Baked sausage and eggs
Ingredients:
Sausage
Scrambled egg mix
Instructions:
Boil sausage until all oils are removed
Cube sausage
Combine with scrambled egg mix in baking pan
Bake at low heat for six minutes or until the egg mixture is firm; do not allow flavours from eggs or sausage interpenetrate
Two-colour carrot salad
Ingredients:
Carrots (orange)
Carrots of a slightly different orange
Canned peaches (imported)
Instructions:
Drain, de-juice, and cube peaches
Gratinate carrots
Gratinate other carrots
Crudely mix in a serving vessel
Bread with garlic butter
Ingredients:
Bread
Butter
Garlic
Instructions:
Remove garlic skin and cube
Warm butter until malleable
Using an ice-cream scoop, combine garlic with butter
Rice, corn, pea, pineapple, and pepper salad
Ingredients:
Cooked rice (imported)
Canned corn (imported)
Canned cooked peas (imported)
Canned pineapple pieces (imported)
Red pepper slices (imported)
Instructions:
Combine ingredients in bottom portion of a large mixing pot.
It's pretty easy for an essentially government institution to simply bring in ingredients from all around the world and then put them next to each other in the hopes that something will happen. After all, celebrity chefs routinely produce stunning examples of international food combinations in the popular media, with their great melting pots. They make it look like magic because they have a through understanding of the diverse characteristics of the materials they bring to the kitchen, and they have an idea about how the individual components can work together to become more than the sums of their parts. They are also backed by decades of local experience and knowledge, along with teams with pipelines into international knowledge pools developed through long-term trust, risk-taking, and many failed experiments.
It's much more difficult to apply some energy to the effort, and to risk burning something in the process. Agitating or adding heat to the mix to encourage the ingredients to individually share their flavours with the others, and to thereby infuse them with qualities from each other is risky since not all ingredients will have equal prominence in the final product. In any given group of ingredients, some members will inevitably simply appear to come along for the ride, but that's all they can do if not given a chance to express and succeed on their strengths.
The approach whereby foreign ingredients are simply placed next to each other, while largely ignoring the strengths of local ingredients, simply averages them into a slightly textured, but ultimately unflavourful mass that *offends* no one. But neither does presenting such spatially adjacent but un-blended imports as a homogeneous outcome *satisfy* anyone. Nothing about spatial and temporal adjacency alone inspires the public to experiment with, or to understand individually, the strengths any of the pre-mixed components. While no menu-maker can force ingredients to work together, they can provide valuable guidance about overall direction. Half cups of pineapple, or of peaches, or peas, or sausage, or scrambled eggs in proportions chosen by each individual to suit their own tastes (even if such tastes disagree with the chefs') can provide a much richer social experience, and greater local benefits than some arbitrary combination imposed from the top.
As it stands, the public willingly cover up the attempts at international co-mingling using overwhelming amounts of American Tabasco sauce, Chinese chili sauce, some kind of Russian or Baltic paprika, French mustard, German pickled items, South Asian "curry" powder, and English ketchup. Hamburger and fries comes as a stereotypical package with no distinguishing Finnish characteristics; as does the Asian chicken and vegetable stir-fry on rice. It's not clear that the local workers on the ground are even ready to import ingredients from other parts of the world.
The reasoning and processes that drive the professionals who have decided on the mechanical mixing bowl menu remain unclear to the public, which makes it very difficult for those outside the menu-making circles to understand or appreciate (or to support) such a menu. Nor is it clear what the expected outcomes of such an unfocused culinary strategy are supposed to be.
Although a small number of local diners benefited from the fusion experiments with cheese-cloth co-developed with their on-again off-again German partners for the Persian audience, the public backlash against that particular kind of collaboration suggests a broader review of domestic and international strategies and menus.
A protectionist attitude against foreign ingredients and fusion would be overreacting (since few would benefit socially or culturally from a strictly True Finnish menu). But instead of perusing a menu of importing foreign ingredients and customers wholesale as replacements for the culinary value and growth that customers expect from participating in a global ingredient supply chain, Finnish menu-makers could find ways to add value to their foods through knowledge.
Given that Finland as abundant access to many varieties of fish, reindeer, hare, ducks, berries, grains, and milk (even though some of those ingredients are linked to politically sensitive histories), there are many opportunities pair international imports with complimentary domestic strengths and assets. Yet the Finnish ingredients are rarely leveraged locally, outside the basics of bread and fermented milk, to which very little value is added for the local customers through Finnish culinary knowledge or international pairings.
Increasingly, and most tellingly, there is a fear among Gen-Xers that Finnish youth are being influenced by well-integrated menu items made locally from international ingredients. Pizzas, kebab, Subway, Chinese take out, and spots drinks are seen as gateway foods that threaten the national culinary identity. As far as I can tell, the only thread uniting Finnish cuisine are the sour, skim, and 1 per cent milk options; the obligatory trip to the salad bar (an American idea from the 1970s) at every venue that serves food; the default heart-conscious low fat, low sugar, and low salt styles of preparation; the very rich (slightly flavoured) butter spreads that apply to every bread; and the overwhelmingly sweet desserts. However, from the opposite perspective such "other" cuisines can only be dreaded in reference to some strong domestic reference.
Serve slightly chilled as a coherent salad, garnish with unsalted sunflower seed kernels to taste.
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