“Remoted” Workday 209 / Day 317 (Wednesday)

The month was winding down quickly and I realized I had gotten way off track on the “read a book a month” goal. The January selection, Charlotte’s Web, at only 184 pages, started off with a bang and then was abandoned. With a week and a half left to the month, the book was only half read. A reading push was required and the thin book for children was finished this morning before work. And it was good.

New book!

A second book was started before the first was finished, but it hasn’t been decided if it qualifies as a book towards the reading goal because it’s a cookbook. More accurately, it’s a Finnish cookbook written in 1964 that was recommended in a Finnish culture Facebook group. It opens with a 13-page cultural lesson and sprinkles additional cultural information throughout the various sections. 

I learned on page 2 that Finland is “larger than Great Britain and as big as Minnesota and Iowa together, although its population is only four and one-half million.” I did not know any of this. A quick check on the worldwide encyclopedia of Google places it at 5.5 million in 2020. On the same page, I learned that Eastern and Central Finland are famous for fish dishes, due to the presence of 50,000 lakes. That is a lot of lakes. 

So far, the book is super interesting, but it also is 250 pages of cruelty. The text is painfully small. And by “small,” we’re talking approximately the same size as the legal disclaimer in ads. The tiny font is used through all 250 pages, and I’m willing to guess it will be responsible for much eye strain and many baking mistakes on my part. I never thought I would need to buy a magnifying lens to read a recipe, but holy hell, this book warrants a full-page magnifier.

Tiny font Beer Soup = one Smarties roll high.

Opening to a random page led me to page 116 and the recipe for Beer Soup. For scientific reference on the font size, the height of the Beer Soup recipe equals the height of one roll of Smarties candies and two lines of text are one Smartie candy high. The recipe the book opened to feels like a sign from the universe that perhaps Beer Soup should be the first dish made from the book, but the idea of a soup made from hot milk mixed with hot beer could take some getting used to. 

The twelve-year-old in me that was highly entertained by finding the canned “Fish Cock” product online before Christmas was childishly amused all over again to find the recipe for “Meat Cock” on page 90 of the new cookbook. It calls for strips of lean veal and pork, and no reference to male body parts. The meat is baked in a rye bread dough for four hours, then stands for another three to four hours. Wow. That requires some planning. 

The preceding page has the Fish version, but calls it “Fish in a Crust,” adding it "is one of the most identifiably Finnish traditional foods." The recipe calls for cleaning two or three trout or 14 smelts and removing the head and tail. There is no description provided for the fish "cleaning," but I have a feeling it's gross. The rest gets baked in the bread dough bones and all. I do not see this happening in my kitchen. The closest I may get is ordering the canned version made with smoked salmon from the online site varusteleka.com.