Makkaraperunat

Chips, sausage and the toppings

The dish is made of French fries, traditionally crinkle-cut ones, though straight-cut chips from the fast-food chains have spread to grill kiosks too, together with pieces of sausage, both cooked in the deep fryer. Its standard toppings are ketchup, mustard, onion and kurkkusalaatti, a cucumber salad, and Finnish Wikipedia lists garlic and different mayonnaises as alternatives.

Sausage and potato are two traditional Finnish ingredients, a grill worker told Hämeen Sanomat, and Wikipedia’s survey of Finnish cuisine says that about a third of the meat eaten in Finland, on figures from 2005, is eaten as sausage, mostly made from pork but often mixed with other meats. Some grills now also offer vegan makkaraperunat, with plant-based sausage or tofu in place of meat.

An old word and a Peruvian origin

The word itself is old. Finnish Wikipedia, drawing on the regional newspaper Hämeen Sanomat, notes that makkaraperunat appears in the archive of Finnish dialect words as early as 1931, but for a dish of leftover sausage and potatoes rather than today’s fast food; in Ostrobothnia it went by dialect names such as makkarapernat and makkarapotut.

Hämeen Sanomat’s headline says the dish comes from Peru. The food-culture writer Liisa Väisänen, whom the paper quotes, says that makkaraperunat were invented as a grill food in Lima in the late 1960s, where the street food is known as salchipapa, and spread across South America and, through Mexico and the United States, to Europe and Finland; as far as she knows, they were first sold in Finland in their present form at the Ruisrock rock festival in Turku in 1970. Wikipedia likewise says that salchipapa was invented as a street food in Lima.

One dish, many names

Grill kiosks were the first places to bring fast food to Finland, Yle notes, and makkaraperunat is the classic grill-kiosk plate. In Jyväskylä the dish is called taksari, short for taksimiehen erikoinen, the taxi driver’s special. Finnish Wikipedia says the name dates from the 1970s, when a grill kiosk there, one of the first in Central Finland, served taxi drivers who had asked for a dish of deep-fried sausage and chips, and a seller at that grill told Yle in 2016 that the name was shortened because the long version would not fit on the price board’s loose letters. In Kuopio the same plate is sitä sun tätä, this and that, and in Rovaniemi makkaraherkku, sausage delight.

Grill kiosks have been in decline. Yle, citing the Federation of Finnish Enterprises, reported that the number of food kiosks of all kinds fell from 780 in 2007 to 634 in 2013 before edging up again with the arrival of street food, and it estimated that about a hundred traditional grills were left in 2016. Finnish Wikipedia says that the dish is also sold at service stations and in restaurants.

In Emblem World, makkaraperunat sits in the Finland food collection alongside karjalanpiirakka, lohikeitto and poronkäristys, where people discover and rate local food, drink and music.