Cheese, Honey, and Pickles (or, Estonian Grocery Shopping)

the one nice picture in this whole post! eggs, mushrooms, and black bread

If you don’t go into grocery stores when you travel abroad, you should. For a few reasons. First, grocery store food is cheap, and if you can, you should try to cook a little to save yourself some money! But second, it’s interesting. People are what they eat, and poking around a grocery store can tell you a lot about who people are and what they value.

So, come with me on a trip to the grocery store in Tallinn, complete with terrible pictures (grocery stores are not terribly photogenic)! There are two big chains: Selver and Rimi. Rimi is a little cheaper, but Selver has more locations. Most of these pictures were taken at a Selver near Balti Jaam bus station; I stopped here to buy emergency tampons while talking to my mom on the phone. It was not actually a good time to take pictures; I mean, I was buying emergency tampons. But once I had the idea for this essay, nothing could stop me, not even my menstrual cycle. Let’s get started.

But first, a quick note about the Estonian language in this post. Estonian has fourteen noun cases; that means that a noun can possibly appear in up to fourteen different forms depending on how the noun functions in the sentence. I know nothing about any of these cases or any of the nouns. So, when I tell you the Estonian word for “potato,” I’m telling you whatever the Internet tells me that “potato” is in Estonian. I have no idea which version of the noun I’m giving you. You can learn Estonian and then come back and fix this post for me. Deal? Good.

We shall start with produce. Estonia is about 40% farmland and they grow a lot of the usual Baltic suspects: cabbage (kapsas), beets (peet), carrots (porgand), potatoes (kartul), and mushrooms. You’ll see lots of mushrooms (seeb) in the supermarkets and at the vegetable stands, usually this very specific kind that look like shiitakes but have a yellow tinge. I bought some pre-sliced ones (chopping is hard with my cast) and cooked them in butter to eat with eggs in the mornings.

Next, bread. Leib. We’ll start with the packaged stuff. Most of it is the brown rye that is the national favorite, dense and just a little bit sweet, moister than the rye bread you find in Denmark. You can buy this bread for two to four euros, in loaves, half-loaves, or roll form, sliced or unsliced, seeds or no seeds, oats or no oats. It comes in every shade of brown, from inky-dark to the color of sand. And, of course, you’ve also got your typical white bread, hamburger buns, etc. But that’s boring.

Moving on to the grocery store bakery. Here you have cinnamon rolls (kaneelirull), which are like croissant dough spirals, not sweet yeasted dough like in the U.S., croissants, various other sweet pastries, and a large collection of savory hand pies, most of which involve meat of some kind. After Google Translating everything, I did try the kapsapirukas, the cabbage pie, and it was really tasty. Most of these pastries are about half a euro each.

Milk (piim)! Estonia has a large dairy industry, so milk is pretty cheap and very tasty, even if there isn’t a large selection. The milkfat percentage is also listed on the carton, so it’s easy to make sure you’re not buying coffee cream (kohvikoor) or heavy cream.

Estonia also is the seventh-largest per capita producer of cheese (juust) in the world. A lot of the sliced cheese sold at the store is just called “Estonian cheese” (Eesti juust), and it kind of tastes like a mild Swiss, but without the big holes. In the packaged cheese section, you can also buy “Dutch cheese,” “Gouda cheese,” and “Edam cheese,” among others. I have no idea how any of these are different from each other. You’ve also got sulatatud juust, which Google Translate tells me means “defrosted cheese,” but I think might be cream cheese, because it’s stocked near the Philadelphia cream cheese. You can try it for yourself. Report back if you do.

Eggs (munad) are stored at room temperature, like they are in the Netherlands. I don’t have any special information about Estonian eggs. Sorry.

Honey (mesi) is a different story; it’s a huge deal in Estonia, and you can buy it by the bucket! It’s thick, sweet, and prized all over the world for its quality. When I met with the U.S. ambassador to Estonia, there was a coffee and tea service laid out like I was a visiting dignitary (I was taken aback considering I’d been frisked like a suspected Russian spy on the way in), and instead of sugar, there was a jar of Estonian honey on the tray.

Fish! Fish is obviously a big part of Estonian cuisine, but I don’t feel like it’s as big of a deal here as it is in Norway and Denmark. Estonians like herring (which I did not try) and various other pickled and pureed fish products. Meat is also a big deal—the old market hall in Tartu was almost entirely meat, in sausage form and in big, raw, hunks. I didn’t take a picture because I don’t want to remember that. I am a vegetarian.

And now we come to the prepared foods, which I find fascinating. Pickles are a huge deal, especially cabbage and cucumbers, often sold by the pound from giant buckets. You also have a variety of Soviet-style prepared salads that I have an odd weakness for. The potato salad is a specific mix of potatoes, carrots, pickles, and eggs in a mayonnaise dressing that is known across the world as Russian salad or salad Olivier. Vinagret, a salad of beets, potatoes, and pickled cabbage, is also very good.

Finally, you deserve some chocolate and alcohol to top it all off (since you’re saving so much money by not eating out anyway). The dominant brand of chocolate (šokolaadi) is Kaleo, very tasty chocolate with unfortunate orange packaging. I really love their 87% chocolate, but I’m a freak—they have chocolate for normal people too, and marzipan bars, which you should also try. Tallinn claims to be the birthplace of marzipan, but I think that’s a myth.

Alcohol is legally required to be sold in a different section of the store so it’s not visible unless you go looking for it. Which I did, of course, because when an ATM shreds your only debit card, you need a drink. Luckily, you can get a large can of good beer (õlut) for about a euro and a half if you buy one of the two big national brands—A Le Coq and Saku. I prefer A Le Coq, specifically the one that comes in white cans (which I think is just their regular lager). Now, let’s go pay!

I’m always afraid of grocery store clerks because they’re no-nonsense; they don’t have patience for some fool who views grocery shopping as an enlightening cultural experience. But I have a method that lets me pass through checkout unscathed about 80% of the time:

1. Put your items on the conveyer belt while remaining straight-faced and silent. If you are feeling bold, say hi in the local language. In Estonia, you say "tere," (teh-REH) rolling the "r" a little bit like you're speaking Spanish.

2. When the cashier is done ringing you up, wordlessly hold up your credit card to indicate that is how you will pay—you’re a European, you don’t deal with cash!

3. Load everything into your backpack or a bag you brought with you.

4. Say “thank you” in the local language (in Estonia, you say "aitäh," eye-TAH) and walk away before they register how bad your accent is.

If you need a bag or a receipt, God help you, you’re on your own.