EU – Baltic States, Foodstuff, Good for Business, Latvia, Markets and Companies

Sklandrausis is a rye flour pie with a carrot and potato filling. The EC describes the designation as helping to increase „the market value of the products of economic operators, by guaranteeing that they are distinguishable from other similar products or foodstuffs”.

Sklandrausis is now a “Traditional Speciality Guaranteed” thanks to organization „Zaļais novads” from Dundaga, Latvia, as they filed the application with the EC in December 2011.

The word ‘Sklandrausis’ appears in volume three of Latviešu valodas vārdnīca (‘Dictionary of the Latvian Language’) compiled by K. Mīlenbahs and J. Endzelīns (1927-1929) along with the definition ‘a round pie with a filling’. The word is a compound of skland- and rausis. The word rausis (‘pie’) is derived from the verb raust (‘to rake over or strew’). This suggests that the pies were baked in a primitive fashion, by raking hot hearth ash or oven coals over them. Sklanda is an ancient word derived from the Couronian language (proto-language of the ancestors of the modern-day Courlanders, inhabitants of western Latvia) which means ‘fence-post, wattle fence’ or ‘slope, declivity’; referring to the upturned edges of the pie's crust.