Mustard Flop
A "How to Fail at Being Finnish" story
Hello friends and welcome to my first newsletter of 2025.
This week I have another of my tales in the How to Fail at Being Finnish series, aka my frequently embarrassing account of life as an immigrant in Finland.
And, since this edition marks the two year birthday of The Recovering Line Cook, I have a brief “re-introduction” below and a few notes on what’s next for 2025.
Love ya,
Wil
Mustard Flop
“The danger is in the neatness of identifications.”
- Samuel Beckett
I was 21 and lost in a Prague nightclub when I fell in love with a girl who looked like Commander Spock.
Obviously I didn’t dare go over to say hello. She, after all, really did look like a Vulcan princess. And, unfortunately for me, that same familiar goblin had still been staring back from the mirror last time I checked.
But when I think of that summer trip, I invariably think of her and her exceptionally short bangs and, such is the fallibility of memory, those beautiful pointy ears that, in all likelihood, she didn’t really have.
The other thing I remember of the trip is the bastard cold I had at the time.
I’m a cook. I write about food every week. Of course smelling and tasting things means everything to me, especially on holiday. When I lose that sense the world is rendered foggy and sterile. And the cold I had in Prague was the thick and persistent variety that had set up so stubbornly in my nose I couldn’t smell a thing.
And so I know nothing of the taste of the local syrupy-sweet schnapps and sausage we were sold by a shady street food vendor from the back of a red and yellow sedan at 1am in Prague Old Town.
But worst of all, worse even than not tasting the rich, spicy grease of klobása washed down with Becherovka and cheap fags on Wenceslas Square, I never got to know the taste of a restaurant dish called the Mustard Flop.
This I regret the most.
You, of course, don’t know what I’m talking about here. Nobody does. A Mustard Flop is not just a mystery to me or you, I accept it now as a mystery to everyone. Googling it returns nothing. No recipe. No familiar image. No TikTok star eating it in close up while dancing to whatever song is trending that week. Yes, I ordered it. I enjoyed the texture of the tender slab of what I think was pork and possibly cream sauce it was drowning in. But any memory of the taste and, with it, chance of recreating it remains impossible.
All I’ve been left are those two words, beautiful in their inelegance: the Latinate “Mustard” and Anglo-Saxon “Flop”. Those words stay with me now as a monument to the unknowable. Perhaps, if I could have read the original Czech, I would have learnt something of what the dish involved.
Instead, I am left only with questions.
Mustard seems obvious enough, but what keeps me up at night two decades on is what the hell they were going for with “flop”.
Was the menu writer simply trying to evoke the careless plating of the dish? Was the name itself onomatopoeically replicating the sound of the pork as the cook casually “flopped” it onto the plate in all its saucy wetness?
Or maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe “flop” was meant in the specifically pejorative sense. Maybe the chef was a tortured perfectionist and the “flop” refers to his disappointment in the current state of his mustardy creation. The name forever reminding him, and his diners, of his Sisyphean attempt to perfect it.
The answers to this are lost to us now in a translation that took place almost 20 years ago.
Being an immigrant English boy in Finland, hiccups in translation such as these tend to be a part of everyday life for me.
My earliest, or at least most memorable, butchering of the Finnish language happened in 2021. I’d been in Finland less than a year at the time and was on a work placement at my local history museum.
It started off innocently enough.
The director of the museum, an impossibly pleasant woman called Tove who dressed almost exclusively in various colours of leopard print and Marimekko flower petal, had spent the morning taking me on a tour of the museum. Not restricting us to just the public exhibits, she also took me through countless hidden store rooms locked away behind bank vault-like metal doors.
Most memorable of the things she showed me was a sealed package that had been bequeathed to the museum by a local man almost a century earlier. Along with the package, he had left strict orders that it not be opened until a very specific date.
By the time I had the package in my hands, that date had passed.
Six months earlier, in fact, a special opening event, covered by local and national press, had been held at the museum for the reveal of what was inside.
What they found that day, so Tove told me, was as much shocking as it was disappointing.
