurants to match.

Modern Estonian chefs have also reinvented their own nation's historical delicacies. It's no longer peasant food and yet the prices are still considerably less than you would pay for food of the same standard in Finland or Sweden.

THE COLD TABLE
Like the Finns and Swedes, Estonians start their meals with an array of salted, dried or smoked fish in a variety of sauces. The finest fish is thought to be Atlantic herring but the smaller Baltic herring is fine. So are smelts, predominantly a lake fish. These are all eaten with potatoes and brown bread.

Two unusual features of the Estonian cold table are small pies and cold jellied meat (sült in Estonian). It may look like brawn but the best is made of veal, braised with pigs' feet to provide natural gelatin. It is often served with potato salad.

Finally you should try rosolje, a salad made of beetroot as well as beef, herring, hard-boiled eggs, apples, mustard and vinegar, plus mayonnaise or sour cream or both. Many other northern European countries have their own versions - the original word and recipe comes from Russia - but Estonians seem to throw the greatest variety of ingredients into it.

THE MAIN COURSE
In winter a soup might replace the cold table or at least precede the main course but, in summer time, this is no great loss. Traditional Estonian soups are based on chicken bouillon with vegetables, nothing to write home about. As for their meat soups, there's often too much cream for modern tastes.

The likeliest next course will be pork. With millennia of experience, Estonians do cook pigs well but, if you can get it, try to order wild boar. Game like deer and elk is often available too but tends to be expensive, whereas wild boars have been successfully raised by farmers in semi-enclosed grounds.

These are undomesticated pigs covered in gray hair. The meat has a gamey aroma and is dark red compared with normal pale pork. It also contains less fat. Naturally, if pork is out of the question for dietary or religious reasons, there's no trouble finding other meats or vegetarian choices.

Estonia has a fair number of distinct national dishes, from the curious to the repulsive. Silgusoust is Baltic herring with bacon in sour cream, strange but not too offensive. And visitors often find mulgikapsad, fermented cabbage stewed with pork, to be quite innocuous.

The sticking point is usually verivorst, blood and barley sausage, served with red berry jam. The trick to eating it successfully is lots of jam.

DRINK
Like the Finns, who speak a similar language in and out of the kitchen, Estonians drink beer and milk. Both are excellent and the range of beers is still very wide; brewers haven't all focused on standard lager.

There is also a small beer, kali, which is sweet and slightly fizzy. It is more like Finnish kalja than Russia's muddy kvass.

Liqueurs tend to be extremely sweet and either very alcoholic or smothered in cream. Men will prefer Estonian vodka, clean, strong and unpretentious.