Martin's Blog: The Finnish Roots of French Cuisine

Originally published 2008

Finnish food - worst in Europe

Any recent visitors to Finland will have had sympathy with Jacques Chirac's comments [1] that it has the worst cuisine in Europe. Tourists are typically confronted with the choice of either enduring an enforced crash diet, or resigning themselves to bland, unappetising meals, always with minimal variety and often of dubious freshness.

The Eastern city of Joensuu is typical. Locals wishing to dine out have the choice of a Hessburger, a sort of downmarket Burger King (!) offering fare unacceptable to anything but the least sophisticated palate, and a couple of pizza restaurants with a menu of tinned vegetables, processed cheese and tomato paste on deep crusts that would be unrecognisable to the aficionado of a Roman pizzeria. Everywhere dairy products are verboten and flavourings are presumably proscribed by the Lutheran church. "During the past decades the Finns have been brainwashed to avoid butter, salt and other ingredients that are bad for your heart," as the BBC article also reminds us. Joensuu's 'supermarket' is a half-hearted attempt to purvey groceries, squeezed behind the cheap DVDs and remaindered books in a department store. Indeed the best that the Wikipedia page on the 'cuisine of Finland' can find to say, is that Finnish meals "generally contain several different vegetables". What this omits is that you'd be lucky if any of them were fresh.

Helsinki certainly offers a wider range of restaurants, and opportunities for the more ambitious budget, but in reality it is the same story told many times over. Oh, and if you go there at the weekend, everything is closed, and you can join the hordes of day trippers ruing their decision to spend a large amount of money sailing across the Baltic to a city that is resolutely unwilling to relieve them of their roubles, kroner or euros. Helsinki could perhaps in one sense be seen as a city of superlatives when it comes to restaurants. It probably has the worst Chinese food, the worst Thai, the worst Mexican, the worst Argentinian steaks, and undoubtedly the worst kebabs.

But these observations, and Chirac's condemnations lack a historical perspective. What Chirac failed to acknowledge was the historical debt that modern classic French food owes to the cuisine of far-off, and much maligned Finland.

Finland and France - first contact

The first contacts between the culinary cultures of Finland and France came in the years of the Hanseatic League, the immensively pervasive and powerful trading community that dominated the economic and cultural life of Northern Europe in the late middle ages. In the 14th Century French traders came to the bustling city of Bruges to buy cloth and lace, and found that, in addition to fine clothing, they could buy strange and interesting food that the Netherlandish traders and sailors had brought from the Baltic. While the French peasantry struggled to survive on turnips and coarse bread, the enormous quantities of eels, herring and salmon, berries and mushrooms consumed by even the lowly burgers of Bruges were an eye-opener. Enquiries revealed that the people of Bruges were proud that they were "eating like the Finns", a land of plenty at the limits of the known world to the North, where everyone ate the same fare, and everyone ate well. A new conception of the possibilities of diet for the hoi polloi, and new expectations for the standards of cuisine for everyone were born.

The diet of the Baltic, while abundant, did lack variety, even then, but rather than this resulting in the lowering of horizons that we see today, in the Middle Ages it was the mother of invention. As well as some passably palatable fish, the thousands of lakes of the Finnish countryside are full of frogs. And in addition to the abundance of berries and mushrooms, the damp forests are plagued with snails. Enterprising Finns in search of variety in their diet were the first to reap these unusual harvests. And the French tradesmen and nobles visiting the fine hostelries of the Hanseatic City of Bruges were introduced to the exquisite delicacies of the frog's leg ragout and the baked snail.

The lack of variety of ingredients also introduced notions of flavouring and mixing ingredients in imaginative ways. While salmon, snail, turnip, cloudberry and dill casseroles did not survive unadapted to the tables of the French Empire, the very idea of the casserole and the ragout, of the mixing of vegetables and meat, with the admixture of fresh herbs, was a powerful one. When introduced into French households abundant with a variety of fine natural ingredients, the result was the birth of the haute cuisine that we know today.

The French jam and preserves so beloved of the English middle classes are another cultural gift of the Finns. Sailors to the far-flung Baltic ports, were in need of food that would survive the journey, and in particular need of fruit to stave off scurvy. A journey to Abo in the Swedish Empire (nowadays Turku in Western Finland) was perhaps the longest trip that the Hanseatic sailor would have to endure. In order to sustain them on the long return journey, the ships would stock up with the berry preserves which the Finns would make to keep them going through the long dark winter.

So while the Finns do undoubtedly have the worst food in Europe today, let us remember that it was not always so. The lesson for the Finns should be to raise their horizons and their expectations and learn from their forefathers. The lesson for complacent French politicians is surely to look to history before they put their marinaded and exquisitely spiced feet into their hungry mouths.