No better fish to fry
If you ask a Finn what Finnish food culture is like, you are not likely to get a straight answer. Finnish cuisine is a curious blend of East, West, varied natural ingredients and imagination.
What is Finnish food? Faced with this question abroad, I have found myself at a loss for words. Is it the decidedly unattractive mämmi, a brown-black porridge of malted barley eaten with cream and sugar? Or rednosed reindeer, dumpling soup, or the traditional Christmas fish lipeäkala, which is air-dried white fish, prepared with lye?Mushrooms, berries and huge portions
A great dollop of mashed potatoes, fried Baltic herring and a large
amount of melted butter! This is the best-known dish served at Salve, a restaurant next to Hietalahdentori square in Helsinki.
Salve is a seamen’s restaurant upholding a tradition that goes back
110 years. The business started with a kiosk selling lunches and tobacco to sailors. Today, Salve enjoys such a strong reputation that anyone wishing to update or upgrade it would do so at their peril.
“We did try it once, and the customers revolted. My job is to keep this place as it is and has always been,” says Mika Elo, the restaurant manager.
A strong dash of traditional local colour is lent by a party of 70-something men, who blend into the nautical yet dignified atmosphere of the place like olive oil into a salad.
Elo assures us that there are no better connoisseurs of Finnish culinary culture than the ‘boys’ here. So, Messrs. Boys, what exactly are Finnish food and cuisine all about?
“Genuine, honest flavours, no gimmicks,” comes the answer.
From butter dish to healthspreads
Merja Sillanpää Ph.D. studies Finnish food culture. She explains
that in wartime, fathers would often promise their children that once the
war was over, they would buy a slab of butter and eat it by the spoonful. Once the standard of living began to rise and people were able to afford butter and sugar, a trend began which is often taken to characterize Finnish food culture as a whole.
Frying became all the rage, and advertisements encouraged mothers to give sugar to their children: after all, sugar was a wholesome nutrient. And where has this got us today?
Finns suffer from the same obesity problems as the old-established
wealthy nations of Europe. However, at the same time Finland has begun to produce functional foods, meaning foods that actually improve one’s health, and these are being emulated elsewhere in Europe.
“We are pioneers in safety and in functional foods. Our food expertise
is of a technical sort. We are a nation of engineers,” says Marja Innanen, General Secretary of the Government´s new Food Programme.
Innanen believes that the appreciation of Finnish food is rapidly ascending, both in Finland and abroad. The only problem is that Finns do not really know how to be proud of what they have. Finns tend to belittle their own expertise and natural resources. This is one reason why so many of the finest raw materials in the land — herbs, root vegetables, berries, vegetables — rot in the forests and fields without ever being found by pickers.
Simple and distinct flavours
Juuri (‘Root’) is a restaurant in Helsinki founded three and a half
years ago on the strength of a brainwave of chefs Ilja Björs and Jarkko Myllymäki: Finnish tapas, which they called sapas. This stemmed from a notion of updating the heritage and foods of the traditional Finnish country banquet.
Today, the restaurant is known and popular even among foreign visitors. It serves food which is proud of its Finnish roots but skilfully tailored to modern taste buds.
Their small sapas portions combine flavours in sometimes alarming
ways, aiming to keep the original flavours as pure as possible. This philosophy emphasizes the core of Finnish food culture, something that the Boys at Salve touched upon too: simplicity.
“There are extremities in the world of flavours, and we combine them,”
Björs says.
Although there is no single food or dish that could epitomize the whole of Finnish food culture, there is a range of raw materials that help define it. Berries, mushrooms, fish, game and health foods point to what it is all about: the richness of nature and pure flavours. And, of course, advanced engineering.
By Tiia Lappalainen
Photos Miika Kainu
