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Hard Core Finnish Easter Dessert
It looks like chocolate fudge cake. It tastes like compact sour-dough rye bread and molasses. It is basically compact sour-dough rye bread and molasses. You have it at Easter, cold, with cream and sugar. It is a Finnish thing....
Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Society, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two.
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Category: Food
Posted on: March 21, 2009 8:45 AM, by Martin R
It looks like chocolate fudge cake. It tastes like compact sour-dough rye bread and molasses. It is basically compact sour-dough rye bread and molasses. You have it at Easter, cold, with cream and sugar. It is a Finnish thing. It is very strange.
It is memma. You will grow to like it.
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Comments
Var har du fatt tag pa detta?
Posted by: Wife | March 21, 2009 8:54 AM
Ohh, memma! Fick det jämt hos min mormor (som var finsk) när vi var på besök. Inget man tar till sig direkt som vuxen kanske.
Posted by: Janne | March 21, 2009 9:45 AM
ps. om du gillar memma så dricker du väl sima också? Fantastiskt gott, och man kan laga det hemma.
Posted by: Janne | March 21, 2009 9:48 AM
Memma? Mitä se on?
It's called 'mämmi' in less civilized parts of the world.
Posted by: Bob O'H | March 21, 2009 10:10 AM
Mämmi rules!
Posted by: Mikael | March 21, 2009 10:45 AM
Posted by: llewelly | March 21, 2009 11:26 AM
it's been too many years since i got to have that.
the wikipedia page has a couple recipes. hmm, i wonder if i could get hold of rye malt anywhere nearby...
Posted by: Nomen Nescio | March 21, 2009 12:19 PM
Baby, I bought it at Hemköp on my way to Skepparstigen.
Janne, I haven't heard of sima before. Judging from recipes it should be pretty vile. But, I guess, "try everything once except incest and country dancing"...
Llew, you made memma and didn't know what it was? What exactly were you trying to make?!
N.N., maybe a beer hobbyist mail-order site can help?
Posted by: Martin R | March 21, 2009 3:33 PM
Did see Gordon Ramsay taste this on one of his shows. He found it absolutely disgusting :D
Posted by: Andreas | March 21, 2009 6:33 PM
I don't see why this would be even close to unappealing. Molasses are a bit of an acquired taste, but sourdough ryebread just sounds yummy.
Then again I like natto and enjoy buttermilk as an alternative to normal milk. Then again I might be a bit off the radar of normal in these things.
Posted by: rsm | March 21, 2009 7:21 PM
sima (mjöd) done right is yummy. it can be screwed up, of course, as any brewing process, but it's relatively foolproof and the result most worthwhile. it's a May Day thing where i grew up.
memma is a bit of an acquired taste, but as compared to stuff like natto, i refuse to believe it would be anywhere nearly as hard to acquire.
Posted by: Nomen Nescio | March 21, 2009 8:04 PM
Sima seems similar to gotlandsdricka, whose quality varies dramatically from maker to maker.
Posted by: Martin R | March 22, 2009 3:44 AM
Yes, sima/mjöd quality varies a lot from maker to maker, plus it goes bad relatively quickly. The varieties you can buy in shops usually taste little like the homebrew stuff.
Posted by: Henrik | March 22, 2009 7:45 AM
A Finn to a foreigner: "It is traditional. It is not what you think it is. This is not some evil prank we pull on gullible out-of-towners. No sirree. Heh heh. Now I will watch you when you eat it. Pon appetititi."
Posted by: Masks of Eris | March 22, 2009 7:31 PM
certainly it is not any evil prank Finns pull on foreigners.
those all involve saunas.
Posted by: Nomen Nescio | March 22, 2009 9:00 PM
Future wife's mother is from Finland, so we naturally eat memmi at easter. I actually became quite fond of it from the start. The key is not to anticipate a yummy sweet dessert when you're about to try it.
Posted by: Niklas R | March 23, 2009 6:57 AM
Memma is pretty tasty. It's also the highest-density substance in the known universe, so you're usually full after just a bite. Gotlandsdricku should be banned, btw.
Posted by: Pär | March 23, 2009 9:34 AM
My granny made sweet cornbread and crumbled it into milk for over 100 years. As far as I know, she's still doing it (age 104). Back when she was young and sugar wasn't available, they sometimes sweetened things with honey, molasses, or even sorghum. If she'd had a different type of bread such as sourdough rye, I imagine she'd have eaten memma but called it something else. She was born in Indian Territory, which became Oklahoma, by the way.
Posted by: DianaGainer | March 23, 2009 4:03 PM
In one of Edith Nesbit's children's fantasy books, a group of sibs make a wish for the best meal in the world, and receive a bowl of bread boiled in milk. This, explains Nesbit, is not the tastiest of meals, but certainly the best.
Posted by: Martin R | March 23, 2009 4:28 PM