Finnish Cuisine Delicacy I: Black sausage

It's time to broaden our minds. This is no news to Finns, but I thought introducing some of Finnish culture wouldn't hurt foreigners. My new angle, as mentioned in my first post.

I was dying to have a piece of this black sausage (mustamakkara/ svartkorv), which is a Tampere-based delicacy. It's a kind of blood sausage with plenty of healthy ingredients. Blood, pork, rhye, onion, ... I have eaten it since my childhood and never stopped liking it. The only negative thing about it is that it makes you fart a lot. I blame the onion in it.

The most correct place to have it is in Tammelantori, a market square in Tampere. The second best place being Laukontori, which locates in immediacy of Tampere centrum. There you can eat it hot and fresh. Originally you need only cold milk with it, but in recent years many are accustomed to have it with mustard or lingonberry jam. Tapola makes the most delicious black sausages, so be prepared to wait in line for your turn patiently.

It's reasonably cheap stuff. You usually buy it by euros, not by weight (which is ok too, but that way you reveal that you're not a 'genuine' black sausage eater) - for example: "Black sausage by 1,5 euros, please!" You can also order like: "Black sausage and milk by 2 euros, please!" Then you'll get enough to eat and drink and don't have to play around with small change.

I must tell this story. It was maybe early 1993 and I had a friend of mine visiting me. Let's call him George. We were argueing which type of food was a cheaper stomach-filler. He claimed it was pizza and I said it was black sausage. I had set him up, and he doesn't know it even today! Black sausage costed about 26 marks per kilo those days normally, but I knew that on Mondays there was a discount, when it costed only about 16 marks per kilo. Because the pizzas costed around 40 marks then, we made a bet that if he could eat all that black sausage (by 40 marks) in one session, I would pay for it. Because of the discount, he got a hell of a lot more to eat! George was infamous for being a heavy class eater and I wanted to make sure I'd win the bet. There was basically nothing for me to win, except for good laughs. I was watching him eat with interest. My portion of black sausage was considerably smaller. He couldn't do it. He ate so much that he might have succeeded in eating it all, hadn't I outwitted him. He had a dog at home who could eat the leftovers, so there was no harm done and everyone was happy. I managed to prove him wrong. And, let's face it, even with the normal prices of today, it's much more filling stuff than pizzas.

Not so many Finns outside (or even inside) Tampere like black sausage. It looks like a black dick or a pile of shit, but who cares? It tastes like nothing else. If you're interested in it, please have a go at it! They make also vacuum-packed versions of black sausage which can be purchased also from Stockholm for example, but that's not the real thing. It's like those pancakes in vacuum, it's not really the same. But you may get the idea anyway.