Cooking and Drinking in Finland

Finland is not really part of Scandinavia, though it is often identified as such. At one point it was under Swedish rule for six hundred years and as a result shares cultural similarities.

Finland has/had it's own regional cuisines. Those that lived near the sea( Baltic) ate a lot of fish, herring for example, and even baked it into rye bread as a herring loaf. A short growing season coupled w/ a cool climate precluded the growing of wheat, consequently all of the early bread recipes were of rye. It was cold tolerant and was the only grain that would mature in that climate.

In the great drought of the 1880's Finns mixed ground up pine bark in w/ the rye flour in order to stretch a severely diminished rye crop. The pine bark had/has no nutritional value other than fiber.

Legend has it that a particularly deadly and hallucinogenic mushroom grows in the Far North in Saami( Lapp) country. Reindeer eat this mushroom with no adverse affects. If you capture the first urine of the Reindeer after he eats the mushroom, and drink it, you will see the Northern Lights like you never have before and also you will not die.