No Room for Lazy People - Laurel Ojala

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.

John M Poltrack - Sep 5, 2009

Laurel Ojala

Most of Laurel and Tim Ojala’s 11 children either helped build Kidder’s Restaurant, the family business, in 1985 or operate it. In 1991, the Ojalas sold the restaurant and Laurel launched a home-based business, Sunrise Bakery. One of her high-volume products is nisu, the renowned braided bread with delicate cardamom accents. Laurel runs the bakery from their family’s working farm surrounded by stone walls and ancient maple trees. A Hoosier cabinet and weaving loom dominate the front room.

Adjacent to the family kitchen, the bakery is all business with an antique icebox, Garland gas stove, old Hobart oven, commercial mixing machines, sacks of flour, pots and pans neatly hung, and the biggest rolling pin imaginable. Clearly, nobody goes hungry here: institutional containers of date spread and fancy molasses wait to be opened along with rows of home-canned tomatoes, pickles, and beets. And for readers wanting a baking secret: in cold weather, Laurel recommends zapping cold flour in the microwave before mixing it into nisu dough. The dough rises faster that way.

When I was a kid, I enjoyed baking and every time I baked, I had a habit of doubling my recipes. One time I didn’t pay attention but went ahead; I think I was making an oatmeal-raisin recipe. I had so many cookies they were just about coming out of my ears. My mother told me, “Laurel, you’re going to have a big family.” I came from a small family; only three. So I had no idea what it was like to raise a large family, but I just took it one day at a time. We believe each child brings its bread and we had faith that if God gives us responsibility for a child, he’ll give us the bread.

Socially, it was quite a change to move to New Hampshire from Michigan. At that time, we were very family-oriented in Copper Country. Our life was spent around our immediate family and neighbors. When I moved here, it seemed there was little neighbor-to-neighbor association. Everybody minded their own business, like a bedroom community.

In 1985, we got the bright idea to open Kidder’s Restaurant because Al Traffie was building the NeWest Mall in New Ipswich and wanted someone to open a restaurant. All his life, my husband Tim had a dream to run a restaurant, so he ‘volunteered.’ It was quite an experience from Day One. One surprising thing we ran into was a lot of negativism in the community: people who said, “You’re not going to make it.” We had established a no-smoking rule; I think we were one of the first to create that type of atmosphere. I felt that if we had all these young girls working in the restaurant, I didn’t really want them being exposed to smoke. We had relatives who wouldn’t even come in just because of the no-smoking rule, but so be it. Other customers really appreciated it. I guess this negativism got our old Finn sisu going and it was even more of a challenge. We said, “We’ve got to do it.” We heard a lot of rumors going around about us that were not very nice and very much exaggerated, but that just got us more fired up to prove ourselves. And so the rumors backfired.

It did help that I was already cooking at home for a big family. But as far as managing and running the restaurant, we had to learn as we went. But our customers were very considerate and patient and those were enjoyable years. We had to start looking for machinery. One of our ovens was Tim’s aunt’s from Cape Cod. She ran a restaurant there until she was about 85 years old. One of her specialties was cranberry loaf; I should’ve gotten the recipe from her.

When our restaurant started up, we had seven children still at home. They were very excited; the boys helped Tim construct the restaurant. They had to design it and everything. The girls had to run it. We served three meals a day and they did really well. I still felt my priority was my family. We also felt that the restaurant was home: the children got off the bus there after school. That’s where we spent the evening together. We bought a camper and parked it in the back so they could do their homework or take a nap.

Working in the restaurant definitely was a good experience for the children and to this day some of them have said it was the best experience they could have had. We have some who are of a perfectionist nature and they found out they couldn’t do it all and get it perfect every time. So they learned their limits: a big lesson. They learned to take on responsibility, use the cash register, and dealwith the public.

One menu item we found surprisingly successful was genuine mashed potatoes. I recently read an article saying homemade mashed potatoes are coming back into the American diet. They’ve been gone for a whole generation because of instant potatoes; but it’s never the same. For about two-and-a-half years, we peeled potatoes by hand, then we bought an electric potato peeler. That helped out a lot. Ten o’clock at night we were still peeling for the next day. Another thing that went over big: homemade French fries. I think we went through six or seven bushels of potatoes each week.

Where I came from, one of the big things in the Finnish culture was pasties: little meat pies. They were actually Cornish pasties, but since copper mining was done in northern Michigan, the Finns more or less adopted the pasty so they could take it to work. I heard the reason why they turn the edges over on the pasty—when they’re eating down in the mine, they’ve got to have something to hold onto. And they can’t wash their hands, so they can throw that piece of crust away.

