How to celebrate May Day like a Finn
It involves a picnic and fermented lemonade and really good doughnuts.
Hello friends and welcome to a special May Day (or Vappu as we call it here) edition of The Recovering Line Cook.
I had planned to share the next chapter of The Prep List today, but that was before I remembered an important detail. It is May Day next week and, since that’s a pretty big event in Finland, I didn’t want to miss the chance to tell you all about the things I’ll be cooking (and even brewing) for it.
So, with my apologies for the delay of that chapter (I’ll send it to paid subs next week), today let’s explore the flavours of Finnish May Day.
Wil
PS:
Please read to the end for a new thing I’m nervous excited to be making available to readers of my newsletter first.
Picnic season begins (*he says unconvincingly)
On the day I planned to send this newsletter out to you (Friday 25th if all goes to plan) I woke up to a world of white yet again.
Spring, by all available evidence, arrived a few weeks ago here in my corner of Finland.
And yet today, in grimly predictable style, it snowed yet again.
A winter reprise.
Whenever I am confident the snow is over for the season, the old Finnish Gods of Mischief are always there to show me how much of a stranger I am in this strange place.
I can see them now, those hairy Gods, laughing in their heavenly sauna getting drunk in their pants.
I should probably bring up these thoughts with my therapist, maybe.
Aaaaaanyway… luckily we have a full week until May Day, the day Finns traditionally head out into the great and green outdoors for picnics and gay abandon. May Day meant nothing to me growing up in England. But here, heralding summer in the not too distant future, it is up there with Christmas, Easter and Midsummer among the biggest celebrations of the year.
First on our list today and very much in anticipation of that very Finnish May Day picnic, I have a very British picnic food for you.
Without this (and obviously a good quiche) no picnic is complete for me.
I’m talking about a humble boiled egg wrapped in a cosy blanket of sausage meat that is deep fried to golden loveliness. I am of course talking about scotch eggs.
Now, here’s a promise for you: if you Google any recipe for scotch eggs, it will, with almost 100% certainty, give you the same old potted history about where they come from and how their origins are actually not all that certain.
Some tosh about Fortnum and Mason in London often comes up.
In my ongoing attempt to be different, I’m not going blot my newsletter with this same, regurgitated history once again.
Also, I invented them with my mate Tony while we were on a Church of England ballroom dancing camp in the late nineties.
You don’t need to fact check this.
You can take my word for it.
A recipe for scotch eggs
You have various fun choices ahead when making scotch eggs but only one important choice. The fun choices are how you flavour your sausage meat. Add some nice fresh herbs, a bit of mustard, maybe some curry powder or smoked paprika if you really fancy being the life and soul.
But the important choice is about how you boil your egg before wrapping it in its sausage-y coffin. If I’m eating these fresh then I keep the yolk much the same way I was during university: loose and jammy. This takes about 4 minutes of boiling from cold water. But if you’re interested in eating this cold on a picnic, then I like to cook the yolk through. Which means about 6 minutes boiling. I don’t know about you but eating cold, molten egg yolk in a field isn’t really my idea of a good time.
But you do you as I’m led to believe people say these days.
Here’s the detail.
Ingredients
400g sausagemeat
6 eggs
Herbs and seasonings of your choice (If I’m using great sausages I don’t tend to add much other than a spoon of English mustard and a pinch of extra salt to boost the seasoning, but if the sausages/sausagemeat is lacking, I’ll add fresh sage/parsley/loads of black pepper for example)
Flour
Panko breadcrumbs
Oil for deep frying
Method
Boil 4 of your eggs (the rest are used for breadcrumbing later). I put room temp eggs in cold water and time 4 minutes from when the first bubbles start to roll into a simmer from the bottom of the pan. For soft yolks I boil for 3-4 minutes (longer for big eggs, shorter for smaller eggs). For harder boiled yolks, I’ll boil for 5-6 minutes.
Once cooked, cool them in cold water immediately (ideally with some ice).
A note here, so much will change the exactitude of what I just said. The size of your pan, temp of eggs etc etc. It can all make subtle changes to how much the eggs cook. The above is a guide. A good one, I think, that works for me. My general advice at this stage is to cook your eggs a little less than how you want them after deep frying with the sausage because it won’t cook all that much more during deep frying.
When the eggs are cold, peel them and dust them in some flour. This is really important as it helps glue the sausagemeat to the egg while they cook together.
Then divide the sausagemeat into 4 balls. Pat out each ball out into a patty larger than the egg, then mould the flattened patty around the egg so it is entirely wrapped. Be sure to gently encourage all the meat together over the egg to push out any air pockets. Take your time and do this gently, particularly if you have left your yolks a little softer.
Dust this in flour again, then beat your remaining eggs and roll the flour-dusted sausage balls in the beaten egg. Finally, roll them in the panko breadcrumbs. I then let them “set” in the fridge for a good 30 minutes before frying.
Fry these at 160°C/320°F for 5 minutes, then drain on kitchen paper. If eating cold, let them cool down uncovered so they don’t go soggy.
If eating fresh, I like to serve them cut in half (cut side up, of course), along with some wholegrain mustard and some fermented cucumbers. For a snack my Dad used to bring home from gas stations, they actually make for a very classy plated dish.
If eaten cold on a picnic, however, I want nothing more than cheap ketchup with them because picnic Wil is a trashy bastard.
Note:
Finland has its own particular sausage style and that means finding sausagemeat/British-style raw sausages is basically impossible here. I made my own “sausagemeat” for this recipe using 400g ground pork to which I added loads of dry sage, pepper, about 3/4 teaspoon salt and, importantly, 2 tablespoons of regular dry breadcrumbs.
