Easter

Easter is approaching, and there are some uniquely Finnish ways of celebrating the occasion. One is the eating of mämmi.

From the Helsingin Sanomat:

Mämmi is a thick dark brown porridge made from water and sweetened rye malt. It is baked in the oven, then stored in the fridge and served cold, perhaps with sugar and milk or cream.
Rather like another odd Finnish speciality, the salty licorice-flavoured candy known as salmiakki (made, believe it or not, from ammonium chloride), mämmi is "an acquired taste".
Actually a Germanic (and Roman Catholic) invention, mämmi is now just a curious Finnish relic, and it has even lost its early laxative/purgative usage during Lent and is seen simply as a traditional Easter dessert.

What they don't say there, is that mämmi looks like the result, rather than the cause, of laxative effects. This has put me off trying it just yet (though I will buy some for the weekend).

The diametric opposite is the eating of luxurious Fazer Mignon easter eggs. Fazer, the Finnish confectionary company, makes marvellous little hazlenut-chocolate filled eggs for Easter. I don't mean some kind of cheap chocolate shell filled with chocolate goo - they fill a real eggshell. Back in the day, they were given as gifts at the court of the Czars (when Finland was part of Russia) so it's another modern miracle that you can pick up an Easter egg fit for a Czar for about two euros in any supermarket now. It struck me when I saw the Fabergé eggs in St Petersburg, that though beautiful, they were inedible. To a younger memeber of the court, I wonder which was more wonderful: a golden egg, or a plain eggshell filled with chocolate.


A more pagan tradition involves growing a small bowl of rye-grass to thank the Sun for returning after the dark winter (we were stupified by the sale of tiny bowls of grass for five euros at the supermarket yesterday, which prompted research).