STRANGE MEATS
If you seek the exotic, try reindeer and elk. Finding bear meat is not so easy.

FRESH FISH
Chefs rave about poached zander but don't ignore little fishes and try the raw stuff, too.

PATISSERIE
With freshly-made coffee, let a Runeberg tart tickle your fancy or munch into a boxer's ear.

BEERS & SPIRITS
Forget fancy wines. You're in beer and vodka country. The cider's pretty good, too.

EATING, DRINKING

Lacking the great variety found in warmer climes, fine Finnish cuisine puts the stress on simplicity of presentation and purity of ingredients The forests yield great quantities of berries and edible mushrooms, which are widely used in cooking.

Traditional fare also shows the influence of the neighbours. From the East came rye bread, quark, sour cream and buckwheat. The West was the inspiration for salted fish, meat balls, sweet bread and German-style beers.

As ever fewer people cook for themselves, ordinary dishes have paradoxically become rather rare.This goes for old staples like minced meat rolls, the local equivalent of Greece's dolmades, except that they are wrapped in a cabbage leaf. The Finns eat them with lingonberries, to provide the sharpness that the Greek version gets from vine leaves.

One favourite that refuses to die is pea soup, possibly because young men get used to it during their national service in the army and later find it such a quick meal, straight out of a can, when they are living in bachelor apartments. It is made by boiling dried peas, with a little ham for extra flavour.

Pea soup is not very digestible, and the brown bread that traditionally accompanies it does nothing to dampen the effect, but in a bachelor pad this doesn't matter much.

EXOTIC MEATS
The first rare meat that a Finn thinks of is surely the last one that would occur to a visitor. Reindeer may look cuddly but they are also excellent eating. There are great herds of them in Lapland, in the far north, where they are kept for their meat rather than for sleigh-pulling and Christmas present delivery.

Reindeer meat is tasty and low in fat. It can be a bit stringy, which is why the favourite dish is made by slicing it into narrow strips and frying it with butter and some black pepper. It is then stewed for 30-60 minutes. Sauteed reindeer is eaten with mashed potato and crushed lingonberries.

The forests of southern Finland teem with wild elk that have to be culled because they have hardly any natural predators left. Some 80 000 are shot each year, yet the population continues to grow. It would be a shame not to eat them, and they have an excellent gamey flavour.

Elk meat is not commonly available because it is usually divided up between the members of the hunting parties and the landowner whose trees the elk has been ravaging. Good restaurants have no trouble getting elk, though.

Rarest of all is bear meat, which is often not obtainable at any price. The population is hard to measure because they wander to and fro across the Russian border but there are usually fewer than a thousand in Finland at any one time. Only 60-80 culling licences are issued each year, mostly in the north of the country, where bears prey on reindeer.

Bear is strong in flavour, sweet and greasy, an acquired taste that few have a chance to acquire. The meat is carefully inspected and has to be thoroughly cooked, because bears are scavengers. It is never available in shops; hunters offer it direct to restaurants. It is pretty expensive, which is why it is often used in soup, where a little goes a long way.

FISH
As you'd expect of the land of a thousand lakes, there's plenty of excellent fish at reasonable prices. The average Finn eats more than 30 kilos (66 pounds) of fish a year, which is many times more than the people of central Europe.

Thanks to fish farming, salmon and rainbow trout are now so common and cheap that people are bored with them. The fish that excites the modern chef is zander, which Finnish menus often call pike-perch although it is neither pike nor perch.

Zander can grow up to 20 kilos (44 lbs) in Finland's lakes and rivers although a fish of half a kilo (about a pound) is plenty for a good meal.The flesh is white, light and tasty like a perch, but without all the little bones that make perch so tough on the gums. Thanks to its popularity in the kitchen, zander is now one of the most expensive fishes, though not quite as pricey as eel.

Pike, the other big predator, is far cheaper. Because the taste is less delicate it is often made into a mousse where the flavours of herbs, spices and cream predominate.

