Traditional recipes?

[Hasse Admin Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Hasse]

This is not a genealogy topic of course, but connects in a way since recipes also travelled from the old country as "carry over" to the new with the emigrants. Some recipes fell maybe out of use and others not. Some recipes only exist as memories or remembered smells and tastes.

Last year I got a recipe book from MI with lots of recipes connected to the Italian food culture, recipes that still are used by the current generations. many of these seem really interesting and the recipe book is in frequent use. (Thanks Paula S.!)

How is it with the recipes and food culture that came with the emigrants from Finland and Scandinavia? Is it only "bulla/pulla", "Squeeky cheese", "köttbullar", "smörgåsbord", "fil/viili" and lutfisk from Norway?

What do you 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation emigrants remember and what recipes do you have and/or use of dishes, cakes, sweets, coffee bread, jams, bread, ... What stories are connected with the recipe?

If you come up with recipes and stories behind the recipe I will enter them on a dedicated recipe page on the SFHS' web page.

You can post the recipe here as part of the discussion or directly to me if you wish.

Hasse

[kivinen1 Registered Find all posts View Profile Close kivinen1]

We often had lanttulaatikko, even if it came from my Swedish speaking Finns, we never used the Swedish name and I don't know what it would be.

My mother's mother always made many different kinds of bread; limppu, limpa and pulla were the most common that she would make.

My father's mother always made a very good, tough and chewy rye bread that is somewhere close to jälkiuunileipä, but not so much of a strong taste. She also made an excellent bread that was supposed to come from around Oulu that was made with mostly graham, but I don't remember the name of it.

We also ate potatoes nearly every day, and we used a string that a cousin had mailed from Finland to make viili.

Most often we ate a lot of cabbage and sauerkraut, but not like German style kraut.

Always we made salt pickles and every kind of salt fish and smoked fish.

I wish I had the time to cook, bake and can / preserve like I did when I was younger.

I still have some of the recipes for these and many other dishes that we made.

Oh, mom's mom used to make "Laxluoda" [I don't know the proper spelling, but it is obviously an Ostrobothnian word] - usually just with the salmon head, potatoes, onions, water, salt, pepper and butter. I didn't like it with the eyes looking up at me.

And, for last minute, unannounced visitors, we always made pankaka / pannukakku.

[Karen Norwillo Registered Find all posts View Profile Close Karen Norwillo]

Potato sausage, Perunamakkara, was a Christmas tradition, along with lutefisk. Grandma always made a jelly roll cake and cardamom bread. Our kids treat at visits to her was coffee, more milk than coffee, and jelly roll. Most bread was made using the potato water. Bread was always homemade.

[kathy Registered Find all posts View Profile Close kathy]

My father was born in Finland and my mother's parents were both from Finland. Mom was the best baker. I loved her bread when it was fresh out of the oven. Although as a child I did not like cardamom, so I was not happy when she would add that to her bread. She also made the very best caramel rolls. When she passed away I was only in high school so I did not bake with her very often. Her recipies passed down to me, but only the ingredients were listed and not the amounts. Not being a baker at the time, the recipies were of no use to me so I tossed them. Now with some baking experience behind me I wish I had kept them.

[June Pelo Senior Contributor Find all posts View Profile Close June Pelo]

Recipes

Kathy,

Most families used the same recipes that you had for making bread, cardamon biscuits, etc. So even though you threw them out, it will be easy enough to replace them. Just ask what recipes you want and there are some of us who still have those recipes. I have several books of them and can supply what you need. I can remember my mother and her sisters baking bread, etc. and they didn't have any recipe written down - it was all in their head and they guessed at amounts. But we watched my aunt baking bread and measured everything as she added it to the mixing bowl.

[Denise Registered Find all posts View Profile Close Denise]

Hi,
I remember my grandmother Ina (Kilpeläinen) Fräki used to make prune tarts and nissua. Couldn't wait to get to her house in Laurium, Michigan's Upper Peninsula. She was born in Michigan but her mother was from Muhos, Oulu, Finland.
Here are links for the recipes.
http://midlifebliss.typepad.com/mid_...h-prune-t.html
http://www.indobase.com/recipes/deta...ish-nissua.php

Best Regards,
Denise

[Arlis J. Registered Find all posts View Profile Close Arlis J.]

