‘If you don’t like it, go Douglas House’
I wrote this piece in 1996 and it was published in this column in June of that year prior to the August Finn Fest. Since then we have lost another of the aunts—the oldest, Drusila, seen standing on the left in the family photo, and another uncle, Alan, who is on his mother’s lap in the picture—who passed on in October 2004.
My aunt Sylvia Huhta, standing on the right, is still living with her family in Colorado and my father, Harold, the shy boy in the first row, are the only remaining of the eleven children. Harold lives on the family farm, sleeping in the room in which he was born, and making salt fish just as he was taught by his mother. A collection of Tikkanen family photos and artifacts, honoring Mary (Saari) Tikkanen will be on display at the New York Deli and Italian Place from August 5 through Finn Grand Fest week as part of the display tours.

I have been thinking about things Finnish and Finnish-American lately as, like so many other Finns in the Marquette area, I am trying to do my part to help with the preparations for Finn Fest 1996 in August.
At one of the meetings, the topic turned to Finnish foods that people remembered eating as kids or, in some cases, still prepare for special occasions. With my almost pathetic ear for understanding Finnish (my tongue is even worse when it comes to those vowels), I tried to follow the conversation and occasionally caught a word that sounded somewhat familiar—piirakka, leipajuusto, pannukakku—while other dishes had to be described to me by the more knowledgeable members.
Still, considering that I am a third-generation half Finn, I find that I do have more recollections about Finnish-American foods than might be expected, probably because my family lived, from the time I was nine, on the family farm settled by my Finnish grandparents.
The words were just curiosities to us as children and we sometimes twisted them into more familiar forms. I will blame one of my cousins that korppua—those little dried cinnamon toasts—became “corpses” in our family, a ghoulish name for something we liked to dunk in our cocoa.
Still my brothers, cousins and I grew up eating prune tarts at Christmas and nisu and rieska year-round. We participated with enthusiasm (more or less) in annual berry picking forays, had it engraved in our hearts that all guests should be offered coffee no matter what, probably will never really accept that fish out of the big lake could possibility be bad for you and, although this might be just me, consider mashed rutabagas “soul food.”
Curious, however, as to what my father’s memories of food might be, I took the opportunity on a recent trip home to talk to him about food on the family farm. My father, Harold Tikkanen, was the eighth of eleven children and the fifth son of Charles and Mary Tikkanen.
As children, both his parents had emigrated to the Copper Country with their families and it was there they met and were married in 1901. My grandfather was a copper miner but, as was true with so many Finns, he wanted a farm and in about 1910 moved the family to a forty-acre parcel just off what is now the Golf Course Road between Calumet and Lake Linden.
During the years when those eleven children were being raised, this was subsistence farming mostly, with most of the goods produced and harvested being used to feed the family while my grandfather continued to work in the mines. What was eaten was therefore in good part dictated by what the farm could produce, shaped by Finnish traditions.
My father remembers that his “pa” was the first farmer in this Finnish farm neighborhood to grow a wide variety of vegetables. While many of the neighbors grew only potatoes, the Tikkanens had potatoes, carrots, rutabagas, cabbages, onions, lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, peas, beans, cucumbers, sweet corn, beets, radishes, rhubarb, chives and dill.
Actually, my father credits the Italians his pa worked with in the mines for increasing his knowledge of vegetable gardening. I include this reluctantly, since my partner in this column, and in life, probably will use it to support his belief that all good food originates in Italy.
Vegetables were an important part of almost all meals with my grandmother serving salads and fresh vegetables with every summer supper, but also putting much effort into preserving enough for the rest of the year.
Peas, beans, tomatoes and corn were canned. Cucumbers and beets were pickled. Cabbage was made into sauerkraut. Potatoes, rutabagas, carrots and onions were stored in the root cellar dug into a hillside out by the barn.
My grandfather also put in an orchard soon after the move, and this contributed cherries, plums and applesauce to the shelves of home canned goods. Blueberries were canned after the annual berry picking camp-out at Rice Lake.
There was a small herd of cows (fed oats grown on the farm) and dairy products were eaten in abundance. Milk was served at every meal, my grandmother made viili, a kind of clabbered milk and the traditional soft Finnish cheese leipajuusto, or what is known as “squeaky cheese” after the sound it makes as you chew it.
Butter was churned weekly. This tradition carried over to my childhood days on this same farm. Of all the kinds of work I have done in my life, I don’t think I have ever had a more satisfying feeling of accomplishment than when, after what seems to be an eternity of turning, the crank suddenly stiffens and you have produced a lovely yellow ball of butter.
Grandma was known for the whipped cream she made. When family or neighborhood gatherings were being planned, there was usually a request for “Mary’s whipped cream cake”—a white cake, sometimes with bananas between the layers, and always frosted with generous spoonfuls of homemade whipped cream.
There always was a flock of chickens, and eggs were sometimes eaten for breakfast although oatmeal was standard fare. Eggs were used in baking and cooking. Chicken meat, however, was a treat kept for special Sunday dinners and beef and pork were the standard supper meats. All meat came from the family’s own steers and pigs.
Slaughtering took place in the fall, and just about everything from the animals was eaten. The tongue was boiled and eventually sliced; tripe was pickled, head cheese made, and then, of course, there was verimakkara.
My brothers and I remember well the late fall day when my father and uncle were butchering and had carefully preserved the main ingredient for their verimakkara (blood sausage). The pan was brought into the house and placed on top of the big freezer in the porch. Unfortunately, there was snow on the bottom of the pan, and the contents were warm. The pan just slipped its way right off that freezer and the blood splashed its way down the stairs to the door. An unpleasant situation for the average kid—unless your mother happens to have a fairly well-developed phobia that meant we had all learned to apply our own bandages at very young ages.
