Rye, blood and other foods

While I'm hatching some other thoughts for a more interesting post, today I'll talk about food. (Who doesn't like food?) First bread, one of my favorites. Rye is a grain hardy enough to grow here, so Finns eat a lot of it. The bread aisle would be virtually unrecognizable as such to an American shopper. Sure, there are 'toasting breads' (into which almost all American bread would be categorized) that come in a boxy loaf ready for slicing. But most of the rye bread comes in serving-size pieces. These can be dark, flat rolls sliced in two that are in squares or circles. But they can also be round, flat loaves with a big hole in the middle. Oats also grow here, so you can find these breads in the oat version as well. Then there are the crisp breads, or 'näkkileipä'. We have Rye Krisp at home. Imagine that in about 50 varieties including sourdough and nearly paper-thin, rye and oat, and you have some idea of what the bread aisle looks like --tons of these two types of bread with a small 'slicing bread' section. (There are also 'karjalan piirakoita' but I've already talked about those.)

While we're on grain products, I'll mention the sweeter breads. I say "sweet-ER" because nothing here is terribly sweet, as you can also see by the fact that the sugar and the flour are not in the same grocery aisle. There's "pearl sugar" in the flour aisle -- that's what you can sprinkle on top to make it look pretty and add just a little sweetness. I grew up eating something called 'nisua', which is actually an old word for 'wheat' in Western Finnish. This is a semi-sweet bread made with egg and cardamom, braided into a loaf that you slice. (Any Saranpas reading this will be salivating about now.) You can find this bread in great quantity in the markets here, but it's called 'pulla' (related to the Swedish word 'bulle' or roll). This is in its own aisle section together with cinnamon rolls and other baked goods to be eaten with coffee. The sweeter things like cakes and pastries are in their own little section, and there are a lot fewer of them.

I spent some time studying the sugar aisle yesterday because I was looking for brown sugar so I can make some banana bread from my overripe bananas. Most of the sugar was cube sugar for coffee. There was also some loose sugar, but none in the large bags you can get at home -- here it's in small boxes, because you don't need a lot of it for baking. There's also vanilla sugar, which is sugar that has been 'cured' with vanilla bean, and there's 'farina' sugar, which is somewhat brown (but doesn't clump together like ours). I did find brown sugar, imported from Denmark.

The candy aisle was next in my research. Given the fact that Finns eat breads and cakes that aren't as sweet, what about the candy? There are American and Swedish and Finnish chocolate bars along with fancier Swiss and German ones, but these are lower down, not at eye level. What is at eye level are rows and rows of bags. These bags have combinations of licorice and gummy candies, which tend to be less sweet than chocolate bars. I tried a 'seven-flavor' assortment last weekend that was not exactly a rousing success with me. I don't mind salmiakki (ammoniac, or, as some would say, pee-flavored), but I would never think to combine it with chocolate, strawberry and licorice together. But many of my Finnish and Swedish friends love salmiakki. Salt licorice is another very special flavor that is an acquired taste. I really do think desserts are very culture-specific, moreso than other foods, and perhaps it's because these foods are used as rewards when we are little that we attach to them so tightly.

Well I've blathered on about food, but I do need to mention a few things Americans might find quirky before I wrap this up. I got to visit a Finnish family in April and we had a wonderful dinner. Included was a selection of meats, but when they told me one of them was horse, I thought they were joking around. However, they were serious. I did try it, and it had a smoky flavor with a consistency I couldn't compare to anything else. Finns also eat blood pancakes (I saw them in the market, between the spinach and mushroom pancakes), fish baked in rye bread and herring-beet salad. Finnish milk products deserve their own post because there are so many of them.

This post about food wouldn't be complete without a description of what my friends Jim and Chris and I ate at the lovely Kielo restaurant before they left. They offer traditional Karelian fare using local produce and meats. We had herring on karjalan piirakka, barbecued boar and some amazing vegetable pancakes made from carrots, bread crumbs (probably rye) and other wonderful things. And the mushrooms! This is a mushroomer's paradise. I'll try to post one I parked my bike next to, not five feet away from my building.

Supposedly Berlusconi said something like British cuisine would be the worst in the world if it weren't for Finnish food after some meeting here. (It could have been someone else, but it's always easy to blame Berlusconi.) I wonder where he was eating. I like it just fine.