The most curious thing I saw in the Åbo market was the bread, which was being peddled by many an old woman from the back of her cart. The cheaper kinds are made of rye meal, and are as hard as the nether millstone. The loaves are flat and about the size of a dinner plate, with a large round hole in the middle. They would make admirable quoits, which you know is my favorite game, and if my Finnish friends would not have considered it altogether too frivolous I should have bought some of these loaves and inaugurated a quoit tournament on the spot.
In some places the bread is baked only once in six months, and the older the bread the harder to masticate.
Some edibles are “not as nahsty as they look,” as our English friends say of certain of our American dishes, but to the uninitiated this Finnish black bread is quite as nasty as it looks, for it is sour as well as hard, and in the back districts, when harvests are poor, chopped straw and bark are mixed with the meal.
I would not have you imagine, however, for a moment, that in the well-to-do families, or in the comfortable hotels and restaurants, we are reduced to such fare as this. In fact, I know of no country in the world, unless it be Sweden, where food is so abundant, so varied, and so deliciously cooked.
As I wandered in and out among the stalls of meat and vegetables and bread and cheese, woolen stockings and aprons, and butter and sausages, where one could find almost anything he might want to eat or drink or wear, I was most interested in the faces of these rugged, weather-beaten peasants.
Ernest Young has well described the character of the Finnish people when he says: “Nature, fate, and tradition have stamped a common mark on the Finnish type of character, which, indeed, varies considerably in the country, but is easily recognized by the foreigner. The general traits of character are hardened, patient, passive strength; resignation; perseverance, allied to a certain obstinacy; a slow, contemplative way of thinking; an unwillingness to become angry and a tendency, when anger has been aroused, to indulge in unmeasured wrath; coolness in deadly peril, but caution afterwards; … adherence to the old and well known; attention to duty; a law-abiding habit of mind; love of liberty, hospitality, honesty; a predilection for religious meditation, revealing itself in true piety, which, however, is apt to have too much respect for the mere letter.”