Pie and Prejudice

On fish pie and love in Finland

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Now for this week’s essay.

Wil

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Pie and Prejudice

by Wil Reidie

A pie isn’t a pie if it’s a “pie”.

This makes sense if you’ve thought about pie as much as I have.

As a good little English boy, I’ve developed a pretty broad definition of the word pie. I love them as rich, slow-cooked stews imprisoned on all sides in thick, fatty pastry. But I equally love them simply topped with brittle puff pastry that melts in the mouth with a buttery flourish.

And that’s not to mention the sweet pies. Shortcrust pastry cases filled with stewed apples or berries or stone-fruits. Their pastry tops egg-washed, sprinkled with sugar and roasted to caramel gold in a hot oven, the juices bubbling from wherever the pastry was rolled a little too thin.

I’m also entirely open to the idea of a pie not being topped with pastry at all. Rather, as the Americans do, I’m happy to call pecan and lemon meringue offerings “pies”, though deep down I’d sooner call them tarts.

Most strangely of all I’m willing to call a stew of mince, be it lamb or beef, topped with mashed potato a pie as well. My favourite of all such pies being the ever so British Fish Pie.

Someone who has a more interesting job title than me might have the time to discover why such a diverse range of dishes are called the same thing. But one thing I do know is that the title “pie” is not so liberally bestowed in my adopted home of Finland.

Pie in Finnish is piirakka. Be they sweet or savoury, a Finnish piirakka is almost exclusively a pastry bottomed affair with an open top. In this sense, when sweet they are like those American pies I mentioned, when savoury, they are rather like what I would call a quiche.

Certainly a piirakka would never have anything to do with potato toppings. This I learnt just a little while ago when I put my fish pie recipe on the menu at work. It was my final lunch special before I ended that chapter in my cooking life, and I learnt that to call it a piirakka would deeply confuse the local clientele.

It took me and the head chef far too long that week to figure out what we would eventually call it when translated to Finnish.

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I spent much of my first year in Finland in a classroom doing unforgivable things to the Finnish language alongside surly Russians, a Moroccan nuclear technician, and a Ukrainian twenty-something who had cheekbones you could slice cheese with. Four years on and the sound I hear when thinking of that classroom remains heavily accented immigrants repeating to each other en ymmärrä (I don’t understand) and en tiedä (I don’t know).

Finnish is hard.

There was, thank god, a two-month break from the endless translation tests and role play sessions halfway through the course. During these two months we were sent out on work placements to use our toddler-grade Finnish in the real world. Rather than the sushi restaurant or tire shop a few of my classmates ended up in, I got lucky and spent my time at the local museum.

And there was one exhibit at the museum that fascinated me above all others. More so even than the mummified bear’s head once thought by prehistoric Finnish shamans to possess magical qualities. It wasn’t an interesting item at all but a piece of text. Printed in a glass cabinet next to some excavated farming tools, the text described the relationship early communities in south-west Finland had with nature. It described the change in this relationship as they moved from hunter-gatherers to farmers. This behavioural change turned nature from provider into something to be controlled. Nature no longer gave but became the force that threatened to take away.

Nature had remained the same, but the way people looked at it changed.

And so nature changed as well.

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One thing I am sure of, whether you call it pie, quiche or piirakka, is that a truly great pie requires careful cooking. A pie isn’t a throw-it-in-the-oven-and-forget kind of affair. An egg-based filling, in particular, demands gentle and slow cooking. Doing so makes sure the egg proteins don’t tighten up so much that they end up leaching water, resulting in a grainy texture and “soggy bottom” of pastry.

I may be a bit sensitive about this, but I despair when I see golden-browned quiches in cookbooks or recipe web-pages. I appreciate it looks good, that roasted, souffléed exterior. But I know it’s to the detriment of the delicate egg custard within.

Give me a pale, gently cooked quiche, I mean pie, any day.

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The person I bothered the most at the museum was the resident anthropologist, Leena. She, after all, had written that exhibit text about the changed perspective of hunter-gatherers that so fascinated me. When I told her of my interest in it, she recommended a book called What is Anthropology by a Norwegian called Thomas Eriksen. It’s a short book, very readable, and clearly angled toward the person whose only real understanding of anthropology is that it’s not just a women’s clothing store.

