No Room for Lazy People - Earl Somero
New Ipswich Historical Society
FINNS: An Oral History of Finnish-Americans in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region
Excerpted from FINNS: An Oral History... by Patricia Kangas Ktistes, 1997, all rights reserved.
Earl Somero
My mother, who everyone called Aiti [mother], never measured ingredients when she cooked. It was always a handful of this or a handful of that, but everything came out great most of the time.
She made kalja—out of root beer extract—when we were haying. I was seldom there when she made it, but she mixed it up in big pots, added handfuls of sugar, and put it into bottles. She even put raisins in: I don’t know if that was part of the recipe or just her idea.
We’d come in sweating from the hay fields, actually anytime, and drink some. It tasted good, like root beer, but the root beer we drink now is sweet compared to kalja. I guess it was somewhat fizzy. Sometimes she didn’t get the mixtures right and it was more bitter than sweet or more watered-down.
Aiti made breads: a lot of rye bread. In the old days, the round reikäleipää with the hole in the middle used to be stored on poles over kitchen stoves. In a short time, they dried out to become hard.
That’s why there’s coffee: so you can soak the dried bread in it. The old Finns liked things they could soak because many probably didn’t have teeth. They would have let me drink coffee anytime after I was 16, but I never drank that much because I didn’t care for it. But I still like coffee-milk, sort of the Finnish version of latte.
One specialty Aiti made was what she called juustua. It’s cheese made from freshened cow: ‘squeaky’ cheese. It would squeak against your teeth. Whenever a cow had a calf, Aiti would take the new milk and add something to make it curdle. Strain that and lift the whey, then put it in the oven and bake it in a pie plate until browned. It was probably three-quarters of an inch high. We’d eat that when it was warm and, boy was it good! I can’t compare it to anything we eat nowadays: more spongy than cheesecake. It almost looked like and had the texture of an omelet, except it was a little more dense.
Of course, Finns would eat it with coffee. Those were your choices: juustua and coffee or nisu and coffee.
Yes, like Earl, I loved whatever my Mummu cooked up and it was eaten with coffee brewed from freshly ground beans (no age limit or quantity limit). My favorites were donut balls with apple sauce in the middle and cardamon coffee bread. When my father had a general store Arthur was a frequent customer. He communicated with father via sign language. At Tricnit I worked with Eino when he was in his 60s. I was his helper. I remember him yelling at me when I did something wrong and then he would apologize. I said to him:
"That''s OK, I'm used to being yelled at, you're like my father.