Seasonal pastries
From the British savoury to the Traditional Finnish “sweet”, there’s only one pastry associated with May Day ‘round these parts: a good, old fashioned doughnut.
(Well, thats a lie. A funnel cake called Tippaleipä is also eaten on May Day, but my wife hates the things so I don’t have much cause to make them).
I shared this recipe the first time last year, but I’m very happy to be doing so again on this traditional Finnish doughnut-eating occasion.
A recipe for light-as-a-cloud doughnuts
These doughnuts are like really great french fries or roast potatoes. They are time-sensitive. They demand to be eaten, I’ll be honest, soon after being fried. They’ll be good a few hours later, but they are at their best still warm. Certainly the next day they are but a mere memory of past brilliance.
Ingredients (makes 8 doughnuts)
Whole milk 75ml
Dry yeast 1.5 teaspoons
White sugar 10g
Butter (room temperature) 75g
1 egg (room temperature)
White bread flour 150g
Fine salt 1/4 teaspoon
Oil for deep-drying
Plenty of caster sugar to roll the doughnuts in and whatever jam you like to fill them with
Method
Warm your milk to something like blood temperature, then add the yeast and half the sugar. Give it a little mix until everything is dissolved. Let that sit for 10 minutes to get the yeast pumping. Beat the butter with the rest of the sugar, then slowly add the egg until combined. Add the yeast/milk mixture, then the salt and flour. Beat this together until it is smooth. Don’t be alarmed that what you end up with is more like a batter than a dough. That’s how it should be. Give it a good beating with a spoon for a few minutes/as long as you can to develop the gluten. You don’t need to knead this in the traditional way. Once you’ve done this beating, cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it rest until doubled in size. In my hot kitchen in sunny Finland recently this has barely taken an hour, but do give it time to double in size. It will take longer in colder kitchens.
Once it has risen, it’s time to let it cool down in the fridge. This extended fermentation will develop flavour, but, importantly, because of the high butter content, it also firms the dough/batter up making it easier to work with later.
After at least an hour in the fridge, carefully work the dough out of the bowl onto a floured surface. Gently flatten the dough and carefully shape it into a very rough rectangle so you can cut out 8 equal chunks. A dough scraper is very good at this job. I say chunks because I want you to work the dough as little as possible at this point. Don’t worry about making perfectly formed round “nuts” here. The less you work the dough at this stage the lighter, I find, the doughnut turns out.
Place your 8 equal chunks on your floured counter top or plate and cover very loosely with plastic wrap to stop them drying out. Leave them another 20 minutes or so for them to rise a little more. Meanwhile, heat your oil to 170°C/340°F. I cook no more than 3 at a time in a frying pan with just a few centimeters of oil to save on the amount of oil I need to use. Fry them for 2 minutes each side at the above temperature before draining them on a plate lined with kitchen paper. While still very warm, cover them in the caster sugar. The optional extra is to fill them with a jam of your choice using a piping bag. I don’t think you can improve on raspberry or strawberry jam, but if you’re one of those filthy sorts that wants to fill them with Nutella or some kind of custard then you go right ahead you crazy diamond.
Eaten fresh, you will end up with a beautiful doughnut that is crisp on the outside but moist and light and infinitely yielding on the inside. A treat. An absolute treat.
A fresh, nearly summer, summery drink
Finally, I want to tell you about the traditional drink people up and down Finland will be brewing in time for May Day: a fermented honey and lemon drink called sima.
Sima is a type of mead really, a simple ferment of water, lemon, yeast and honey, which gets lightly carbonated (and ever so slightly alcoholic) as it slowly ferments.
It’s also pleasingly hard to get wrong thanks to an in-built and low-tech mechanism by which you can judge whether it has fermented long enough yet. This comes in the form of a few raisins you add to each bottle of the sima for its secondary fermentation. These raisins, saturated as they become with CO² during fermentation, rise to the top of the bottles, telling you it’s ready.
Here’s how I’ll be making mine this weekend…
A recipe for Finnish Sima
Ingredients.
4 litres water
2 lemons
250g dark muscovado sugar
250g white sugar
1/4 tsp dry yeast
2 tbsp honey
a few raisins
Day 1
Bring half your water to a boil and add it to your dark and white sugar and the peel of your lemons (peel it in long strips so you can easily remove it later). Dissolve your yeast in a bit of the remaining water then add it to the rest. Once the sugar water has cooled add everything together including juice of the lemons (in a non-metallic bowl) and cover with clingfilm. Leave it somewhere dogs or children can’t knock it over.
24 hours later and you should see lots of bubbles appearing on the surface.
Now, get your bottles and put into the bottom a tablespoon of honey in each along with a few raisins. We will talk about why these are important later…
Fill the bottles with the sima, removing the lemon peel, and close the lids loosely so the gas can escape and the bottles don’t explode. There is conflicting guidance in Finnish recipes I’ve read about where to ferment sima. Some suggest somewhere warm for a few days. Some both warm then cold. I go with leaving my bottles out on the kitchen table for 3 days, then into the fridge for a further 4 days.
The raisins, as the image shows, will start to float when the drink has started to ferment enough and the raisins have absorbed enough CO². At this point the further time in fridge helps develop the flavour.
And there you have it. Delicious, cheap, and the kind of fun, totally unnecessary cooking project I really love.
A taste of Finnish May Day wherever you are.
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My mouth is watering at all this deliciousness, in particular those gooey eggs! Yum, yum.
Welp, thanks for clearing up the origin story for the scotch eggs. Going to give it a test next week. Thanks Wil.