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Facts & Arguments

There are some things you can't rush. A good Finnish soup is one of them, Liisa L. North writes

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Fish entered my life even before I was born in rather remote Sotkamo, in northern Finland, thanks to my Grandpa Lukkari, the local schoolteacher. He lived on a hill between two lakes, one of them practically at his doorstep. Before walking to his schoolhouse, he fished every morning for breakfast – summer and winter, and seasons in between; in rain and hail and snow. Grandpa was the primary teacher in Juurikkalahti, a rural area, and his seven children were instructed that fish was "brain food." My father, understandably, learned to fish at an early age.

Decades later, when I paid summer visits to Finland with my parents as an adult and stayed at Aunt Alli's cottage, on the shores of another one of the many local lakes, my father would commission me in the evenings to help him lay nets for harvesting fish in the morning. For breakfast, of course!

I was not very good at keeping the boat steady in one place as he untangled the nets, but he had no alternative to my awkward paddling efforts. My mother was happy to prepare the fish, but she had no interest in going out on the lake in the evenings and listening to an unceasing flow of: "Hold it still, back it up a bit, a little bit forward, steady again, are you listening to me?"

In the ocean currents off the Gulf of Finland, where another aunt, Anna-Liisa, had her island summer cottage, I was an even weaker rower and helper. Just off the coast, to the west of Helsinki, the fish were abundant and delicious, and the ocean in the Nordic summer light was magical and churningly menacing.

By the time our summer visits to Finland had become possible, I was living in Toronto, only 15 minutes from lake fish in Kensington Market. By then, my parents lived in upstate New York and, although they were at first quite dubious about my decision to move to Canada, they changed their minds when they saw the special shops that received deliveries of just-out-of-the-water white fish and pike from northern lakes several times a week.

My parents would drive north to visit me on days when the fish was delivered. While I was still attending to my students at York University, they would purchase four or five fish from the market. When I got home, I would find my father happily wielding his purchased-in-Finland special fish knives in the kitchen: the tastiest parts – heads, stomachs and tails – would go into the soup kettle; filets would be cut for salting and sautéing; and one beautiful whole fish would be saved for baking.

The day of their departure would be timed for another fish delivery. Since my father wanted the "best," they would make sure that they got to Kensington Market at the crack of dawn if not before to pick out the fish from the back of the delivery van. Then, the catch was packed into well-insulated ice chests, to be cleaned, cut and salted when they got home. Enough was purchased to provide gifts for their Finnish neighbours.

I never did understand how my parents handled the border crossings, carrying what looked to me like commercial supplies of fish. I also wondered if they came to Toronto to visit me or to buy fresh lake fish. For sure, the frequency of their visits had something to do with the aquatic treasures on offer at Kensington Market.

When my mother died and my father began to suffer mini-strokes, it was my turn to get the ingredients for the fish soup and prepare it. By then, my parents had moved to a town called Lantana on the south Atlantic coast of Florida, where they had retired to be with some 25,000 other Finns from various parts of Northern Ontario and the Great Lake states.

At the same time, my sister, who lived on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and was involved with the construction industry, was drafted to find my father's preferred hardwood shavings for smoking salmon. She made dutiful deliveries to Lantana whenever she drove south to visit him.

But then the local grocery chain and even the Italian deli stopped carrying whole fish, and getting heads, tails and stomach cuts became an urgent problem. The grocery-store staff informed me that the only place where I could still buy these essential soup ingredients was the Lantana pier. I learned that when sports-fishery tourists sailed back in the afternoon, their catch was cleaned by their crews and the essentials for soup were sold for a pittance.

The buyers were yours truly, accompanied by a friend who helped take care of my father, and a long lineup of Haitian migrants and refugees who looked rather askance at us as unfair competition for limited stocks. They were sure we could afford the grocery-store fillets and they were right. That made me feel a bit uncomfortable, but not enough to stop me. I really had no alternative. I simply could not deprive my father of properly made fish soup.

The soup I made for my father and his friends was delicious. But perhaps more importantly, the satisfaction it gave him and me as he reminisced about his father's "brain food" lessons and the cold, blue lakes, where he learned to fish, was priceless.

Liisa L. North lives in Toronto.