Notes from Tallinn

By Raul Dias

Quick question. What’s the common denominator between Coca Cola, the tonic water part of a gin-n-tonic and marzipan? Believe it or not, as it so happens, all three of them were invented in a pharmacy as medicines! I pick up this nugget of trivia as I bite the head off a dinosaur. And no, I’m not relating the contents of a substance-induced ‘trip’. My trip is of the real kind. A trip that I recently took into the wonders of the Baltic country of Estonia and more specifically, to its charming portside capital, Tallinn.

Sweet Somethings
I’m at Maiasmokk Café on Pikk Street, the Tallinn version of Willy Wonka’s candy wonderland and I’ve just been handed a luridly green coloured three-inch tall tyrannosaurus rex made from the store’s—and the city’s—number one calling card, marzipan. Hand painted by Külli Mihkla who is just one of the six remaining marzipan painters in all of Estonia, my first bite is everything Estonian marzipan is made out to be. The perfect sum of its almond paste, liquid glucose and powdered sugar parts to which a drop or two of bitter almond extract is blended in.
But this iteration’s not overtly sweet as compared to the Italian marzapane, or even to the one my confectioner mother makes back home in India, which sees the substitution of almond with the more regional cashew paste. But there’s a reason (which I’ll get to in a little while) for the lack of cloying sweetness to Estonian martsipan, I’m told.
This time I find myself at Tallinn’s Kalev Marzipan Museum Room which serves as both a store and a museum and is regarded as Estonia’s de facto Ground Zero for all things marzipan. Besides its trio of marzipan painters who sit behind a glass partition, painting everything from snowmen to kittens with vegetable dyes, the museum even has its own marzipan researcher in the form of Otto Kubo, who has worked at Kalev for 60 years. And it’s the genial, pink-cheeked Otto who’s giving me a crash course in all things martsipan—Estonian style!

Putting the ‘Mart’ in ‘sipan’
Quick to dispel any errant talk of marzipan being a German invention, as conjecture would have us believe, Otto tells me that both Tallinn and Germany’s marzipan capital Lübeck were both, at one point in time, Hanseatic towns. Towns, that were part of the same commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds that came to dominate Baltic maritime trade for three centuries along the coast of Northern Europe from 1100AD to it decline in the 1450s.
He hands me a dog-eared copy of the book Mardileib (Mart’s Bread) by Jaan Kross, which he summarises for me, revealing hitherto unknown facets to the confection I so love.
It all started in the 15th century when a certain Rathmann Kalle, a member of Tallinn’s city council took ill with a stomach ache and approached an apprentice pharmacist named Mart at the Tallinn Town Hall Pharmacy to come up with a curative potion. Now, as Kalle was a high-ranking official, Mart had to first taste the medicine himself, before administering it to his patient, just to prove that it wasn’t poison in disguise. So, to make it more palatable, he made sure to add a little sugar to the almond paste and bitter almond extract to mask the medicinal taste of the concoction.
To cut a long story short, Kalle liked the medicine prepared by the apprentice pharmacist very much and it was truly able to cure his stomach! It was Kalle, who then called the medicine “Mart’s Bread” or martsipan.
And the rest as they say is (edible) history, which is alive and kicking in Tallinn to this very day!


(An edited version of this article first appeared in the 18th February 2018 issue of The Hindu newspaper's Sunday Magazine section on page 7 http://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/travel/notes-from-tallinn/article22783570.ece)