Porilainen

The Porilainen was invented in Helsinki in the 1950s by students of Satakuntalainen Osakunta, the Satakunta student nation at the University of Helsinki. A fuller Finnish account, drawing on Suomalaisen makkarakirja (Otava, 2002), describes post-war students who had met hamburgers abroad and wanted a burger-like item for the Student Union’s nakkikioski by the Old Student House – but the technology of the time could not produce ground-meat patties at volume, and brioche buns were out of reach, so a slice of sausage stood in for the patty and toast stood in for the bun. That account is honest that the early credit is tangled, with the Satakunta co-operative slaughterhouse also in the story, and that who first coined the name and the form is lost in the haze of the 1950s.

What is dated is the sale: the Porilainen went on sale in autumn 1958, at first exclusively at the Helsinki University Student Union kiosk, according to the Suomalaisen makkarakirja account. Its name is a pun – porilainen literally means someone or something from Pori, and it plays on purilainen, the Finnish word for a burger. Pori then adopted the sandwich as its own, and it is now considered a traditional food of the city, sold at grill kiosks across Finland.