Recipe Cotechino with shrimp and lentils cream

The most typical Slovak national food is Bryndzové Halušky with bacon. This is made from potato dough mixed with a special kind of sheep cheese – „bryndza“ that tastes best in the so called cottages of shepherds or mountain chalets. The dish is topped by fried bacon lardons and some of the fat. Bryndzové halušky is best eaten with buttermilk or acidified milk. Slovakia can boast a remarkable world curiosity. Every year, in the mountain village of Turecká at the foot of the Veľká Fatra mountains, lovers of bryndzové halušky meet at the European championship for cooking and consuming of this dish.

Provocative appearance and produced in an extremely interesting way is branch cake – Šakotis. Its taste is as impressing as its appearance. And no one argues about the taste of the Lithuanian branch cake – it’s fabulous. It’s for a good reason that it came to Lithuania in the beginning of the 20th century and in just over a hundred years have become the centerpiece of every Lithuanian wedding table and a mandatory sweet offering to the most honourable guests.

Waterzooi is a classic stew of Flanders. Its name is Dutch, ‘zooien’ meaning ‘to boil’. It is sometimes called Gentse Waterzooi (in Dutch) which refers to the city of Ghent. The original recipe is made of fish, either freshwater or sea, though today chicken waterzooi is more common. The most accepted theory is that rivers of Ghent became too polluted and the fish disappeared. The stew is made of the fish or chicken, vegetables including carrots, leeks and potatoes, herbs, eggs, cream and butter and usually serbed as a soup with a baquette to sop up the liquid.

The borders between today’s Austria and its southern neighbours are particularly dissipating in Carinthia. Instead of drizzling with melted butter, here the famous ‘Kasnudel’ are topped with melted Sasaka: the word comes from the Slovenian language and simply means finely-diced bacon or a type of lardons. Besides being a wonderfully spicy spread for bread, it also figures prominently in Styrian cuisine, proving that the colorful culinary merry-go-round in the former territories of the Habsburg Monarchy is still vibrant today.