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Barbecue Bonanza: Finland’s Haute Cuisine |
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By Mirja Krause
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Monday, 12 May 2008 |
 When I left the house two weeks ago for the store, a ray hit my skin and the strong daylight hurt my eyes. I realized I must look a bit funny in my winter jacket and gloves; a biker passed in shorts and a T-shirt. Summer had come to Finland overnight! I passed at least two barbecue spots before the nearest store. Before I saw them I could smell them, the typical burning wood, smoky smell.
April was back, and with it, barbecue season.
I had to call my friends and organize a barbecue right away. A virus had caught me–or rather, had been there ever since I came to Finland. Whether a disease or an addiction, it’s very easy to get hooked. The barbecue spots are omnipresent.
On the morning, I was on the phone with my mother gushing excitedly. She asked where we would go; perhaps somewhere outside Oulu? I laughed: the nearest place is right in front of our building and at least five other places are in walking distance. The common room of our complex has piles of wood ready and waiting: this is as normal as sauna.
Yet how barbecue occurs is in Finland is peculiar. Every Finn knows and loves it. Every foreigner has to try it and like it eventually: Finland’s haute cuisine, the Makkara sausage. This comes in packs of four, dominating supermarket freezers and existing in all kinds of flavours, including plain, cheese, chilli, chilli-cheese, and the crucial salmiakki, in all desires of flour-to-meat ratio.
If the sun shines of a weekend, you needn’t bother trying to buy your favourite makkara. The freezers are nothing but a yawning emptiness, testimony to the Finn’s weather sensors. While foreigners doze and contemplate getting up, the Finn realises it is sunny, and the weekend, and goes to buy a bundle. It’s almost always, therefore, advisable to store some in your freezer.
Invited to a barbecue by Finns, do your best to bring makkara. Don’t hock along some Jamie Oliver vegetable creation; you might end up on the barrel end of a few severe glances, if not donned a snob. And don’t try to outdo everyone by packing salmiakki sausage: chances are you’ll end up surreptitiously binning them after lying how ‘good’ the black something tastes, or drinking all your beer on the spot to drown the taste.
Finns have brought barbecue almost to the point of perfection. Every child knows how to start a fire with a pathetic bit of paper and some logs. Coal is for wimps. This shouldn’t be a surprise in a country where the wood starts a foot away from everyone’s house, and seventy percent of the place is covered in coniferous taiga.
Even in a hurry, Finns do barbecue best. Call it fastbecue: you chuck a sausage into coal, wait a minute, snatch it out again, and smother the now-black sausage with mountains of mild, yellow mustard. QED.
Once the shock of such peculiarities sinks in, and one day it will, you’ll find you can join in the discussion about meet-to-flour ratios. You’ll learn to preface each shopping list ‘sausage’ as soon as the first sliver of sun manages to get past cumulonimbus cloud. You’ll never know who or how many will join your barbecue, but one day you’ll find yourself the centre of a vortex of Finns warming up, strangers shaking hands, and sausages and beer being passed around like the first day after war rations. A few strange souls might even start a spontaneous conversation, in a local dialect.
This is all part of the fun.
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