Not your grandmother’s Finnish cooking

By Katherine Larson

When Amanda Latvala asked whether I’d like to lead another cooking class at the Marquette Food Co-op, I jumped at the chance. Of course! What fun to spend a couple of evenings delving into gustatory matters with people who love food. But then she asked whether I could focus on Finnish cooking.

I paused. My connections to Finland are quite limited: one visit in 2017 on tour with the Marquette Choral Society, plus a bit of family lore — one set of my grandparents reputedly traversed Finland on foot in 1919 whilst fleeing the Russian revolution. But I love food from Finland and I love a good challenge, so I accepted with a caveat. This class would be “Not Your Grandmother’s Finnish Cooking.”

Thus, hopefully, freed from the burden of expectations I could not possibly meet, I plunged into the challenge of developing a series of recipes grounded in Finnish classics but brought to this time — 2023 — and this place — Marquette.

My first thought was split pea soup, which is absolutely foundational to Finnish cuisine, a weekly treat for many Finns to this day. But the class would be taught in May. While I too love a good split pea soup, by May I’m ready for something lighter, fresher, and altogether more springlike. Could I take the essence of split pea soup and transform it for the season?

The first step would be to move from dried split peas to the fresher taste of frozen peas. (May would be too early for fresh peas, and anyway in my opin- ion it’s hard to do anything better with fresh peas than eat them raw as soon after picking as possible.) I wanted a bit more flavor than just peas, but not all the heft that would come with adding common components of split pea soup like carrots, potatoes and ham hocks. Still, it was essential to nod respectfully in that direction to maintain the Finnish connection.

The solution? I cooked the peas, plus a chopped onion and a little parsley and tarragon, briefly in vegetable stock — a good-quality commercial stock without too much salt ended up working fine. “Briefly” was important; I wanted the peas to retain their taste and brightness, not to descend into mush. Also important, it turned out, was an addition borrowed from petits pois à la française (peas braised with onions and lettuce): a small head of iceberg lettuce, coarsely chopped, added the subtlest hint of bitterness needed to cut the peas’ sweetness. After only five minutes on the stove, the concoction was ready for blending. I used a food processor, in batches, because that’s what I own. A blender would have worked equally well or better, and the immersion blender that Latvala brought to the actual cooking class worked best of all.

But how about that ham? The solution was a little tangle of julienned prosciutto frizzled in butter and then tossed with minced chives and lemon zest. If you garnish a bowl of fresh pea soup with a spoonful of this delectable mixture, you’ve taken it from the tasty to the sublime.

It can be served hot or warm or at room temperature. My only caveat would be, if reheating is necessary, not to keep it on the stove too long, in order to preserve the fresh-pea brightness.

With the pea soup question solved, I plowed with renewed confidence into recipe development. Alas, that confidence was soon punctured, as a series of experiments with spinach crepes (pinaattilettu), intended as an accompaniment to smoked trout with horseradish sour cream, proved only that I am incapable of living up to, let alone improving on, the tried and true Finnish version.

So what else to do with smoked trout? Smoked fish of all kinds are a huge part of Finnish cuisine, and I felt it essential to include some in this recipe collection. Moreover, I really wanted the smoked fish to be smoked lake trout, one of the most delicious staples of our Marquette fish scene.

I found three solutions. One, perfect for May, was a gingery quick-pickle of rhubarb, which pairs beautifully with smoked trout’s smooth unctuousness. Two others come from deep within Finnish culinary heritage: apple-beet-celery salad and potato salad. Because the potato salad’s dressing had to be creamy (and because I’m not all that fond of cream with apple), the apple salad received a mustard-honey-orange juice dressing instead. Also, switching from red to golden beets saved the apple salad from an otherwise ghastly pink. Both sets of flavors married well with the trout.

