What local dishes should I try in Latvia, and where should I look for them?

Latvia's protected names split neatly into river food, dairy and bread. The Latvian Institute's national record lists Carnikava lampreys as a protected geographical indication, caught in the Gauja River from August to February and most prized grilled, and Salacgrīva lampreys as a second PGI, taken near the coastal mouth of the Salaca with a slightly smoky, briny character and a fishing method described as part of local life since the 18th century. A seasonal window of August to February is the single most useful fact in Latvian food planning: a summer visitor simply cannot eat the country's signature catch at its own season.

Rucava white butter is the third PGI — hand-churned, retaining its whey, with a recipe dating to the early 20th century. The fourth is Aglonas maizes veistūklis, a rye loaf filled with dried pork fat and onions, traced to 19th-century Latgale in the east of the country.

A further 3 products are registered as traditional specialities guaranteed, a designation that protects a recipe rather than a place. Sklandrausis is a sweet rye-crust pie layered with potato and carrot and flavored with caraway; because the TSG protects the method, producers outside its Kurzeme coast homeland can make it legitimately if they follow the registered recipe. Jāņu siers is a fresh sour-milk cheese made from milk, curd, caraway, butter or cream, eggs and salt, and it is the central festive food of Midsummer. Salināta rudzu rupjmaize, sweet-scalded rye bread, is made by partly scalding coarse rye flour before kneading, then adding caraway and sugar, with the dough rested in wooden tubs.

The single protected designation of origin is Latvian large grey peas, a soft, nutty variety grown only in Latvia, cultivated since the 18th century and selected at Priekuļi since 1925. They are cooked with bacon and onions and belong to Christmas.

Exactly 2 of these foods are calendar foods with a UNESCO connection, which makes timing a trip around them realistic rather than sentimental. Jāņu siers belongs to Midsummer, and the Baltic song and dance celebrations — inscribed by UNESCO in 2008 — are the other great fixture of the Latvian summer calendar. Grey peas belong to Christmas. The lamprey season runs August to February. Between them, those three windows cover most of the year but almost never overlap, so a food-led itinerary here is a choice rather than a sampler.

• Gauja mouth — Carnikava sits at the Gauja's outlet, and its PGI lamprey season runs from August to February.
• Vidzeme coast — Salacgrīva's lampreys are the second PGI, from the Salaca's coastal mouth.
• Kurzeme and Latgale — Sklandrausis belongs to the Kurzeme coast and Aglonas maizes veistūklis to Latgale, which puts those 2 protected baked names at opposite ends of the country.

Unpasteurized dairy is a specific risk in this region, not a general caution: the CDC's Yellow Book lists consumption of unpasteurized dairy as a transmission route for tick-borne encephalitis and names Latvia among the countries with the highest recent incidence, while noting that risk is negligible for travelers who avoid it and stay out of forested areas. Fresh farmhouse cheeses are exactly the category to ask about. More prosaically, several of these products are village-scale: the State Department describes Latvian medical care outside urban centers as limited and ambulances as mainly an urban service, which is a reasonable proxy for how rural the producing areas are. Latvia accepts only euros, and the currency limit is 10,000 euros or the equivalent in each direction.

The Latvia sights answer in this chapter describes the Gauja valley and its national park; the trip-planning answer covers entry terms and the Schengen arithmetic.