Sklandrausis: the Latvian rye tart with carrot on top

Overview

A sklandrausis is a small open tart, roughly the size of a saucer, built on unleavened rye dough. The case is pressed by hand and its edge is pinched up into a low, uneven wall. Inside there are two layers: mashed potato at the bottom, sweetened mashed carrot on top, both seasoned with caraway. The carrot is what you see — an orange disc, slightly cracked, brushed with cream or butter and baked until it dries and firms rather than browns.

It tastes as odd as that description sounds and then stops being odd within two bites. Rye gives a dark, sour, almost bitter base; the potato is salted; the carrot is sweet but not dessert-sweet; caraway runs through both fillings and holds them together. It is not a cake and it is not a pie in the savoury sense, and Latvian has never needed to decide, because the category is simply rausis.

The dish is not the city’s own. It comes from Kurzeme, the western region — Courland on older maps — and Riga eats it the way capitals eat their countryside’s food: everywhere, all year, from a counter. Say so honestly and the dish gets more interesting rather than less, because the western origin is legible in the ingredients. Rye, potato, carrot and caraway is a list from a place with a short growing season and a long winter, and nothing in it needed to be bought.

It is also protected. In 2013 the European Commission registered sklandrausis as a Traditional Speciality Guaranteed — the designation that protects a recipe and a method rather than a place of production, which is the correct instrument here, since the point was never that the carrots grew on a particular hillside. That is the strongest checkable fact in the dish’s file: what is guaranteed is that a thing sold under the name is made of rye dough, potato and carrot in that order, and not of shortcrust and jam.

The name is old and its parts are Couronian rather than modern Latvian. Rausis relates to raking — the tarts were baked on the swept floor of a bread oven after the loaves came out, which is also why they are flat, small and cook quickly. A dish shaped by the leftover heat of something else is a common pattern in poor kitchens, and it is usually the honest explanation for a shape that otherwise looks decorative.

What to order

Ask for one sklandrausis; the plural you will hear at a counter is sklandrauši. The word alone is enough — this is not a dish with a menu of variants, and any bakery that has them has one kind.

What varies, and what is worth looking at before you point:

• The ratio. A good one is roughly equal parts potato and carrot, with the carrot layer thick enough to hold a crack or two. Where the carrot is a thin smear over a deep bed of potato, you have bought a potato tart with colouring on it.
• The edge. Hand-pinched walls are irregular by nature. A perfectly circular, machine-even rim means an industrial case, and the industrial case is made softer and sweeter than rye dough should be, because it has to survive a week in a packet.
• The surface. It should look matt and slightly dry, with fine cracks. Glossy, wet or uniformly smooth means either a heavy cream glaze or a reheated one.

They are eaten at room temperature and are meant to be firm in the hand — you hold one, you do not need a plate. Warmed is a modern habit and not wrong, but a sklandrausis served hot loses the contrast between the sour case and the sweet top, which is the whole architecture.

The standard accompaniment is coffee or, at home, milk. Nobody puts anything on top.

In Riga the two reliable places to find them are the covered market halls and ordinary bakery counters, where they sit alongside the rye bread rather than in the cake case. There is also a dedicated festival in Dundaga, out in the region the tart comes from, which is the sort of thing to know exists rather than to plan a trip around.

What to avoid

The commonest disappointment is the supermarket version in a sealed tray. It is legal — the protection guarantees the method, not the freshness — and it is dry in a way that a day-old bakery one is not, because it has been made to keep. If the packet gives it three weeks, the rye in it has been softened with wheat, whatever the label says about tradition.

Second: anything called a carrot cake in translation. Menus in the centre occasionally render sklandrausis that way for visitors, and the two things share a vegetable and nothing else. If what arrives is soft, sweet all the way through and has icing on it, that is what you have been given.

Third, and specific to the centre of the city: the tourist-facing “Latvian tasting plate”, on which a sklandrausis appears as a decorative wedge next to grey peas and black bread. The tart is a two-bite object designed to be eaten whole; quartered on a board it is cold rye and a smear.

The price tells you something here, in the direction people do not expect. This is a cheap tart made of cheap roots, and a bakery selling it at a few times the market-hall price is charging for the room. But an implausibly cheap one at a chain counter is the tray version, warmed.

Practicalities

Reckon on roughly €1 to €2.50 apiece at a market hall or a neighbourhood bakery, and up towards €4 in a café in the old town where it comes with a coffee and a saucer. Two are a snack; three are lunch, and heavier than the size suggests, because the base is potato.

They are a morning and afternoon thing. Bakeries have them out from opening, and the honest window is the first half of the day — a counter that still has a full tray at six in the evening either baked a great many or baked them yesterday. Market stalls sell out and do not restock.

There is no season for eating them, but there is one for meaning: they belong to the ritual calendar, and they turn up in quantity around Jāņi, the midsummer holiday, and at Christmas markets, when they are one of the few stalls’ items that is not mulled. Around midsummer the bakeries make many more of them, which is the best week of the year to compare two side by side.

Cash is not required — cards work almost everywhere in Riga, including market stalls — but the smallest sellers price in coins and appreciate them. Buy them the same day you eat them; they keep for two or three days at room temperature and the carrot goes dull well before the rye does.