Our own Finnish coffee bread, or nisu, was being introduced through our restaurant and this gave us an idea that there is a market for it. There aren’t that many people making it commercially anymore. At the restaurant, we served it grilled, toasted, or plain. I remember the first time I grilled it.

And my impression was, “Why haven’t I done this before?” You put a little butter on each side and place it on the grill until it’s a golden brown. I experimented on the family and they liked it, too. That’s when we decided to put it on the menu. It takes time for customers to get courage to try new items, but grilled nisu was a big seller.

My daughter did most of the nisu baking at the restaurant. I was more or less the one to make the big meals. We also had Rhonda Traffie make nisu for Friday nights; we had to start having a supply on hand because people wanted to take it home for the weekend. After five-and-a-half years, the older girls were starting to get married and leave home, so more responsibility for the restaurant work was left to the younger ones. By that time they were starting to lose interest a little. It also was the time of the recession, so we switched into bakery mode. However, after we sold the restaurant, the children had a hard time adjusting to not seeing customers every day and to the reduced level of activity.

I miss the restaurant because I miss the people. We had the experience at the restaurant of a man who rode over all the time on a motorcycle. He said, “This is home away from home.” I think it was because of the cooking [that] people could feel the spirit of home. Nowadays a lot of people don’t cook. We also had a man who came in every day: he wanted communication with the children. We’d all sit around the table and talk with him.

Certain people arrived when they knew I’d be able to visit. That’s where I really learned to drink too much coffee I think there is a tendency within the Finnish culture to never just give a person a plain cup of coffee. You always have to have something with it and that makes more of a social atmosphere. It’s an empty feeling without food. There is nothing to linger and talk over. We often had customers coming from quite a way. From the Boston area, an elderly couple would come just because they wanted to take a ride. And an interesting experience recently occurred when I went to a nursing home in Peterborough to visit Tim’s aunt. There in the same nursing home was one of my old restaurant customers from the Boston area.

I’m not a typical baker who’s up at three o’clock in the morning because this bakery is more of a hobby. I usually get everybody off to school and my husband fed before I start in on the day’s projects. I make the mix for the nisu, then make two or three batches of cookies. I roll out cookies while the nisu is rising, then bake, package, and deliver. I grind cardamom for the nisu in the blender.

I’ve tried pounding it with the mallet, but you wake up the whole house. I’ve seen nisu recipes calling for oil, butter, shortening, or margarine. I haven’t done a survey to see if there’s a preference. No doubt it could be better with butter, but I’ve used recipes without butter because of the cholesterol.

We had a room vacant off the kitchen and bought appliances one at a time. We had Tim’s aunt’s old oven we used in our restaurant. I started baking many different things but gradually narrowed it down. It seemed the more variety you offered, the more time-consuming it was. How strict the bakery license is depends on your product. For nisu and Finnish rye bread, you get a ‘dry goods license. It’s not as fussy if you were producing pastries or pies. Then you’d need more refrigeration—stainless steel sinks—the whole nine yards. I’ve been doing five different cookies, nisu, and sticky buns or cinnamon rolls. I also started making a Finnish rye bread, reikäleipää. It uses regular rye flour, coarse rye flour, and fine rye flour. I got the rye bread recipe from Elmi Aho, who ran a bakery in Rindge. The nisu recipe I got from Ida Hakala, another Finn woman. I think that in general, the old-time Finns like nisu plain. But during the holidays, the frosted and filled ones sell very rapidly as Christmas presents. They look festive with cherries and nuts and little candies for leaves. My two main bakery customers are New Ipswich Market and Coll’s Farm Stand in Jaffrey. I do have a few individual customers with priority.

For instance, I have a customer who calls from Milford and buys nisu in quantities. But she doesn’t want vanilla in it. She’s of Finnish descent and says genuine nisu doesn’t have vanilla. It’s getting easier to run the bakery; they say it takes five years to organize your methods and learn how to operate efficiently. I’m noticing it now because I’m changing my pattern from doing everything in one little room to doing the packaging in another room: a lot less confusion. You have more space and it’s better because I’m walking rather than standing in one spot all day, buzzing around in a circle. I’m still changing my systems, depending on the demand. Around Christmas I could bake four or five days a week, but after Christmas everyone’s fasting as a result of New Year’s resolutions.

The busy times pick up again around March and April through the summer. Spring is busy because who wants to stay in and bake when they could be outside planting the garden?

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