Another must-have was wild mushrooms. Finland’s devotion to nature — including foraging for mushrooms while out in nature — is embodied in the legal concept of jokamiehen oikeudet, or “Everyone’s Rights”: every person has the legal right to enjoy nature anywhere in the Finnish countryside regardless of land ownership, so long as they act responsibly. Acting responsibly includes picking wild mushrooms judiciously, and Finns take full advantage of the opportunity.

Research offered me a plethora of Finnish mushroom salad recipes, but at first, I balked because so many of them wanted the mushrooms boiled. Surely not, I thought. I have always loved the crisp brown edges of a mushroom sauté; I have always recoiled from the flabby texture of canned mushrooms; why, I asked myself, would I want to take a perfectly good mushroom and turn it flaccid?

Still, could so many happy Finnish eaters be wrong? Clearly, more experimentation was in order.

With snow thick on the ground, I could not possibly forage for wild mushrooms, but a variety pack from Up Gourmet provided me with a nice array: oyster mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms and lion’s mane. I sliced up all three kinds and with the variety of types I ended up with a variety of shapes: floppy leaf-like bites from the oysters, quarter-inch crescents from the shiitakes and chunks from the lion’s mane. So much for the possibility of a blind taste test, but at least my testing partner didn’t know which was

Easy-as-pie blueberry tart (Helppoa kuin heinänteko mustikkapiirakka)

Note: These quantities work best if you use a 9-inch tart pan with vertical sides. If you use a 9-inch pie pan with slanted sides, the diameter of the bottom is typically only 7 inches and you’ll end up with quite a thick crust unless you set aside about a third of the dough for another purpose.

Filling

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1-1/2 tablespoons cornstarch

3 heaping cups fresh or frozen wild blueberries (about 1 pound)

1-1/2 tablespoons sugar

1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom

Dough

1 to 2 teaspoons lemon zest

1-1/2 cups (190 grams) all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom

1/2 teaspoon salt

8 tablespoons butter at room temperature

4 tablespoons heavy cream, plus more if needed

1 egg, beaten which.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Dissolve cornstarch in lemon juice. Toss blueberries in a bowl with cornstarch, lemon juice, sugar and cardamom. Set aside.

Place dry dough ingredients in the base of a food processor and whir briefly. Add butter and process until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Add cream and process briefly, until the crumbs hold together when pinched; add a bit more cream if needed to get the desired texture. Place dough into the tart pan and pat into place so that dough is evenly spread over the bottom and sides of the pan.

Brush the beaten egg over the bottom and sides of the crust, then pour in the blueberry mixture.

Bake for 30 to 40 minutes with fresh blueberries, and longer with frozen. Look for the blueberries to bubble in the center of the tart and the edges of the crust to be golden brown. Let cool for at least 15 minutes before eating to give filling time to set.

A scoop of vanilla ice cream or whipped cream goes well with this tart.

Next, I made the sauce: three tablespoons of Nancy’s probiotic organic sour cream — I specify the brand because its flavor and texture are so far superior to any other — stirred with two green onions, minced, plus salt, pepper and a tiny pinch of sugar.

Time to cook. Half the mushrooms were duly boiled for two minutes in lightly salted water acidulated with a few drops of lemon juice; the other half were sautéed in a tablespoon or two of butter until nicely browned. I drained the boiled mushrooms, patted them dry and let everything cool, then tossed them all in the prepared sour cream sauce.

The results? Hugely dependent on the type of mushroom. Boiled oyster mushrooms were thin, watery, unappetizing. Boiled shiitakes had more mushroom flavor but were unpleasantly tough. Boiled lion’s mane, on the other hand, was a revelation. It’s never been my favorite mushroom, but prepared this way it was a dead ringer for tender sea scallops — a gourmet treat. Give it a few extra drops of lemon juice and serve on a cracker or bit of toast, and your guests’ socks will be knocked off. Superb!

As for the sautéed mushrooms, here the lion’s mane fell to the back of the pack. The oyster mushrooms developed more flavor, with a subtle hint of seafood that gave a clue to the origin of their name, while the shiitake mushrooms responded best to this cooking method, with a good earthy