What happens when you know exactly what Estonian food should taste like — but somehow the online recipe never tastes quite like Grandma’s? A travelling workshop may have answers.

There are some things Estonian grandmothers apparently expected future generations simply to know. How to make proper verivorst. What belongs in mulgipuder. How karask reaches that particular point somewhere between bread, comfort food and a direct line to childhood. And, perhaps most importantly, how to make your own kohuke when the nearest reliable supply is inconveniently located several suburbs — or several thousand kilometres — away.

If your family neglected to pass down these vital survival skills, help is coming. In September, Estonian cook Margit Kirss-Elsayed will take a traditional Estonian cooking workshop to Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, teaching participants how to make familiar favourites.

Meet Margit, the “culinary fairy”

Margit Kirss-Elsayed is a teacher, cook, trainer and passionate keeper of Estonia’s food heritage. She teaches at Olustvere School of Service and Rural Economics and is the founder of Kirsikool, where languages, culture, food and stories come together. She has taught cooking to both young people and adults and has also served as head chef of Estonia’s Song and Dance Festival, responsible for feeding large numbers of people during one of the country’s biggest cultural celebrations.

For Margit, food is about much more than recipes. She is particularly interested in the way tastes preserve memories of home and help carry the stories and identity of smaller cultures from one generation to the next. Her work explores Estonian heritage food, local traditions, wild plants, seasonality and finding new life for old recipes.

When in Australia, Margit says she hopes to bring with her a little piece of Estonia — its flavours, stories and warmth — and perhaps, for a few hours, the feeling of being home.

Event information

Sydney

Saturday, 5 September, 11 am
Arrive from 10.45 am
Estonian House
141 Campbell Street, Surry Hills NSW 2010

Tickets: $60 general admission; $50 for members of the Estonian Society in Sydney.

Melbourne

Sunday, 13 September, 3.45 pm
Gather from 3.30 pm
Mr Percival Cafe & Restaurant
14 Queens Road, Melbourne VIC 3004

Tickets: $50.

Adelaide

Sunday, 20 September, 11 am
Gather from 10.45 am
Estonian House
200 Jeffcott Street, North Adelaide SA 5006

Tickets: $50.

Get tickets to all events: https://www.trybooking.com/DNVZB

From grandmother’s kitchen to yours

Traditional food has an interesting habit of carrying much more than ingredients. A smell can suddenly put you back at a Christmas table decades ago. A particular dish can belong equally to a country, a family and one specific person who made it better than anybody else — despite apparently never measuring anything. And therein lies the problem. Recipes and cooking knowledge don’t automatically travel from one generation to another, particularly when families live halfway around the world.

These workshops aim to fill in a few of those gaps and pass on the cooking tips your grandmother may have neglected to share. Or, who knows, perhaps Margit knows a secret or two even your grandmother didn’t.

The September workshops will be hands-on, with participants preparing the dishes themselves before sitting down to enjoy what they have made. You will learn to prepare:

• verivorst — Estonia’s traditional blood sausage
• karask — a traditional quick bread
• mulgipuder — the hearty potato-and-barley dish associated with Mulgimaa
• kohuke — the sweet curd-cheese treat requiring no introduction to many Estonians.

We cannot promise that mastering homemade kohuke will make you dangerously popular among your friends. But we wouldn’t rule it out.

The workshops are an opportunity not only to cook but to spend a few hours around the tastes, stories and traditions that have travelled with Estonians across generations and oceans. And this time, somebody might actually tell you how much of everything goes in. Enjoy!

Read more

September cooking workshops | Facebook event page
Margit Kirss-Elsayed | Eesti Päevad Sydney 2027 (in Estonian)

Thank you

Thank you to Ave Nukki for information and photo!