Almost the equal of zander in flavour is the whitefish, a freshwater fish in the salmon family. It's rather easier to obtain because, unlike zander, it has proved suitable for fish farming. The ideal size for the kitchen is 600 grams (1.3 lbs).The whitefish has very little fat and is cooked very lightly. It can be baked, frilled, broiled, pan-fried or steamed.

Don't forget the little fishes. The eastern lakes are full of vendace (Coregonus albula), often only about 10 centimetres (4 inches) long, while the sea is home to the Baltic herring, which is 14-18 cm. The most common form of cooking is pan-frying in butter, though fitness freaks point out that this destroys many of the healthy long-chain fatty acids these fish contain.

Cooking is of course only one approach. Like their Scandinavian neighbours, the people of Finland like raw fish, pickled or salted. Salmon is usually just salted but there is a two-stage process for herring, where it is first cured in brine and then immersed in sauces of mustard, tomato or onion. Raw fish is a popular summer starter, eaten with new boiled potatoes.

No list would be complete without crayfish, freshwater crustaceans that look like tiny lobsters.They are boiled in salt water that has been flavoured with lots of dill. Crayfish come into season at the end of July.

This is a hands-on meal, where diners must extract the tiny quantity of flesh from the armoured shell with their bare hands, then rewarding themselves with sips of neat vodka. If you haven't the patience, you can buy bottles of ready-shelled tails, but where's the fun in that?

CAFES
In the countryside people still drink a lot of milk, buttermilk, berry juice and homemade small beer, too. In town everyone drinks coffee, especially after meals. The Finns are epic drinkers of it all day long. On average they each get through 10 kilos of roasted coffee beans a year.

Tea is to be avoided. It has probably been steeped for too long, or made hastily from tea bags with tepid water. Stick to coffee, and in cafes where they make it to order instead of letting you serve yourself from a glass flagon on the counter, where it may have been simmering grimly for several hours.

The favourite local pastry is the cinnamon bun. It is called korvapuusti in Finnish, which means a clip round the ears, possibly because it looks like a boxer's ear. Like ears, they come in all sizes. Whether the eater unrolls it a bit at a time or munches straight through reveals much about their personality.

If you prefer something stickier, try a Runeberg tart. This confection was invented in the old town of Porvoo in the 1840s, where it is said to have been the favourite breakfast of the nation's favourite poet, Johan Ludvig Runeberg. It is a cylindrical cake seasoned with almonds, with raspberry jam on top.

Popular legend tells that it was invented by Runeberg's wife Fredrika, but in fact she borrowed the recipe from a local confectioner. Mrs Runeberg's contribution was to smother the tart with arrack, a potent drink made from fermented molasses. Johan Ludvig's mornings got off to a flying start.

STRONG DRINK
The traditional drink is beer although wine and cider sales have been rising. Wine is not made locally because the winter is too cold for vines. You won’t find wine and spirits in kiosks and supermarkets. By law, strong drink can be sold only in the premises of the state-owned chain of stores that sell nothing else. Its name, Alko, says everything.

The main product of the three main brewing companies is standard lager and rather similar to Germany's top beers. It comes in two standard categories. Class 3 can contain up to 4.7% alcohol by weight while anything stronger is Class 4.

There is also a Class 1, almost non-alcoholic but not quite, and tasting slightly better than the completely alcohol-free beers. Pubs and bars sell beers of all strengths but supermarkets are not allowed to sell Class 4. (Incidentally, there is no Class 2.)

Finland is home to Europe's last existing primitive beers, called sahti. It differs from modern beers in that it contains no hops and was traditionally flavoured with juniper. The flavour is admittedly odd and few people drink it but it has a large enough following to sustain several micro-breweries. For the connoisseur, sahti is as exciting as wine, with overtones of chocolate or even bananas. It is also fearsomely strong.

Finnish cider is crisp and clean in taste, unlike the sugary stuff that the Swedes prefer. The native wines of Finland, made from berries rather than grapes, are probably best described as interesting.

In spirits, the North of Europe is vodka country. Sweden's Absolut may be the world's leading imported brand but in places where they know about vodka, like Russia and Poland, Finlandia is number one.