Finnish Foods

My grandparents were both Finnish immigrants in Northern Minnesota. We always had lutefisk (boiled) with white sauce and plenty of allspice on Christmas Eve, along with the tough, chewy, potato-water rye bread someone mentioned earlier.

They had a of couple cows, so we had plenty of crock-churned (often by me) butter and buttermilk, too. Aiti, as we called my grandmother, let me peel and then smash the cardamom seeds in a couple folds of flannel when she made cardamom bread. In the spring time with calving we always had baked custard and filli. Also in the spring a particular type of fish could be speared in local creeks as it went upstream to spawn; these my grandmother would wrap in layers of wet newspaper and smoke in a small fire.

In the early summer we feasted on new potatoes with a sprig of dill thrown in the water to boil with the potatoes. I remember eating them out of hand when they were cold, too, adding a dab of butter with each bite. I remember a lot of rice pudding with sauces made from every kind of berry you can imagine, plus rhubarb. And berry-picking. And canning venison in the oven of Aiti's woodstove.

These memories aren't about recipes. She didn't use recipes. She made bread on the hottest day of the summer in her woodstove. That's what I remember!

[June Pelo Senior Contributor Find all posts View Profile Close June Pelo]

traditions

Arlis,

My childhood was similar to what you describe, but I was a city girl and we didn't have cows. I do remember crushing cardamom seeds for bread, making filé, lutfisk with white cream sauce, cooking small new potatoes with the peel on except for peeling a strip around the potato and dipping the potato in potato water with butter melted in it. My father said that was the way they ate them when he was a boy in Finland. I wrote more about my childhood and sent it to Hasse, if he decides to print it.

[Hasse Admin Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Hasse]

Food traditions

June's article can be found on the SFHS web page here along with June's other articles - here.

Hasse

Took the liberty of deleting June's previous message with the attached article since the article is already on-line/Hasse

[goldie Registered Find all posts View Profile Close goldie]

traditions

I want to say thank you for those that have shared some of their memories on here. The only thing I remember from my grandparents is the pickled herring, smoked fish and saunas. I have read that my great grandfather helped start the co-ops around the Oulu, WI area. Other than what I mentioned no one in the family has passed on anything concerning Finnish. So I am enjoying reading what others have said. Also June thank you for all those articles you have done. That will keep me reading for awhile.
Goldie

[Arlis J. Registered Find all posts View Profile Close Arlis J.]

June,
I read your recipes. In your herring salad, do I presume the potatoes are cold, boiled? the beets boiled or pickled? I could make a meal of pickled herring!

I was going to mention the collection of blood at butchering time each fall, but feared it might be too icky for some people. It was my job to keep continuously stirring until it cooled down without forming into one giant clot. Aiti baked her final mixture in a jellyroll pan; I refused to taste it.

The cucumber thing we always did with cider vinegar, but with perhaps 1 tablespoon of sugar and some fresh dill thrown in the bowl with it.

Arlis

[Arlis J. Registered Find all posts View Profile Close Arlis J.]

Hasse,

Kiitos!

Arlis

[June Pelo Senior Contributor Find all posts View Profile Close June Pelo]

Recipes

Arlis,

Yes, the potatoes and beets were cooked and diced. I also love pickled herring and our store carries small jars of it - I have to restrain myself from eating the whole jar at one time. And blood bread had no taste at all. My father would get a bucket of fresh blood from the butcher and share it with neighbors. When it was baked it looked like chocolate cake. When we cooked it, the salty bacon gave it flavor. There were other Swede Finns living around us and they all ate the same foods we ate. My mother also used to fry donuts and drained them on brown sack paper - then sugared them.

You mentioned cooking fish in layers of wet newspapers and smoking it. One of my uncles was a commercial fisherman on Lake Huron. He and the crew would wrap a whitefish in layers of brown paper and put it to cook on the steam pipe by the engine. Whenever we are near Lake Michigan or Lake Huron we stop to buy smoked whitefish or trout - yum.

[kathy Registered Find all posts View Profile Close kathy]

Oh my gosh -- donuts. I forgot to mention them as one of the favorites that my mother made. I loved her donuts.

[kivinen1 Registered Find all posts View Profile Close kivinen1]

Agreed!

Grandma's potato doughnuts were the best by far.