Ost omelette, a delicious sort of custard or omelette, made with cheese and served hot, although everything else on the side-table is cold.
Mushrooms cooked in cream is another favourite dish.
Then small glass plates with slices of cold eel in jelly, salmon in jelly, tongue, ham, potted meat, etc., complete the Smörgåsbord, which is often composed of fifteen or twenty dishes.
These delicacies are many of them delicious, but as the same things appear at each meal three times a day, one gets heartily sick of them in the end, and, to an English mind, they certainly seem out of place at breakfast time.
There are many excellent breads in Finland—
Frankt bröd is really French bread; but anything white is called Frankt bröd, and very good it is, as a rule.
Råg bröd, or rye bread, is the ordinary black bread of the country, made in large flat loaves.
Hålkaka, the peasants' only food in some parts, is baked two or three times a year, so they put the bread away in a loft or upon the kitchen rafters; consequently, by the time the next baking day comes round it is as hard as a brick. A knife often cannot cut it. It is invariably sour, some of the last mixing being always left in the tub or bucket, that the necessary acidity may be ensured.
Knäckebröd is a thin kind of cake, made of rye and corn together, something like Scotch oatcake, with a hole in the middle, so that it may be strung up in rows like onions on a stick in the kitchen. When thin and fresh it is excellent, but when thick and stale a dog biscuit would be equally palatable.
Wiborgs kringla, called in Finnish Wiipurin rinkeli, is a great speciality, its real home and origin being Wiborg itself. It is a sort of cake, but its peculiarity is that it is baked on straw, some of the straw always adhering to the bottom. It is made in the form of a true lover's knot, of the less fantastic kind, and a golden sign of this shape hangs outside to determine a baker's shop; even in Petersburg and in the north of Finland a modified representation of the Wiborgs kringla also denotes a bakery.