One day this past March, I was thinking about lapskoussi. The last two schools I’ve worked at used to offer it at lunch once a month, and I always liked it. It’s a dish that scales well for institutions, is non-offensive to kids, and can be genuinely tasty if done right. And while Finnish schools reliably offer stuff that’s edible and nutritious, it’s always an exciting bonus when it’s something you actually want to eat. I wanted to recreate that at home.

This was a problem, because the last time I made lapskoussi — years ago, before I knew what I was doing — it was terrible. I’d dumped in half the garden’s carrot harvest and ended up with something that tasted flat and vaguely orange. The dish went on a grudge list. I don’t keep a lot of grudge lists, but the kitchen ones exist for a reason.

As you know, I can never leave well enough alone when it comes to the kitchen and garden. A food that is, by all accounts, a thick meat-and-potato mush, should not be that difficult. I wasn’t going to let it win.

The thing about lapskoussi that makes it different from most Finnish recipes I cook is that it specifically comes from here. Sort of.

Rauma is a small city on Finland’s west coast, the third-oldest city in the country, and in the 1800s it had Finland’s largest sailing fleet. At its peak in the 1890s, Rauma’s harbor held 57 vessels. That’s a lot of ships, and a lot of sailors, and a lot of ship’s cooks making do with whatever was in the hold.

Lapskoussi was what they made. The name travels across every language it touches — Labskaus in German, lapskojs in Swedish, lobscouse in English (which, yes, is where the word “Scouser” comes from — Liverpool’s nickname traces back to this sailor’s stew). It’s a dish that exists in port cities across northern Europe, because sailors carried it from harbor to harbor like a recipe virus.

But in Finland, lapskoussi belongs specifically to Rauma. The Hotel and Restaurant Museum’s research confirms this — of all the port cities in Finland, only Rauma claims lapskoussi as its own. A sea captain named Artturi Hakri learned to make it as a 13-year-old ship’s cook on the schooner Olga in the early 1900s, and kept making it at home after his sailing career ended, “jälkläiste suureks herkuks” — to the great delight of his descendants.

Since 1972, the Rauma Martat (the local chapter of the Martha Organization, Finland’s venerable home economics group) have sold lapskoussi at Pitsiviikko — Rauma’s annual Lace Week festival — and the line to buy it is itself a tradition. The local schools serve it regularly enough that my kid ate it in a cafeteria and liked it. FresCo Ravintolat has turned it into a year-round menu item and even invented lapskoussi pizza (a calzone they named “Hjalmari Calsongi,” which is exactly the kind of pun Rauma would produce).

There is (because of course there is) an argument about where lapskoussi actually originated. The Suomi24 forums have hosted a multi-year debate between people who insist Rauma invented it and people who point out that Labskaus appears in German sources from the 1700s. The truth is probably that sailors everywhere were making variations of “boil meat, boil potatoes, mash them together” since the first ship left port, and Rauma simply held onto it with more stubbornness than anyone else.

That tracks. Stubbornness is the city’s primary export, after paper pulp and lace.

History lesson aside, the point was that I couldn’t live here, call myself a decent and adventurous cook, and not master this recipe. It wasn’t an option.

The baseline came from K-Ruoka’s recipe cross-referenced with Yle’s Puoli Seitsemän segment. What jumped out immediately was the meat ratio — traditional lapskoussi is really meat-heavy. The K-Ruoka recipe calls for nearly two kilos of meat to one kilo of potatoes. This is a stew that treats vegetables as a supporting cast. My garden carrot version had gotten this exactly backwards.

For the meat, I used what was already in the freezer: kassler (Finnish pork neck — raw and uncured, not the smoked kassler you’d find in Germany) and venison paahtopaisti I’d bought from a local hunter the previous fall. Venison is lean, though, and lapskoussi wants fat. So I dug out a chunk of pork fat that had been in the chest freezer since New Year 2025 when I got the world’s biggest ham at a bargain post-holiday price. Nothing wasted.

The seasoning is almost aggressively simple: allspice, black pepper, bay leaves, onion, salt. That’s it. Some old Rauma recipes mention celeriac root, but the classic profile is bare-bones Scandinavian. Salt, pepper, allspice. Trust the long cook to do the rest.