In the days before that freezer on the porch existed, the meat from butchering was stored in the summer kitchen for use throughout the winter. The summer kitchen was a small log cabin, which still stands on our family property, used for cooking and eating during the warm weather to keep the heat out of the house.
And while the family did eat meat often, fish was an important part of the diet. Most fish was purchased from a fish peddler who went from farm to farm. The dish my father remembers as prepared most often was kala lakslouta—a trout and potato casserole cooked with onions and milk. Many times he would come into the kitchen after school, look to see what was cooking, and tease his mother with, “Kala lakslouta, again?”, to which she would reply, “If you don’t like it, go Douglas House!” The Douglas House in Houghton was the Copper Country’s premier hotel in those days.)
My father’s favorite dish was his mother’s salt fish which he still says is the best. This was either eaten raw (like lox), or washed and broiled by holding it over the wood fire in the kitchen stove in a wire holder. That my grandmother was skilled with fish is not surprising since her family members were fishermen, not farmers as were my grandfather’s, and she was born on a small island in the Barents Sea a few miles north of Vadso (Norway)—an area that had been settled primarily by Finns.
We visited this area with my parents in 1988 and think we found the actual island where my grandmother was born. This is tundra country, above the seventy degree parallel, barren of even the small, twisted birches you see throughout most of northern Finland. The Keweenaw would seem like a lush paradise in comparison.
My father remembers that herring were most plentiful in the spring when Pa would take some of the boys out to near where McLain State Park now is located on the western shore of the Keweenaw.
Here there was a fisherman who was willing, for a dollar, to sweep his net near the shore where the herring were running. It was a game of chance—you could end up with a lot or nothing. Herring often was fried, but this was the fish my grandparents liked to smoke with the sauna serving as smokehouse.
There is one other fish dish my father remembers with enthusiasm—fishhead soup. This was the dish my mother, not of Finnish ancestry, remembers my dad asking her to make for him when they moved back to the Keweenaw. It’s a simple concoction of fish heads, onions, salt and pepper, simmered, I suppose, until the bits of meat and those little eyes are tender.
Perhaps it’s psychological, but I truly can think of no cooking smell that is as noxious as this. I remember once as an adult entering a friend’s grandmother’s kitchen in northern Wisconsin and my stomach doing a neat sommersault as it recognized the smell of the fish heads simmering on the stove. Apparently my mother felt the same as it has been quite a few years since my father has had this prepared for him.
The size of her family kept my grandmother busy baking. Vertin’s in Calumet delivered dry goods once a month, and there always was 100 pounds of flour in the order. Vertin’s was one of the oldest and finest department stores in the Copper Country for many decades. I was not aware, however, that they had ever been in the grocery business as well, but was told that, at this time, the basement of their Fifth Street store in Calumet was their grocery department and their slogan was, “Five Floors. Five Stores.”
The daily bread was a plain white that my grandmother baked—a dozen loaves at a time. Rye and other whole grains were used less often, although rieska, an unleavened barley bread, often made with buttermilk, and nisu, the Finnish cardamom sweet bread were made.
Nisu is the name that all Copper Country Finns use for this coffee bread. However, pulla is the “correct” name, and what the same bread is called in Finland and in other Finnish-American communities. The famous Finnish prune tarts were made only at Christmas; more common treats were large, sweet biscuits or scones. Grandma also made fruit pies quite often using either the blueberries canned in the summer or apples.
One non-Finnish dish my grandmother made often—every few weeks in fact—were Cornish pasties. She would start this process by peeling a half bushel of potatoes and plenty of carrots and rutabagas. It’s no wonder she always insisted on having lots of help on the days she took on this project. She made fish pasties, a dish that sounds like a real hybrid, using the Cornish pasty-type crust but filling it with a mixture of fish, potato and onions. Piirakka, the real Finnish pasty-type dish, has a crust made with rye flour and may have either a meat or fish filling with rice or mashed potatoes and sometimes slices of hard-boiled eggs.
The results of all this activity really came together at the family suppers, which were served at about five o’clock each day. The main dish might be the kala lakslouta, another fish dish, pasties, a vegetable and meat soup or stew, or a roast of some type served with boiled potatoes, gravy and other vegetables. Bread and butter and pickles were on the table, along with milk. Hot tea was served with supper, although a pot of boiled coffee was kept hot on the back of the stove all day long. Desserts were simple—puddings, perhaps with some fruit sauce, or a plain cake might be served. Uncomplicated meals until you explore the effort behind them.
Over the years, changes came to the farm that affected the way food was preserved and prepared. A combination gas and wood stove made the summer kitchen obsolete, and the cabin was moved away from the house. That freezer (still on the porch during my childhood) made preserving the results of butchering animals and harvesting the vegetable garden and orchard safer and easier. The boiled coffee was replaced by a drip pot.
The number at the supper table grew smaller until, in her last few years, my grandmother was cooking only for herself, my grandfather and the one son who stayed on with them at the farm.
As I listened to my father, I was amazed at exactly how much time and effort a Finnish farm family of that time put into the production and preparation of food. Having been raised for part of my childhood on this same farm, I have never had a lot of romantic notions about the glories of farm life and know there was much drudgery. Still, it seems worthwhile to visit, at least in memories, these traditions, and to recognize that like all things, food style and preparation change but change is not always progress.
—Pat Tikkanen

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