There were a few things in the book I found particularly interesting. One of these was a concept called ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is the act of judging or understanding a different culture through one’s own customs and frames of reference. It is the anthropologist’s primary job, instead, to consider any subject through a “native point of view”.

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Like a quiche, a good fish pie requires gentle cooking as well. A fish pie is often made by placing some good quality chunks of raw fish in a baking dish, covering it with a rich sauce, sometimes velouté-based, bechamel or, my favourite, cream, then mashed potato, and baking it in a hot oven until cooked through and golden brown on top. The problem with this method is that, if the pie is baked too aggressively, the fish will, like the eggs of a quiche, release too much water. This will render the sauce, that may well have had a perfect consistency before, too runny.

The sauce will no longer thickly coat the chunks of fish. And the pieces of (now overcooked) fish will sit in a thin soup topped with potato that has inevitably started to disintegrate having absorbed some of that liquid as well.

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Ethnocentric or not, I want to impress on you how unusual my Finnish family seemed to me when we first met all those years ago. And there’s no better demonstration of this than how they spend Christmas here. For some indecipherable reason they choose not to open their presents the second they wake up. Nor are they content spending the day eating chocolate in their pyjamas, watching TV, and arguing about who was stupid enough to buy only a half-bottle of Baileys this year.

So unusual is Christmas in Finland that gift opening doesn’t only wait until after lunch, it must also wait until we’ve visited the local graveyard and left candles for long-departed loved ones. This being a Finnish custom that, in its remarkable selflessness, makes the Yuletide festival of indulgence I’m used to in England seem almost savage.

But these oddities are nothing compared to how differently they treat each other to what I was used to growing up. The way no one lavishes my mother-in-law with words of praise after a few bites of her Christmas cooking. The way so few words of hyperbolic gratitude are shared when they finally do open gifts.

If my own mother received as few compliments about her food as my mother-in-law does, she’d sulk until new year’s.

So would I, most likely.

I’ll put it more bluntly, in the decade I’ve known them, I’ve not heard any of my Finnish family say “I love you” to each other.

Not even once.

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Oven baking doesn’t have the same rock ‘n roll aesthetic as a tattooed, Bourdain-esque chef-pirate deftly negotiating sauté pans from behind a gas-fired stove. Be it a quiche or fish pie, the oven cooking process is less controlled, less active. You make your choice, program the oven, and close the door. This kind of cooking is distanced from you, you have less agency. You can be gentle, you can set a low temperature, but, when all is said and done, cutting into the pie, slicing that quiche, is an act of anticipation. An exercise in faith that the dish will turn out good. It’s a part of cooking I’ve never stopped loving. It’s like opening a gift at Christmas.

The leap of faith in oven cooking.

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Some months after my time at the museum, I had a Skype chat with a friend back in London. I remember it well because of a question he surprised me with about one of the few Finns he’d ever heard of, which, as an F1 fan, was the famously laconic Kimi “Iceman” Räikkönen. My friend asked what it's like to live among such emotionless, deeply reserved people.

I told him he’d got it wrong and that it isn’t a lack of emotion at all. I told him, or at least tried to explain, that one can’t translate one way of doing things to the other. People do say certain things a little less here. They do react in a way that’s unusual to Brits like me and my friend. There may be fewer words of praise and fewer words of love even, but that’s not to say that their love is any less real.

It just looks different.

I told him love looks very different here.

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And it still looks different even now to me, a British man spoiled by daily, reassuring words of love from his parents as a boy. If I have come to accept the absence of such words from my Finnish family, I know this is because of my wife, Silja. Having built our love together in a country neither of us called home, Sweden, I think we fashioned a way of loving that was equally one part mine and one part hers.

On moving to Finland, I suppose she became my Rosetta stone for love.

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In judging nature by their own demands and prejudices, it seems to me those hunter-gatherers were a little ethnocentric themselves. In learning not to judge the people in my life by the rules I grew up with, I’m trying to avoid making the same mistake.

I often still feel like a stranger in a strange land here. But one thing I understand is that love, like certain words, can’t be translated neatly. Little gaps and absences emerge, sometimes all too frequently, to trip me up. To fill those gaps, I’ve had to do less tripping and commit to something of a leap.

The leap of faith in Finnish loving.