Through Finland in Carts Part 4

_Ost omelette_, a delicious sort of custard or omelette, made with cheese and served hot, although everything else on the side-table is cold.

Mushrooms cooked in cream is another favourite dish.

Then small gla.s.s plates with slices of cold eel in jelly, salmon in jelly, tongue, ham, potted meat, etc., complete the _Smorgsbord_, which is often composed of fifteen or twenty dishes.

These delicacies are many of them delicious, but as the same things appear at each meal three times a day, one gets heartily sick of them in the end, and, to an English mind, they certainly seem out of place at breakfast time.

There are many excellent breads in Finland--

_Frankt brod_ is really French bread; but anything white is called _Frankt brod_, and very good it is, as a rule.

_Rg brod_, or rye bread, is the ordinary black bread of the country, made in large flat loaves.

_Hlkaka_, the peasants' only food in some parts, is baked two or three times a year, so they put the bread away in a loft or upon the kitchen rafters; consequently, by the time the next baking day comes round it is as hard as a brick. A knife often cannot cut it. It is invariably sour, some of the last mixing being always left in the tub or bucket, that the necessary acidity may be ensured.

_Knackebrod_ is a thin kind of cake, made of rye and corn together, something like Scotch oatcake, with a hole in the middle, so that it may be strung up in rows like onions on a stick in the kitchen. When thin and fresh it is excellent, but when thick and stale a dog biscuit would be equally palatable.

_Wiborgs kringla_, called in Finnish _Wiipurin rinkeli_, is a great speciality, its real home and origin being _Wiborg_ itself. It is a sort of cake, but its peculiarity is that it is baked on straw, some of the straw always adhering to the bottom. It is made in the form of a true lover's knot, of the less fantastic kind, and a golden sign of this shape hangs outside to determine a baker's shop; even in Petersburg and in the north of Finland a modified representation of the _Wiborgs kringla_ also denotes a bakery.

Having partaken of the odds and ends mentioned, the ordinary mid-day meal or dinner begins, usually between two and four o'clock.

The hostess, who sits at the head of the table, with her husband generally on one side and her most honoured guest on the other, with two huge soup-tureens before her, asks those present whether they will have soup or _filbunke_, a very favourite summer dish. This is made from fresh milk which has stood in a tureen till it turns sour and forms a sort of curds, when it is eaten with sugar and powdered ginger. It appears at every meal in the summer, and is excellent on a hot day. It must be made of fresh milk left twenty-four hours in a warm kitchen for the cream to rise, and twenty-four hours in the cellar, free from draught, to cool afterwards. The castor sugar is invariably served in a tall silver basin--that is to say, the bowl, with its two elegant handles, stands on a well-modelled pillar about eight or ten inches high, altogether a very superior and majestic form of sugar basin.

There are two special drinks in Finland--one for the rich, the other for the poor.

_Mjod_ is one of the most delicious beverages imaginable. It is not champagne, and not cider, but a sort of effervescing drink of pale yellow colour made at the breweries, and extremely refreshing on a hot day. It costs about one shilling and sixpence a bottle, sometimes more, and is often handed round during an afternoon call with the coffee and _marmelader_, the famous Russian sweetmeats made of candied fruits.

The other drink is called in Swedish _Svagdricka_, but as it is really a peasant drink, and as the peasants speak Finnish, it is generally known as _Kalja_, p.r.o.nounced "Kal-e-yah." It looks black, and is really small beer. Very small indeed it is, too, with a nasty burnt taste, and the natives up-country all make it for themselves, each farm having half a dozen or twenty hop poles of its own, which flavours the _Kalja_ for the whole party for a year, so its strength of hop or amount of bubble is not very great.

From the middle of June till the middle of July we ate wild strawberries three times a day with sugar and cream! They simply abound, and very delicious these little _Mansikka_ are. So plentiful are they that _Suomi_ is actually known as "strawberry land."

There are numbers of wild berries in Finland; indeed, they are quite a speciality, and greet the traveller daily in soup--sweet soups being very general--or they are made into delicious syrups, are served as compote with meat, or transformed into puddings.

Here are a few of them--

Finnish. Latin.

_Mansikka_ _Fragaria vesca_ Wild strawberries, found in profusion everywhere.

_Mesikka_ _Rubus arcticus_ Red, with splendid aroma.

Liqueur is made from them.

_Vaatukka_ _Rubus idaeus_ Wild raspberry.

_Lakka_ _Rubus chamaemorus_ Black. Often made into a kind of black juice, and taken as sweet soup.

_Mustikka_ _Vaccinium myrtillus_ (Wortleberries)--Black.

Often made into soup of a glorious colour.

_Puolukka_ _Vaccinium vitis idaea_ (Red whortleberry)--Like a small cranberry. Eaten with meat.

_Juolukka_ _Vaccinium uliginosum_ A common black kind of berry, not very eatable.

_Herukka_ _Ribes nigrum_ Cranberry.

_Karpalo_ _Vaccinium occycoccus_ This berry is not gathered in the autumn, but is left under the snow all the winter, ready to be picked in spring when the snow melts, as the fruit is better when it has been frozen. It keeps in a tub for months without any preparation, and is particularly good as a jelly when eaten with cream.

_Muurain_ (Swedish, _Hjortron_) In appearance is like a yellow raspberry; grows in the extreme north in the mora.s.ses during August. It is a most delicious fruit, with a pine-tree flavour.

