Cream & Sugar

Mämmi (pronounced ) is a traditional Finnish Easter dessert. The Swedish name for it is memma. more...

Mämmi is made from water, rye flour and powdered rye malt, seasoned with dark molasses, salt and dried, powdered Seville orange peel. The mixture is then allowed to go through a slow, natural sweetening process before being baked in an oven until set. Preparation takes many hours, and after baking the mämmi is stored chilled for 3 to 4 days before being ready to eat . Sometimes mild fermentation can occur during preparation.

Generally mämmi is eaten cold with either cream and sugar, vanilla sauce or vanilla ice-cream. It is also eaten spread on top of a slice of bread .

There is a Finnish society for mämmi founded by Ahmed Ladarsi, the former chef at the Italian Embassy in Helsinki, who claims that there are around fifty recipes containing mämmi . There are a number of websites with recipes using mämmi most of which are in Finnish .

History

Mämmi was mentioned the first time during the 16th century, in a dissertation (in Latin) . It is claimed that it has been eaten in the southwestern region of Finland, ever since the 13th century, when Finland was a part of Roman-Catholic Sweden . It is also claimed that it can be traced to medieval Germany and that its use spread with Catholicism to the north, the food falling out of favour in Germany and now remaining only in Finland.

Read more at Wikipedia.org