Today's Finnish population of New York consists largely of students and of banking and UN people - a crowd best run into at the film nights of Scandinavia House. The older layer of Finnish New York, the housemaids, dockyard workers and hard-line communists, lived in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, where 40th to 43rd Streets once teemed with Finnish congregations, halls, butcher's shops and housing co-operatives. The Finns' co-operative apartment houses are said to have been among the very first in America. Many of the buildings are still standing, but of the Finns there is probably next to nothing left: taquerias, bodegas, Chinese laundries and Spanish-speaking Pentecostal churches have brought in a different crowd altogether.
But for anyone who simply longs for the feeling of not standing out in the street in any way, fair hair and all, Brooklyn's Polish Greenpoint is an excellent address. Seen from Finland, Poland feels like a very exotic and foreign culture, but from across the ocean the Baltic seems to unite more than it divides - from here even Ukraine is part of Scandinavia.
In Greenpoint, at Kristina's Restaurant, at Polonia and at the other restaurants of the area, you get cutlets, mashed potato and grated root vegetables - food that brings back, nostalgically, the homely petrol-station cafés and roadside bars of Finland. Polonia even has lace curtains in the window. The service is efficient but mute in the manner of a Kaurismäki film. The local grocers also sell all sorts of raw materials for Polish cooking: meaty sausages, Slavic preserves and Zywiec beer. Often there is something Finnish in stock too, Panda liquorice at the very least.
In Brooklyn the daytime temperature rose to 15 °C yesterday and again today, and the air smells of spring. Since Finland is reportedly still in the grip of hard frosts, I am putting down here what are really the only Polish-style dishes I cook at home again and again. Both are solid nourishment against the cold.
Bigos takes pork, sausage and sauerkraut, which is worth snipping smaller with scissors, and the pot simmers on the hob, barely bubbling, for an hour or so. The smetana goes in only at the end, and dark bread belongs beside it. Bigos is said only to get better when it is heated up again the next day.
Should this cassoulet-like dish not seem hefty enough by itself, a cheesecake can be served for pudding. I have eaten exactly this kind of cheesecake at the Blikle café in Warsaw. It is also a delicacy that the Jews of Eastern Europe brought with them and that, with small variations, has risen to be the signature pastry of New York. The biggest variation is probably that here cream cheese has taken the place of the curd cheese. This version is made with quark and baked in a water bath, which does wonders for the texture of the cake - as long as the tin is watertight.
Recipe card
Bigos
- Simmering an hour or so
You will need
| 1-2 tbsp | butter |
| 300 g | pork neck or other boneless pork suited to braising, cubed |
| 300-400 g | kielbasa, Krakow sausage or bratwurst, in bite-sized pieces |
| 300-400 g | sauerkraut |
| 1-2 | cloves of garlic, crushed |
| 2 | onions, finely chopped |
| 3-4 | carrots, in pieces |
| 1/2-1 tsp | salt |
| 1 tsp | coarsely ground black pepper |
| 1 tsp | marjoram |
| 1 tbsp | sugar |
| 300-500 ml | tomato passata (or tomato juice) |
| 100 g | smetana |
Method
- Brown the meat in the butter in a sauté pan, in small batches, then add the pieces of sausage.
- Snip the sauerkraut smaller with scissors and add it, and all the other ingredients except the smetana, to the meat and sausage.
- Simmer on the hob, barely bubbling, for an hour or so.
- Add the smetana at the end, stir, and serve with dark bread.
Recipe card
Warsaw Cheesecake
- Tin 20 cm springform
- Oven 180-200 °C, water bath in the upper part
- Baking at least an hour or so
You will need
Base
| 150 g | digestive biscuit crumbs |
| 75 g | melted butter |
Filling
| 3 | eggs |
| 3 | egg yolks |
| 750 g | quark (Finnish maitorahka) |
| 150 g | sugar |
| 2 tsp | vanilla sugar |
| 1 1/2 tbsp | lemon juice |
| 100 ml | golden raisins |
Method
- Line a 20-centimetre springform tin with foil, preferably double and as watertight as possible.
- Mix the digestive crumbs into the warm melted butter and press them over the base.
- Mix the filling ingredients together in a bowl and pour over the crumb base. Take care that the cheese mixture does not rise above the foil lining.
- Set a dish a good deal bigger than the springform tin in the upper part of the oven, pour some boiling water into it and stand the cheesecake tin in this water bath to cook (a water bath does wonders for the texture of the cake - as long as the tin is watertight).
- Bake at 180-200 degrees for at least an hour or so, until the top is golden.
- Leave to cool properly before cutting and serving.
4 comments
hi! i'm writing from nycslav.blogspot.com, Slavs of New York. you've linked to us in this post, but we don't speak finnish 🙁
can you send a summary of what this post is about? (other than greenpoint, obviously). my email is nycslav@yahoo.com
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