Thoroughly Modern Mämmi

Bake off your sparge water for this finicky Finnish dessert

I’ve been getting most of my food news from Duolingo these days.

In a couple of weeks, I will be in Finland eating smoked fish and sublimating in a sauna and kissing a supermodel in the prime minister’s downstairs bathroom. I have spent the last eight months trying to learn Finnish in preparation, and I still don’t know how to ask where the downstairs bathroom is. Instead, Duolingo has taught me how to utter many other essential phrases, such as “I am a wizard” (minä olen velho) or “the bride is a woman, but the groom is a hedgehog” (morsian on nainen, mutta sulhanen on siili).

It has also taught me to to express disappointment over mysterious puddings:

Mämmi?

Mämmi.

Mämmi is a very old Finnish dessert—and I use that term loosely—made from rye flour, rye malt, and stoicism. Finns usually eat it around Easter, when they are naturally more inclined toward penance.

It is often described as a “sweet rye pudding,” but this is advertising. Mämmi is grainy and tar-like; it dwells in the textural no-män’s land between porridge and pudding, bread and mousse. It smells like a brewery and tastes like Grape Nuts.

it is customary to drown your mämmi in milk.

It is also, essentially, beer that you gaslight into becoming bread.¹ So much so that if you live in These United States, as I do, you will probably need to buy the rye malt from a homebrew supply store. There’s a recipe at the end of this post for the curious, but you start by brewing a sort of thick, two-stage rye tea (a mash, really) and heat it gently so that the starches in the rye can slowly be converted into sugars. Then, you bake it in a low oven for an impossibly long time, during which nothing appears to happen to it.

If you’ve never heard of mämmi, you’re not alone. I like to consider myself hip to food in general and food with umlauts in particular, but I had never thought to make it until Duolingo forced it into my lexicon.² Researching it was a challenge, too—I could find few recipes and even fewer articles about it in English.

So why bother?

Most Hatereaders stopped asking that question long ago. Childish obstinance, mostly. But a small, dopey part of me also wondered if I could reverse-engineer a cultural tradition. Although I’m not Finnish by ancestry, I am Sámi—the indigenous people who live in the subarctic region of Finland known more commonly as Lapland and more precisely as Sápmi. (This has led me to claim adverse possession of all Nordic foods.)

My last ancestor who lived there before emigrating to the U.S. was a tall, dour woman named Mari, who has been the source of all of the best family legends. She was sturdy and surly and stocky. An old letter, translated by a relative long dead, stated that she would often ski across the Sápmi border to fetch sacks of grain. On one trip, the letter alleges, she met a large black bear and “cracked him with her ski pole.”

She also smoked a corn cob pipe, and her grandchildren whined that they would have to sleep in the corn crib to escape the smell. In sum, she was terrifying and jowly and jacked—there is photo evidence—and accordingly I have always loved her.

The roguish smile of a woman who would have loved Malört

Everything I just wrote is true, at least as best as I know it to be. But it’s also slightly slimy bullshit.

Like a lot of white Midwesterners, I’m a mash of different European grains, one that’s gotten more homogenous as the generations pass. The part of me that’s Sámi isn’t really any more important than the parts of me that are Irish, Scottish, English, or French Canadian. It’s just the part of my heritage that’s been mythologized the most.

In that sense, reading too much into my family history has always felt a little fraught. I like learning about Mari for the same reasons I used to like reading the horoscopes in the back of magazines. I liked someone telling me who I was and what I was going to be.

In the wrong light, genealogy can look a little like astrology. When people look at the stars for guidance, they’re literally looking into the past—at a sort of photo of a celestial body long deceased. And they’re often looking into it for selfish reasons. They’re not trying to understand the past; they’re trying to construct the present. They’re looking at a fuzzy outline and imagining it into life.

That it’s a selfish project doesn’t mean it’s bad. I just wish we could be more honest about our hand in our own mythology. I want a more honest accounting of what’s inherited, what’s created, and what’s a little bit of both.

My family came to visit me in Kansas City a couple of weeks ago. I served them mämmi in little ramekins. I expected them to hate it, but everyone kind of liked it—at the very least, they all agreed it was palatable. My 9-year-old nephew even had a second helping.

If I decided to make mämmi for my family every year, maybe it could become part of our story. Traditions are patterns, and patterns are sticky as rye. But I’m probably not going to do that. Mämmi is an acquired taste, and it’s a pain in the ass to acquire.

For now, I’ll settle for a narrative heirloom—for a deceptively true story I can insert myself into with ease. I’ll tell my friends that I was born to be strong and surly. To smoke a pipe, to scare the children.

Recipe: Thoroughly Modern Mämmi

1 liter water
125 g rye malt (coarsely ground)
200 g rye flour
1/4 cup unsulfured (NOT blackstrap) molasses
Zest of one orange
Pinch kosher salt
Heavy cream (for serving)

1. In a three-quart (or larger) saucepan, bring half of the water to a boil. Turn off the heat and stir in half of the rye malt and half of the rye flour. Cover and let mixture stand for at least 30 minutes and up to one hour (the mämmi will get sweeter the longer it sits).

2. Preheat oven to 325° Fahrenheit. Grease a 9” square pan (glass or aluminum are both fine).

3. Bring the second half-liter of water to a boil. Pour water into the rye mixture you made in step 1 along with the other half of the malt and flour. Add molasses, the zest of one orange, and a pinch of kosher salt. Stir to combine. Cook the mixture over medium heat for 10 minutes, stirring frequently; if it starts to boil, reduce the heat so that it stays at a gentle simmer.

4. Pour mixture into the 9” pan and bake for at least two hours and up to three. The “crust” will appear firm, but you should see a little subterranean jiggle when you shake the pan. Let cool completely, then refrigerate two to three days before serving. You may notice that the mämmi develops a ~dewy sheen~. This is normal (in a relative sense).

5. Scoop cold into individual ramekins and drizzle with heavy cream. Sprinkle with granulated sugar if desired.

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1. Early Finns would often dilute leftover mämmi with water and then ferment it into a low-ABV beer known as kalja. Finnish beer writer Mika Laitinen describes the end product as “incredibly viscous.”

2. Maybe getting my column ideas from a cartoon owl isn’t the worst idea. There is so much food media to consume right now, and so much of it feels the same. Every magazine article is either titled something like “Meet the Third-Generation Ombudsmen Making Spelt Sexy” or an essay about an essay about an essay about the “intersection of food and memory.”