Inside was a leather-bound notebook. In the type of cursive handwriting only machines know how to do in 2025, page after page of elegantly drafted notes had been written. After only a quick read during that ceremony it became clear what these notes detailed.
The local man in question had left the museum a list of people, his neighbours and associates and colleagues. And with this list he had written a corresponding section detailing the many and varied reasons as to why he disliked them all.
As of 2025, and because of the somewhat sensitive nature of the insults he chose, the book hasn’t been made open to the public.
I found all this fascinating. I felt like I was really getting to know a strange hidden part of my new Finnish home town. And I was genuinely full of gratitude when, as Tove went to leave for a meeting, I said in “perfect” Finnish:
“If you want anything from me just say so and I’ll meet you.”
I smiled. I’d never been more polite and friendly. And, what’s more, this little English scamp was even capable of being polite and friendly in Finnish now.
But before I could complete my sentence, I knew something was wrong. A crinkle in Tove’s forehead. A definite pull at the corners of her mouth. A smile. Then, oh shit, she’d started giggling.
Did she think I was being sarcastic? Maybe I’d made a mistake?
I ran through the words in my head as her hand came to her mouth, stifling her laughter.
“Wil,” she said. “You’re an… attractive young man but I don’t think there’s anything to worry about here.”
Oh fuck, what had I done?
“Oh… goodness, what did I say?” I asked.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” she said, which immediately moved my emotional state to one of intense embarrassment. “You said ‘jos sinä haluat minua’ and, yes that means ‘if you want me’, literally. But, I’ll be honest it sounds more like ‘if you want me’ in a, you know, sexual way, than the way I think you meant.”
I nodded.
“And then you tried to say, I think, ‘minä tapaan sinut’ to mean ‘I can meet you’.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I was really just trying to say ‘I can come if you need anything’, honestly.”
“Well be careful of ‘haluat,’ maybe use a word like ‘tarvitset’ instead. And be very careful of ‘tapaan’ which means ‘I meet.’ Because you actually said, ‘tapan’ with a short ‘a,’ and that means something very different.”
“What does tapan with a short ‘a’ mean?”
“Well, I’ll tell you what I heard when you said that sentence.”
Please don’t tell me I called you a bitch. Please don’t tell me I called you a bitch.
“To be very honest, it sounded more like: ‘Tove, if you want to have sex with me, I’ll kill you.’”
I managed to eventually break the following silence with the ever so British words: “Right… Blimey”, which was an odd choice since it must’ve been the first time I’d heard anyone say “blimey” since my grandmother in the mid-nineties.
Tove laughed. “Yes, the difference between tapaan and tapan is the difference between meeting someone and killing them.”
She once again went to exit the office, and, on reaching the door, turned to say: “Unless you do want to kill me, Wil, in which case, the Finnish was perfect.”
It wasn’t the last time I’ve felt like a Mustard Flop in my Finnish language journey.
Allow myself to re-introduce…. myself.
If you get this by email, you‘ll be receiving it two years to the day I sent out my first Recovering Line Cook newsletter.
Since then I’ve been here (very nearly) every week to share my Memoirs of a Line Cook, recipes and techniques, and food/life writing essays (you particularly enjoyed this about social media “chefs” last year”).
I write this newsletter here in Finland in the gaps between caring for my two kids, cooking food for people at a lovely restaurant on a hill, and various other gigs that keep the heat on.
It’s not always easy to find the time, but it is always a joy to write.
One of the problems I want to solve in 2025 is how to show my gratitude and value to paid subscribers without hiding my work away from people who are new to The Recovering Line Cook.
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I can't immediately remember a good story about a short/long vowel mistake in Japanese (which also has that distinction), but it did remind me of a story about an American man in Tokyo who wanted the taxi driver to drop him off (oroshite kudasai), but was instead asking the driver to kill him (koroshite kudasai).
I'm glad that your boss had a good sense of humor. It reminded me of when I had to tell German friends that their term for cell phones, handies, might not go over well in the USA.