Through Wikipedia, I think I’ve been able to identify a major grievance of the Cornish nationalist movement — they’ve had it with their culinary culture being appropriated by those good-for-nothing, culture-stealing Finns:
The pasty survived the collapse of mining because it became extremely popular with the major ethnic group to remain after the mines closed, the Fins. In 1864 a small wave of Fins came to the UP [i.e., the Upper Peninsula of Michigan], well after the Cornish were established, when the big mining wave of Fins came 30 years later, they probably learned pasty making from the older Fins, not the Cornish. The pasty resembles the Finish foods, piiraat and kuuko, so when the new Fins saw their countrymen carrying it in a pail, they thought that it was the Fins who invented the pasty. Since there was a similar food in Finland, it was easier for the new Fins to adopt it. During Finish “ethnic” celebrations the pasty is often featured as a “Finnish” specialty.
Good heavens, have these Finns no shame? First Esa Tikkanen, now this (or first this, then Esa Tikkanen, as it were).
10 Comments
I always thought Gypsy Rose Lee did more for the pasty than anyone.
What’s the problem with Tikkanen? That he moved around so much in the NHL, that he left the single Korean professional team after one year, or that he never played for your beloved Whalers?
How about that he was the single most irritating man to ever tie up skates in the NHL.
I wonder how they would explain the origin of the ‘pâté lorrain’, the ‘panzerotti’, the ‘calzone’, the ‘dimsum’, and the ‘pierogi’.
PS. I use boiled meat, onions, and nutmeg to make the stuffing for my meat pies.
Well, I’m not sure about the others, but everyone knows the pierogi comes from Edmonton.
In Canada it is. It’s Slavic (Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Hungaria…)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierogi
Dude, Robert was making a joke! You’ve gotta lighten up sometimes (I mean that as a good-humoured piece of advice).
Re Tikkanen, okay, I wasn’t really following hockey at the time when I would have learned the most about him, the one season he played in Vancouver. Fairweather friend I, I’d given up on the Canucks after they blew it in the 1994 Stanley Cup finals against the Rangers.
It seems he’s a source of controversy wherever he goes, even in his home country. Quoth the ever-so-reliable fount of information, Wikipedia:
Tikkanen is quite a non-entity as far as celebrity status is concerned, unless he ends up marrying a former beauty queen like his one-time team mate Jari Kurri. I also have the impression that people are less keen about taking hockey advice from him than from Kurri, for example. (Kurri has some kind of an official function with the national team.) Now we’ll se if Teemu Selänne retires and returns home (which is a humongous seaside villa in my own hometown Kirkkonummi), he is in his own class.
Robert, back to the topic of this post, take a look at this kind of Eastern Finnish piirakka, and you’ll get the idea what the word has come to stand for in addition to a specific dish. Hint: that can be eaten as well.
You learn something new everyday…