The Minnesota Farm Woman

My grandmother was of Finnish descent, the daughter of immigrants. When it comes to coffee, the Finns get serious.  Finland has one of the highest coffee consumptions in the world, and Finnish-Americans have always carried on the tradition.   My grandmother drank her coffee  black and strong enough to eat through the finish on the kitchen table if you spilled it.  Children in the family were allowed coffee at an early age, and I was no exception. I remember getting a cup of milk (canned or fresh) with a splash of coffee and plenty of sugar. That was back in the good old days, giving a child coffee or plenty of sugar was not a bad thing.  As I grew older, I was allowed more coffee than milk. By the time I was about 15, I was drinking it black and strong, just like Grandma. I remember Grandma and her sisters sitting around the kitchen table sipping, dipping, and gossiping.  “Sipping” meant drinking coffee out of their saucers, which is something they did to cool those first few wonderful sips, before drinking  the rest out of their cups. Saucer sipping was a European tradition that has gone by the wayside.   One Scandinavian tradition involves putting a sugar cube between your teeth and slurping the saucered coffee through the cube  for a special treat. Why? I can’t imagine, but I do know that there must have been quite a few shirts and blouses with coffee stains down the front, at least if those Scandinavians were related to me.  I always manage to dribble a little even if I have a lid on the cup.  “Dipping” meant dunking something sweet into their coffee, which sometimes made for a kind of chunky beverage if they lost of piece of cookie in their cup. Nothing ever went to waste for these depression-era ladies, though. A thoroughly soggy piece of cookie would just be fished out of the cup with a spoon and eaten. My family’s favorite dipper was a hard piece of cinnamon-and-sugar toast, dipped just for a moment in the hot coffee, just long enough to soften it for that perfect bite but not too long to make it fall apart and make for a chunky beverage. Grandma always had a tin of prune tarts in her cupboard.  Prune tarts are a Finnish specialty:  A cross between a pastry and a cookie, star-shaped and filled with a sticky sweet  prune filling.  I didn’t like them very much at all.  Grandma made them because they were my dad’s favorite, and every time we visited, she sent him home with at least a dozen.  A few years after Grandma died, I came across an old recipe for prune tarts, which included the directions for cutting and folding the dough into a star shape, just like she used to make. I excitedly told my dad that I would make them in place of some of my usual Christmas cookies.  He quickly told me not to bother.  Surprisingly, he didn’t care for prune tarts that much, either.  He told me that he just told his mom they were delicious because he knew she had worked so hard to make them.  Just like that, a family tradition is lost forever.  It’s a good thing we still drink coffee. That will probably go on for generations to come. It is in our blood.