While I was visiting my friend Toma in Klaipeda, she made plans for us to go see her family out in the country. She wanted to introduce me to her parents and siblings and show me where she grew up. Never one to turn a chance like this down I immediately agreed.
Her mother and father met us at the train station in the afternoon. During the ride Toma was excited to inform me that her mother had ordered cepelinai for dinner. There’s a restaurant in her village that’s famous for it’s cepelinai, she told me. They’re delicious, huge, and cheap.
Her parents met us at the train station to give us a ride back to their house. I was getting pretty amped for lunch. We stopped at the house just long enough to drop our bags off then set out to the restaurant to bring the food back.
Two mouth watering cepelinai.
It was finally time to eat, Toma’s mother had set the table and served out everything. It was heavenly. A cepelinai is basically nothing more than a huge egg made of meat and potatoes. Hidden inside is a delicious core of ground meat seasoned just perfectly surrounded by a shell of mashed potatoes. I’ve eaten a lot of food while traveling and cepelinai is one of the best I’ve ever tried.
I enjoy cooking so I asked Toma’s mother if she knew how to make the cepelinai. Toma translated for us because her mother didn’t speak English and I can speak Martian better than Lithuanian. Of course she knew how to make them. All Lithuanian women do. Cepelinai are a special dish, very time consuming and difficult to make so they only come out for special occasions. Like visiting Americans I guess. She described the process to me and I thought that was the end of that.
We spent most of the next day working in their fields harvesting potatoes for the winter. It was a bit chilly out but the work kept us warm. The mother left a bit early and when the rest of us returned to the house she called me over. I walked into the kitchen and it was ready for some serious use. There were pots and pans and ingredients strewn all over the place. With a whole bunch of hand gestures and three or four words of English she indicated her and I were going to make cepelinai.
The process was very time consuming. Together we made enough to feed six people and it took close to four hours. It’s surprisingly easy to get past a language barrier with someone as talkative and outgoing as my friend’s mother. We held a number of good conversations ranging from my family back home to where me and Toma met to their family history complete with photo albums and other trinkets.
To make cepelinai you need potatoes. Boil, chop, then mash them up like you’d do for regular mash potatoes. After that you want to take around three quarters of the mashed potatoes and squeeze the liquid out with a cheese cloth. Pour off the excess water and the white liquid you collect is potato starch you need to save. This step takes the longest, it helps to have an extra set of hands. Put a little of the starch to the side. Mix all the potatoes in with the starch. Now it’s time to start making the cepelinai. Take a bit of the potatoes and flatten it in your hand. Then add a bit of the ground meat mixture you made ahead of time. Since this is such a long process many people make the meat earlier in the day, maybe the night before. You add the meat in the middle of the flatten potatoes then wrap the sides around to make a football shape. Or zeppelin shape, where the name comes from. Dip your finger in the starch set aside, brush the whole thing to help it stick together. Boil them in a large pot of water, it might help to add more starch here to prevent them from galling apart. When they float they’re ready to eat.
Cepelinai are often served with a white gravy. Just chop up some onions and bacon and fry them up. Add sour cream (this is heavy peasant food) to the pan with some black pepper and allow it to heat up.
Dinner with the family.
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