These boots are made for pickin’: Culinary delights in Finland

Eat love Fin: Cityscape, Helsinki!

Ever picked Rudolph’s rosy schnozzle off the menu? The schnozzle is fried in fat, spiced with black pepper, salt and cooked tender in beer or cream. Even when Christmas is around the corner and even though slaughtering Santa’s reindeer for a meal is generally an unpalatable idea, in Finland, poronkäristys (sautéed reindeer) with a side of mashed potatoes and lingonberry preserve is a big, fat gamey meal. Lean, actually: it’s high in B-12, omega-3 and omega-6. It’s also dished as reindeer steaks and cold smoked reindeer.

Finland is one of the biggest exporters of reindeer meat and in 80-year-old Savoy, one of Helsinki’s grandest dining rooms, I could order glazed leg of wild reindeer with whey cheese-seasoned celeriac and smoked ham sauce. Or, I could book a seat at a table for 22, get suspended 50 metres mid-air for a Dinner in the Sky — with my feet dangling over the Helsinki skyline, and sample reindeer pate. Instead, I head for Loyly, the newest sauna in the Finnish capital. Mostly for their menu: lightly smoked garlic soup, fish cake made of rainbow trout and pike, butter potatoes and crayfish stock, and licorice panna cotta.

In Finland, all meals begin with dark, sour ruisleipa, the country’s most popular bread; and its cousins named limppu (dry rye bread), reikäleipä (rye bread with a hole in the centre), vesirinkeli (small rings of yeast leavened wheat bread), jalkiuunileipa (after-oven bread), nakkileipa (crisp bread), korppu (rusk), and rieska (unleavened barley flat bread). With oat and potato bread also in the basket, Finnish bread can be white, brown, dark, flat, round, with a hole, wheat, rye and barley. Rye is the most common and preferred because it is famously immune to spoiling — it can stay on for months without developing a mold.

Finland’s famous rye bread! 

In Helsinki, supposedly the world’s coldest capital, one never has to buy bottled water. The tap water in Helsinki is so good that it is exported (Saudi Arabia buys drinking water from Helsinki); hardly surprising, perhaps, since the tap water here comes straight from the mountain springs via Päijännetunneli, the longest water tunnel in the world — it starts at Lake Paijanne, Finland’s second largest lake and ends in Silvola reservoir in Vantaa, in the Greater Helsinki area.

On cold days, when even the mornings are inky, Karl Fazer Cafe is the best place to warm up with a tall coffee tumbler. Founded in 1891 and famous for its art deco facade, this cavernous cafe is where the history of Fazer chocolates started. One can choose from salmon and shrimp sandwiches, towering sundaes and dazzling cakes. Before stepping into the cafe, remember to leave all saucy stories behind — rumour has it that the glass cupola of the cafe reflects sound. Certainly a bad place for gossip.

No food trail in Helsinki is complete without a berry-day. There are nearly 50 kinds of wild berries in Helsinki, of which 37 are edible. Once summer ends, Finnish grandmothers slip into their boots, scarf their hair and then disappear into the woods. As twilight falls, they return home laden with treasures — lingonberries, bilberries, cloudberries, raspberries, cranberries, bog whortleberries, mountain crowberries, sea-buckthorn berries and rowanberries. Roughly 500 million kilogrammes of berries and 2 billion kilogrammes of mushrooms grow in Finland’s forests every year.

An ancient teapot in Turku’s Museum of History & Contemporary Art