Today we are going to talk about two staples that people from both cultures are concerned about getting too much of: sugar and salt.
To put things bluntly, Americans use way more of both of these than Finns typically do. The American idea of "not super sweet" is often still too sweet in Finland, to the point where people will find it overpowering.
Take, for example, cranberry sauce, the traditional sweet cranberry jam or jelly (depending on the recipe) served at Thanksgiving.
My American family has long since grown sick of canned cranberry sauce and switched to a simple but slightly more involved cranberry relish recipe borrowed from a neighbor. In addition to large numbers of cranberries, this recipe calls for smaller amounts of chopped apple and orange... and multiple cups of sugar.
One cup of sugar, for what it's worth, is about 200 grams.
Last year, when we hosted a Thanksgiving celebration for a number of Finns, we had to cut the sugar down to a third of what the recipe called for. And they still thought it was very sweet, bordering on too sweet. In the other direction, I have had the experience of tasting a child's "American style" birthday cake and finding it good but thinking that the cook must have been actively cutting back on sugar; the rest of the Finnish guests thought it would have been easier to like if the sugar had been cut even more. (I made an American style cake for my partner once. They are both still alive and still interested in being involved with me, but they were also visibly shocked and sickened by the amount of sugar.)
Some younger Finns, as it turns out, have genuinely never bought sugar, or have had the same relatively small bag of sugar in the cupboard for as long as they have been living on their own. To someone raised in a world where a small bag of sugar is about one cake or batch of cookies' worth, this can be hard to fully appreciate at times.
Salt is also a constant point of difference. To me, foods like French fries and chips are supposed to be salty. While there is definitely such a thing as too much, it takes a lot to get to that point — more spoonfuls than pinches or shakes of a shaker. But my normal is consistently overwhelmingly salty for Finns, and my "please add less salt" is still too much. Only now am I slowly learning what "just a little bit of salt" actually means.
To invoke, again, a personal example, my partner learned as a child that when you double a recipe, you don't double the salt (even though you have doubled all other ingredients and thus are reducing the salt concentration by half). To me, to this day, this rule feels absurd — but apparently it works well enough. I have never verified whether this is just their family or a general rule in Finnish cooking, but either way, it is a telling example.
As a consequence, I am starting to develop more of an appreciation for the tastes that arise naturally from various foods. Both for health reasons and in terms of learning to appreciate the gastronomic world on a deeper level, this is probably a good thing, although at first it sometimes felt like my food was unnecessarily bland.
That said, you still get plenty of sweet and salty things in Finnish cuisine. There just generally isn't as much added sugar or salt, and the flavor of the sugar or salt isn't as overwhelming as it is in American cooking. Finnish food is much more likely to rely on the natural sweetness or saltiness of a particular (often natural) ingredient, such as fruit or cream, as opposed to Americans who want to pour in an entire bag of each and call that flavor.