Traditional lapskoussi is a stovetop project — four to five hours of simmering, with the vegetables going in during the last hour. The purists would have you do this on a woodstove, stirring periodically, drinking coffee, and staring moodily out at the Baltic.

While I had the woodstove and a picturesque snowy window view, I did not have the time or patience for that. School schedules and hockey practices did not care about my historical cooking reenactment ambitions. I used the slow cooker. Everything went in at once on LOW for six hours while I did other things. Other things being four loads of laundry because, once again, hockey.

It was not traditional. It was not romantic. It worked perfectly.

The one thing every Finnish source agrees on is the mashing: potato masher, NOT an immersion blender. This came up in every recipe I checked, always in bold, always with an exclamation point. The texture is supposed to be rough and hearty — shredded meat visible throughout a thick, porridge-like mass. An immersion blender would turn it into baby food, and that is apparently a crime against Rauma’s maritime heritage.

So I mashed. By hand. In the slow cooker insert with a plastic potato masher bought from the hypermarket, standing at the counter while doomscrolling Instagram. Which is not exactly the heritage-steeped Baltic experience but gets the job done.

Lapskoussi is served as a mound — traditionally shaped into a little hill on the plate, with a well pressed into the top for melted butter (voisula) to pool in. The sides are pickled beetroot and pickled cucumber, always. This is non-negotiable. The tang of the pickles against the rich, meaty mash is the whole point.

I served it in bowls because we are not formal people, with a generous pour of melted butter on top and the pickles on the side. It was — and I want to be precise here — really good. Rich without being heavy, deeply savory from the long cook, with the allspice giving it that warm, almost-sweet background note that Finnish food does so well. The venison disappeared into the mash so completely you couldn’t tell it from the pork. The ham fat did its job.

My son ate it. My husband ate it. I ate it standing at the counter, which is where I eat most things I’m proud of, apparently.

I portioned the rest into takeout containers and froze them. Traditional wisdom says lapskoussi is even better the next day, after a night in the fridge to set up thicker and let the flavors intermingle. These frozen portions became gauntlet-day emergency rations — the kind of food I can reheat in the microwave for an afterschool rush meal in the car before dropping my kid off at practice. A sailor’s stew, built for rough seas. Still works for rough Tuesdays.

Ships. Meat mash. Hockey. Yeah, that about sums up this town.

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Lapskoussi (Finnish Sailor’s Stew)

Ingredients

For the meat:

• 800g kassler (pork neck — Finnish kassler is raw, not smoked)
• 300g stewing beef or venison, cut into chunks
• 100g ham fat or fatty pork trimmings, chopped

For the vegetables:

• 650g floury potatoes, peeled and quartered
• 200g carrots, peeled and sliced (restrained — trust me on this)
• 250g lanttu (rutabaga), peeled and cubed

For the aromatics:

• 1 heaping tbsp onion powder (or 1 diced onion)
• ½ tsp ground allspice
• ½ tsp ground black pepper
• 2 bay leaves
• 2 tsp salt (add 1 tsp first, taste before adding the second)
• ~2L water

To serve:

• Melted butter (voisula), pooled on top
• Pickled beetroot slices
• Pickled cucumber

Method

Stovetop:

Place meats and ham fat in a large pot, cover with cold water, and bring to a boil. Skim any foam. Reduce heat to low, add aromatics and 1 tsp salt. Simmer covered for 3 hours until meat falls apart.

Add potatoes, carrots, and lanttu. Continue simmering 1 hour until vegetables are completely soft.

Remove bay leaves. Mash everything together with a potato masher — not an immersion blender — until thick and porridge-like with visible shreds of meat. Taste and adjust salt.

Serve in bowls with melted butter, pickled beetroot, and pickled cucumber.

Slow cooker:

Cut all meats into 2cm cubes. Place everything — meats, fat, vegetables, aromatics — into the slow cooker. Add water to just cover. Cook on LOW for 6 hours. Fork-shred the meat, then mash with a potato masher. Taste and adjust salt. Serve as above.

Notes

• Finnish kassler is raw pork neck (sianniska). If you’re outside Finland, any pork shoulder or neck roast works.
• The overnight rule: this is genuinely better reheated the next day.
• Yield is about 4kg. Freezes beautifully in individual portions.
• Keep the carrots under control. Learn from my mistakes. This is a meat-and-potato dish. The carrots are guests.