I don’t know if it still is, because I haven’t had it since 1977, but back then, it was singularly delicious. Not really sure how to describe it-- for one thing, it had a lot of taste, and it was creamy beyond just a high fat content (albeit, pretty sure I was getting the Finnish equivalent of whole milk-- still, was better than American whole milk).
In 1977, I lived in the Soviet Union, where the milk was nasty. Maybe it’s better now, but the best one tasted slightly spoiled, and the worst tasted like battery acid.
So for Americans in Moscow, the US embassy commissary got us Finnish milk. I’ve had milk in a lot of places, and some imported milks from places where you’d think it would be good (although, the shelf-stabilization process for the Swiss milk may have affected the taste), but nothing was as good as the milk from Finland.
What does Finland do, or was doing in 1977, to get such good-tasting milk? is there a breed of cow? or is it the cold-weather cow-feed? or the white nights?
You’d think if Finland could make such good milk, so could Estonia, and the Soviet Union would produce its milk there, but the Soviet Union didn’t always make a lot of sense. And I guess Estonia wasn’t quite as far north.
It was milk. Kefir in Russia is actually pretty good, and the way most people get dairy-- that, and raw curds, with smetana (something that tastes like buttermilk and sour cream mixed, and about the same consistency) and sugar on top. Tastes better than you’d think.
The Finnish milk was sweet and creamy-- not fermented at all.
In general Finland is very serious about milk and dairy. There’s a very wide variety of Finnish dairy products. It’s hard to give an explanation for your specific case without knowing the exact type of milk, but it might be as simple as just getting very fresh, minimally processed milk, from a country that really cares about good milk.
I had a similar experience when living in Japan’s milk-producing region. Even the cheapest tier of convenience-store milk was better than anything I had in America. AFAIK they don’t have any special farming practices. They’re just really serious about milk, and I was living close to the source.
That’s pretty much what I wanted to know. I don’t know anything at all about Finland or Finnish culture.
It does make me wonder how Soviet milk was so impressively awful. There was plenty of space where the conditions of Finland dairyland could have been replicated.
I mean, Soviet food was nothing to brag about-- once in a restaurant, I was served chicken soup that had a feather in it. But some of the milk just didn’t taste like food at all-- it wasn’t that it was bad-- it was like eating cleaning products.
Yet weirdly, Soviet-era ice cream was considered to be superb. Something I first heard from my father - he shook his head about actual flies buzzing inside an Aeroflot passenger jet, but he thought the ice cream was the best he ever had.
Compared to US ice cream? no, not at all. Compared to Western Europe? I haven’t had a great sampling, but in the UK, the ice cream quality was hit or miss, and at least in Russia, it was the same everywhere.
It WAS better than the immediate surroundings-- Polish ice cream I had was all badly kept frozen, and either had crystals in it, or had separated. Slovak ice cream was nasty. I had some OK ice cream in Prague when I found a place that had a soft-serve machine, but that was when I was there in the mid-80s. Wasn’t impressed by the ice cream in 1977.
Russia did do baked goods well. Always enjoyed the bread, and the pastries.
I think the ice cream may have been better because for some reason sugar in Russia was good, and plentiful. The sugar in the ice cream was good, and they weren’t stingy with it. They probably also put in a little salt-- that and extra sugar would really bring out the vanilla. That was the only flavor in Eastern Europe.
Now, as far as produce-- by the time stuff produced in the Asian regions got trucked to Moscow, it either had passed its prime, or had been picked green and ripened during transport-- never as good.
But oh-my-freaking-gawd, when I had fresh fruit and vegetables in Uzbekistan, it was straight from heaven. And Georgians know how to prepare veggies for the table. Now, I was already a kid who loved vegetables, but I couldn’t get enough of the vegetable-based dishes in Georgia, and meat, which I disliked, was sparingly in a lot of them, and my mother found that I was just eating it and not complaining. I don’t know how she never thought of that as a way to get me to eat meat before.
