This being the week of the Calgary Stampede, people will be eating pancakes. The Stampede is pancakes, cooked in many ways and in many places and eaten at all times of the day.
This is not so much a culinary delight, as one Calgarian explained recently, as it is medical necessity. “Guys in the oil patch drink so much by 10 in the morning during Stampede week,” he said, “they need something to soak it up.”
Frankly, there are better reasons to eat pancakes. You might want to evoke deeply personal and Proustian memories or your childhood. You may want to dive into a soft mesh of morning satisfaction that will hold you until dinner - the health rationale.
You may simply want to stuff something reassuringly filling into your mouth as fast as you can. Whatever your motivation, I recommend the thin Finnish pancakes at the famous Hoito restaurant in Thunder Bay.
The Hoito, Thunder Bay— Ian Brown
The Hoito is in the basement of the Finlandia Club. The Club is a big old Edwardian pile that was originally the leftist Finnish Labour Temple, a building that’s a hundred years old this year. (There’s going to be a big party July 22, to celebrate.) The Hoito is a large rambling restaurant with blond wood walls and mostly communal tables.
When I arrived, at 8:15 in the morning, ten regulars were already eating. A tall, square-jawed, naturally blond waitress named Artith Francis - half Welsh, half Finnish, which is a spelling problem at the very least - came over and poured me some coffee and told me that the mojakka, the Hoito’s famous Finnish beef stew, wasn’t yet ready, but that I should order a salt fish sandwich and an order of Finnish pancakes with bacon.I felt instantly well-cared for.
She who delivered my pancakes: Artith Francis, my waitress at The Hoito— Ian Brown
One does in the Hoito, which means “care” in Finnish. In 1918, at the end of the first world war, life was dark for Finns in Canada, though they were a mainstay of the workforce in both mining and forestry. Immigration had been shut down.
The Finnish local of the Social Democratic Party of Canada, the majority shareholder in the new Finnish Labour Temple, had been declared illegal under the War Measures Act. A Finnish immigrant without papers could be jailed for carrying a Finnish-language book.
So the Finns, a co-operative minded winter people to begin with, took to looking out for one another. When a group of loggers complained they couldn't find anyplace cheap to eat when they came out of the bush for weekends, a union organizer named A. T. Hill convinced the Finns to pony up $5 each to create the Hoito, a co-operative restaurant. (Finn later helped found the Communist Party of Canada, for which he spent five years in Kingston penitentiary in the 1930s.)
For $6, a Finn could eat all the Hoito food he could manage for a week. Even in 1974, when the Finlandia Club, a non-profit organization devoted to the promotion of Finnish culture in Canada, took over the restaurant, dinner still cost $1.
While I waited for my pancakes, Artith gave me a tour of the Hoito’s frantic kitchen, where the batter’s mixed in five gallon pails and transferred to aluminum jugs and poured out onto a black griddle and flipped with one swift move when the bubbles show. It was an operation.
The griddle at the Hoito— Ian Brown
Artith served 100 people a day, and was one of eight waitresses. She still found time tell me about her daughter, and about how mojakka was once made at the communal tables in the restaurant, and how the Scandanavian House across the street served Scandanavian pancakes and had a shorter line but wasn’t as good (there is considerable dispute about this), and how the Hoito also makes “fantastic liver and onions, Thunder Bay’s best,” which is not praise one hears very often.
