Traditional Family Recipes: Laxlada from Finland

 

As Christine showed us in our last posting of Traditional Family Recipes, anyone can take a recipe given to them and pass it down to members of their own family for generations to come. Now, our next recipe in the series looks at how an old favourite can come from a foreign land and become adapted to new environments and food selections.  The spirit of the dish is still present, but its contents may vary slightly based on the local ingredients available. This week’s recipe comes to us from June who was born to Finnish immigrants who fished and lived in a Finnish speaking community along the banks of British Columbia’s Fraser River called Finn Slough. 

When many people think of immigration to British Columbia, the first countries they think of are the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Russia, India and China. But another nation that came to British Columbia in large waves in the first half of the twentieth century was Finland. The Finns were known as superb fishermen and lumbermen in their native country and they brought those skills with them to Canada. There were two major waves of Finnish immigration to Canada. The first was in the early 1920s. Even though Finland was not an active participant in the Great War of 1914-1918, their country did feel the backlash of diminished food supplies and commodities which swept all of Europe. Trade routes had either been seized or disrupted, causing starvation in some parts of northern Europe, including Finland. At war’s end, many Finnish families decided to abandon the chaotic political climate and came to North America for a better life. This first Finnish wave of immigrants settled mainly in northern Ontario around Sudbury to work in the nickel mines and in forestry while another group came directly to British Columbia’s west coast which resembled the west coast of Finland with its long inlets and excellent fishing. And it is with two young immigrants to British Columbia, Selinda and Sakri, during this first wave of immigration that our real story begins.

In order to come to Canada from Finland in the 1920s, a person had to have a sponsor. Young Selinda was 19 years old in 1927 when she boarded a ship from Helsinki to Quebec City, then hopped a train to Vancouver. She spoke only Finnish and she carried a hand written note, in English, informing those who read it of her destination. The people who sponsored her came from her home village a few years before and operated Hastings Bakery in downtown Vancouver. When she arrived at the Grand Central train station in Vancouver, Selinda’s sponsors met her and took her in. She began working in their bakery and in the 1930s, Selinda would meet Sakri.

Sakri came from the west central coast of Finland and arrived in Canada in 1929 having been sponsored by his cousin and her husband. He was both a fisherman and a carpenter but he couldn’t get work right away in either trade because he hadn’t been in Canada long enough and the Great Depression was making life difficult for job seekers. Eventually, he fished along the west coast in summer and worked at finishing carpentry on fish boats at the Nelson Bros. Shipyard near New Westminster during the winter. Selinda and Sakri met in Vancouver and eventually married. They moved to a small two room float-house on the banks of Finn Slough, a small Finnish speaking community in south Richmond, BC. Nearly all the inhabitants were from the same region in Finland and most of the men were fishermen. Finn Slough is still inhabited by some of the descendants of those early settlers while some non-Finnish residents have recently moved in to live a rustic, riverside life. Many of the houses are over a century old including this home pictured below.

June spent the first two years of her life on this float-house, speaking only Finnish. It wasn’t until her family moved to Sointula, another large Finnish community on Malcolm Island, at the north tip of Vancouver Island, that June learned to speak English when she started school. Her parents had agreed that they would not speak English to her until she started school for Sakri said he did not want her to learn the broken English he and Selinda spoke, but wanted her to speak and communicate properly in order to give her better opportunities when she grew up. Sadly, Sakri passed away when June was seven and just over a year later, the home she and Selinda lived in burned to the ground. Selinda then decided to go back to Vancouver where she knew more people and had more opportunities to find employment to raise her only child.

In 1957, Selinda and June moved to Vancouver Island.  In adulthood June met and married Lawrence, who worked for 34 years as a welder in the Vancouver Island pulp and paper industry. The couple retired to northern Alberta in 2007 and are active with various groups in their community. June explains that though life for the Finnish community may have seemed simple and difficult to those outside the community, it was a very vibrant, hard-working, family oriented culture that always banded together to help one another in times of need. Things that were important to their community were living off the land, family and maintaining their language and customs from Finland, which included passing down traditional, rustic recipes that developed a west coast Canadian flair in time. One such dish was silakkalaatikka or fish scalloped potatoes. This is a traditional Finnish dish of simple scalloped potatoes that contains white fish commonly found in Finland such as smelts, herring or even trout. It is traditionally served as the main meal with rye bread, cheese, beet pickles and salted cucumbers. Living in British Columbia, and fishing its waters, allowed the Finns to adapt the dish by using salmon instead. The following recipe called laxlada, or salmon scallop, was a very popular dish made by many Finnish families in British Columbia.  June still makes this dish the way she remembered her mother making it when she was growing up.

Laxlada

You will need

1 pound of canned salmon or fresh salmon cut into cubes

6 large potatoes, washed, peeled and sliced into thin rounds

1 onion thinly sliced into rounds

2 cups of milk

2 tablespoons of butter

1 egg

¼ cup of fine bread crumbs

2 or 3 slices of bacon

Salt and pepper to taste

Remove the skin and bones from the salmon and break into chunks. Into a well buttered casserole dish, arrange the layers of potatoes, onions, fish and salt and pepper. Make sure to begin and end with the potatoes. Dot the top potato layer with the butter. In a bowl, mix gently together the milk and egg then pour the mix over everything then sprinkle the top with the breadcrumbs.  Finally, arrange the bacon slices on the top. Bake at 375F for about an hour or until the potatoes are fork tender.

Would you like a traditional Finnish beetroot salad to go with this dish? Here are the ingredients to make rosolli, a very popular summer salad dish that can be enjoyed all year long.

Rosolli

You will need

5 cooked or pickled beets

2 boiled potatoes

2 boiled carrots

1 pickled cucumber

1 onion

1 apple

Parsley

Dressing:

½ cup of mayonnaise or Miracle Whip

Splash of white wine vinegar

Splash of liquid from pickled beetroots to give the dressing a pinkish colour

Salt and white pepper to taste

Cut the vegetables and apple into ½ inch cubes, place into a bowl and top with salt, pepper and parsley. Mix the dressing ingredients in a separate bowl. When thoroughly mixed, pour over the vegetable mixture and lightly toss. Set into the refrigerator to allow the flavours to blend and mature. Serve with a portion of the salmon scalloped potatoes.

My thanks to June for sending me some of her family favourite recipes which originated back in Finland and have been adapted here in Canada. Hope you enjoy them. I know I look forward to making them!

Culinary History, Fun Stuff beet and potato salad, British Columbia, family recipes, Finn Slough, Finnish heritage, fish dishes, Fishing, Rosolli, salmon scalloped potatoes