Are we talking Soviet-era or Russian? My understanding is that Russian ice cream started tanking in the 1990’s once the strict controls went out the window and imports flooded in. Apparently the Soviet-era reputation was built on a state-mandated purity + very high butter-fat standard, with the best stuff mostly being concentrated in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Apparently the butter-fat was set at 12-20%, which is very, very high on that upper end. But I am absolutely going second-hand here, so I will surrender to better-informed first-hand experience .
I’m talking about ice cream in 1977. I didn’t care for it-- by I was an American kid annoyed by the fact that you could only get vanilla.
Now, something called “sirok,” which was a little like the filling for a cheesecake, but smoother-- it sort of had the taste of cheesecake, but the mouthfeel of sour cream-- that stuff was good. And smetana with sugar was good too. It was hard curd, with sugar on top, and then something like kefir poured over.
Maybe the milk was awful because it was the by-product of all the other dairy things you could get. Maybe it was more like whey, and not really milk. Although, I still don’t know what was up with the one that tasted like a cleaning product. Maybe it was meant for cooking something specific we didn’t know about.
I recall ca. 2010 a woman telling me about how her husband was obsessed with Russian milk and would gain weight whenever they visited family (they were both Russian) because he’d drink so much. So maybe. Never tried it myself.
The best milk i ever had was when i was a kid at camp. There was a herd of guernsey cows a couple of miles away, and we got tanks of fresh milk delivered twice every day. Guernsey milk is richer than standard milk, with more butterfat and more protein. And that was part of it. But part of it was just that it was incredibly fresh.
The best chicken i ever had was in Russia, at a stand on the street. I’m guessing that bird was a little older than US chickens, and ate a lot more bugs.
Flavor of milk is affected both by the breed and by what the animal’s been eating; as well as quite possibly by post-milking handling.
My guess is that the excellent and creamy milk you had was from breeds bred for high butterfat and flavor of milk, not for maximum quantity of production; and that also the farmers were careful what they were eating, so that their feed and pasture were producing both excellent milk and excellent flavor. Maybe the Russians at the time were just feeding whatever they could get. Or maybe it was the handling, and it actually was slightly spoiled.
My first trip to the USSR was in the summer of 1975, as part of a group of high school students. We were warned not to drink the milk because it wasn’t properly sterilized, but we all agreed the ice cream was very good indeed.
My next visit was for ten months as a grad student in 1989–90, the tail end of perestroika. Whole milk was one of about five things regularly offered at the local dieta (bigger than a corner grocery but smaller than a supermarket), but it usually turned sour less than a day after you bought it. I didn’t use it for much other than making cocktails at Christmas (I put canned condensed milk in my tea). If you wanted decent, safely potable milk, you had to buy imported stuff sold at bereozkas (hard currency stores), though they also stocked some locally produced premium high-fat milk that came in bottles and was delicious.
Living in Moscow in the 1990s and early 2000s, there were a number of good brands that were made with UHT technology and came in bottles or cardboard cartons. My ex claimed at least one of them was reconstituted powdered milk, but they all tasted fine to me. I usually bought 3.2% year round and 6% in the winter. I could also buy farm-fresh bottled milk in the summer.
My favorite is the 3.8–4% milk produced in Latvia. I buy cartons of the stuff whenever I go there. If any of it goes sour, I boil it and drain off the whey to make cream cheese. There’s definitely something about the Baltics that makes their milk exceptionally good—maybe the cows they have or the grazing conditions.
The cost of imported dairy products, which were still quite reasonable a year and a half ago, are now going through the roof in Russia (gee, I wonder why?). They’re currently displayed in stores under lock and key and CCTV surveillance.
I’ve read that often the Communist-era food regulations made for some products to be extraordinarily good in some countries- Czech beer, Polish sausages, Russian ice cream, are all ones I can think of, and it was because the regulations codified recipes and ingredient quality. Of course, there was zero innovation (just vanilla!), but the products that were produced were top notch.
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