"Will you have some sweetbread?" we were once asked, but as we were drinking coffee at the moment we rather wondered why we should be going back to the _entrees_--our stupidity, of course. Sweetbread is the name given to all simple forms of cake in Finland; a great deal of it is eaten, and it is particularly good.

At dinner, hock, claret, or light beer are drunk as a rule; but at breakfast and supper, beer and milk are the usual beverages, the latter appearing in enormous jugs--indeed, we have actually seen a gla.s.s one that stood over two feet high.

After dinner, coffee is immediately served with cream, not hot milk; after supper, tea is generally handed round, the hostess brewing it at the table.

Beside her stands a huge _samovar_, which is really a Russian urn, and not a teapot as generally supposed. Inside it are hot coals or c.o.ke, round the tin of which is the boiling water, while above it stands the teapot, kept hot by the water below. It is generally very good tea, for it comes from China in blocks through Siberia, but it is much better when drunk with thin slices of lemon than with milk. As a rule, it is served to men in tumblers, and to women in cups, an etiquette with an unknown origin. It is pale-straw colour, and looks horribly weak, and so it is, but with lemon it forms a very refreshing beverage.

At the end of each meal every one at the table goes and shakes hands with the host and hostess and says "_tack_" (thank you); certainly a pretty little courtesy on the part of strangers, but rather monotonous from children, when there are many of them, as there often are in Finland, especially when the little ones cl.u.s.ter round the parents or grandparents as a sort of joke, and prolong the "_tack_" for an indefinite period.

Then the men smoke; seldom the women, for, although so close to Russia, Finnish women rarely imitate their neighbours in this habit. The elder men smoke tremendously, especially cigarettes, fifty or sixty per diem being nothing uncommon. In fact, this smoking has become so terrible a curse that there is now a movement among the students, most of whom seem to be anti-smokers, against tobacco, so perhaps the new generation may not have such black teeth and yellow fingers.

But to return to the first impressions of our country-house. The balconies are made very wide so as to admit a dining-table, and as the roofs of the houses project a couple of feet beyond the balcony, in order to throw the winter's snows on to the ground instead of allowing them to block up the verandahs, there is plenty of shade; that is occasionally increased by hanging curtains of red and white striped canvas, which can be drawn together, and form quite a little room. They were the jolliest, happiest meals in that island home! Every one spoke German--the language we all knew best in common--and conversation, jokes, and merriment never flagged as we sat facing that glorious view of pine-wood and water, while the lilac (just two months later than in England) scented the air, or the hawthorn afforded shelter for endless birds who were constantly singing. Among the most notable cries was that of the friendly cuckoo. Fourteen, and even twenty, of us often dined together--the daughters, sons, husbands, wives, and children from the other houses frequently gathering round the father's board. And in the cool of the evening we usually went for a row on the lake.

Every one boats in Finland. Two or three sailing boats, and some dozen rowing skiffs and canvas _kanots_ of different sizes, lay upon the Captain's water, and at all times and seasons some person was away in one of them, or down at the bathing house enjoying a so-called sea-bath, although it was not really salt water, being more of an inland lake.

Canoeing is one of the great sports of Finland, and yet it is only within the last ten years that these _kanots_ have come in such universal use, although no country was ever better fitted for the purpose, for it is one series of long lakes joined together by beautiful rivers. Dr. August Ramsay must be termed the Father of Finnish canoeing, for it was his book on the subject that made the sport so fashionable.

Funnily enough, these Finnish canoes are always made of canvas stretched over ribs of wood. They are two and a half to three feet wide and some twenty feet long; therefore they are pretty solid and can be used with a sail. An Englishman fond of the sport cannot do better than take a summer jaunt to Finland, and with his canoe travel through some of the most beautiful parts of that captivating country.

Finlanders lead a very jolly, independent, happy life during the summer months. They seem to throw off their cares and responsibilities and to make up their minds to enjoy the long, balmy days, and, as they are not devoured by the midges which eat up strangers alive, they have nought to ruffle the even tenor of their way.

After supper, when the day's work is over, and the great heat has gone, boating parties are made up, and, in the brilliant midnight sunsets, they glide in and out of the islands, visit distant friends, singing the while some of the delightful melodies for which their land is justly famous.

Even as far back as 1896, when I paid my first visit to Finland, and when telephones were barely in general use in England, _Suomi_ was ahead of us.

The great excitement in the homes was the ring of the telephone bell and the Swedish cry, "Hulloa! ring up so and so," which at first we imagined was being translated into English for our benefit. Telephones are very cheap there, costing about a couple of pounds a year, and they are universal; for, like Norway, Finland was one of the first countries to be riddled with them, and a delightful luxury they are, for by their means one can live out of the world, and yet be in it.

In those early days of telephones strange things happened. _Pekka_ was madly in love with _Ilma_, a wondrously beautiful maid. He heard rumours that she was trifling with another. He could not stand the torture even for a few hours, and so "rang up" the mansion of the family _Heikkila_.

Joy, he heard the voice of _Ilma_ in answer, and said, "Is it you, dear one? I, _Pekka_, am here."

A soft sigh replied.

"Are you glad to hear _Pekka_--do you care for him just a little?"

"Yes," sighed the fair maid.

"Darling, it is not true you care for _Armas Merikanto_?"

"No, no!" she cried.