Vintage Thingies 34 - Bowls

Earlier this week I told you about my favourite summer food. My favourite summer snack is a vintage meal of viili , a yoghurt type fermented milk product, served with sugar and possibly fresh berries or an even more traditional and vintage thing called talkkuna, which is a flour made of roasted barley, rye and peas. It is like a Finnish version of Müsli, very nutritious and easily carried to remote fields or forests for a meal. The bottle or jug with sour milk was kept cool in a spring or inside a wet wool sock. It was easier to transport than viili, and tastes almost the same.


Viili is thick like this, when you take a spoonful. If you mix it with the talkkuna flour, it will be more liquid and "ropy". What has this with Vintage Thingies Thursday to do, you may ask.

Well, earlier, viili was made at home simply by adding a spoonful of viili from your last lot to a bowl of milk, letting it stay in room temperature covered with a tray or a plate until the next day to thicken. Then it was kept cool in the cellar. The new portion was ready to eat when it was nice and cool, and could keep for several days. When my kids were little, I used to make viili in these bowls my mother had painted in 1946. I'm showing them upside down, because the decoration is on the outside only:

Each bowl is different. My mother probably had enough of repeating the same pattern for every dish after she painted her dinner service.

You can click the pictures to see the details. The manufacturer is Arabia, a Finnish porcelain factory which once was the biggest in Europe. - In the bowls you had a lot of the creamy, velvety viili surface to sprinkle with sugar. Therefore it was better than from the shop!

Vintage Thingies Thursday is hosted by Coloradolady Suzanne. Happy VTT, have fun seeing all the vintage treasures.