In a few days I’m leaving for Finland and I’m a little worried about food. What I remember from my previous trip to Scandinavia is a huge, depressing display of highly processed ham and cheese, canned soups, crisps, industrial candy bars and a number of soft drinks at supermarkets. We would buy something and try to fix dinner at the hostel. But we missed fresh food, and above all we missed street food, pub food, small restaurants, conviviality in one word.
No, what we missed most was money to buy some food, any food, actually. Very often a Snickers was the most filling thing we could afford. We basically survived on cookies, some bread in Lapland, some strawberries again in Lapland, where they have Russian-style bread, some strawberries again in Lapland, sugar sachets for cold nights. We were nineteen years old, on a budget (inter-rail to North Cape), and back then Oslo was the most expensive town on planet Earth.
Only twice we ate a regular meal: once at a hostel in Trondheim we had fiskeball with potatoes for supper, and once in Stockholm we ate I don’t remember what with reed beets and sour cream, it was a place that used to offer a warm lunch to anyone showing up with an inter-rail ticket.
Oh, once we cooked pizza from scratch, in a hostel in Narvik where we happened to find a oven. Our friend A. cooked it actually. We couldn’t read Norwegian, so we bought wholemeal by mistake. The people at the hostel were shocked, a bunch of starving Italians cooking pizza in Narvik! Best pizza I ever had.
And once we fished from a boat, during a guided tour to the Trollfjord in the Lofoten Islands, and the guide killed, gut and boiled the fish for us. We had it with some crackers and salted butter.
Now I’m no longer a student and I can buy myself food, at last.
I just hope there will be food to buy, actually. I have no information on Finnish cooking. Is it influenced by Russian cooking? Maybe at least in Karelia? Do people eat together, or just have a plastic-ham sandwich alone in a corner? What do they think about vegetables?
Stay tuned for the answer.
