Finnish Food (by Liisa Salmi)

Finland has well followed the international trends in gastronomy and thus it is possible to get a great variety of different kinds of foods, especially in bigger places. If you travel around in the country you cannot expect all kinds of ethnic cuisine in every place, but on the other hand, you may find some genuinely Finnish courses. Not all countries in the EU value Finnish food (here I am referring to the Italian Prime Minister and some French high officials), which of course immediately made us to defend our eating.

The most important thing is perhaps that food grown in Finland is pure, especially compared to some other countries, and the Finnish Food Safety Authority is a very strict authority. EU gives us all directives on food safety, and unlike some other countries, Finland also follows them (it's our Lutheran sense of responsibility).

Please see http://www.foodfromfinland.com/ and once there, see also http://www.virtualfinland.fi/ for Gastronomy.

Although we nowadays import a lot of even exotic food from all over the world, it is good to know something of the basic Finnish characteristics in our food habits. We use a lot of rye and dark rye bread, even sour, is available everywhere. We grow also barley and oats, which both have health-promoting characteristics. Oats seems to be good for people with celiac disease, and much research is done in this field in Finland. All these are also used for porridges, of which we eat a lot.

Finns eat a lot of potatoes; they have kept us alive in hard and poor days in the past. At Midsummer, we get the first potatoes of the new harvest (“new potatoes”), and it is a must then to eat them with dill, butter and salt herring, caught in the N. Atlantic waters. We drink much milk, fat free and more or less fatty, and also their different sour variants. Finnish people are, perhaps surprisingly, one of the biggest coffee drinking nations in the world.

Being a scarcely populated country, we still live quite close to the nature. This also means that we do fishing and hunting, pick wild berries and fungi in the forests. We also grow a lot of strawberries, which are picked in July-August. This is the best time for Finnish fresh vegetables as well.

The menu in Finnish homes always includes berries (fresh, deep frozen, juice and jam made of them), and fungi (fresh, dried and deep frozen), fish (fried, cooked, marinated, barbecued, smoked) and many people in other places than the metropolitan area (“Rush Finland”) hunt especially in the autumn and eat much elk meat and of course reindeer meat in the North. As to meat, we eat pork, beef, mutton and poultry, but have to also import them.

We grow apples, plums and pears, but they grow properly only in Southern Finland. We prefer them to imported ones, because there is no need for preservatives, but we don't have enough of them for the whole winter.

Then there are the seasonal foods: at Christmas we eat ham, stockfish (not a delicacy to everyone), rice porridge, ginger biscuits and Christmas pastries with plum jam. At Easter we eat mutton and a special Easter pudding made of malt (it is dark brown and rather sweet and foreigners usually don't even want to look at it) and colour the Easter eggs with children or boil them with onion peels to make them yellow. Scattered around the year there are minor celebrations for various occasions and some of them have characteristic foods. Especially the Swedish speaking people have a crayfish party in August-September and then a lot of snaps is drunk and a lot of merry songs are sung.

Generally speaking, Finnish cuisine is a mixture of Slavic or Russian and Western foods. Especially different kinds of pies, both sweet and salt, are of Russian origin, and you can make a pie of almost anything. Interestingly enough, there is still a rather clear “bread division” in Finland: in Western Finland people have always eaten hard bread and in Eastern Finland people eat fresh bread. Nowadays the distinction is not so clear any more and the variety of breads is more or less international. In the West bread was made once or twice a year and then hung on the beams close to the ceiling and dried. In the East bread was made once a week and eaten fresh and soft. This also affected oral health: the Westerners had better teeth than the Easterners.

So, once in Finland, eat Finnish and go to the market places to see what we make our food of.

Liisa Salmi