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LUTEFISK My wife was very proud of the Norwegian half of her ancestry. Her grandmother had emigrated from Norway in the 1860s. We joined the Sons of Norway, and she introduced many Norwegian customs into the family. Christmas dinner, particularly, brought out her Norwegian propensities. She always made lefse, a kind of potato pancake, which we ate with a bowl of Norwegian fruit soup,
and, as the main dish and feature of the holiday meal, she supplied a special Norwegian dish, lutefisk. I think you have to be Norwegian to even imagine something like lutefisk. A staple of the Norwegian diet has long been dried salt codfish, which has the appearance and some of the consistency of a pine board. One look at it is enough to make you realize that only some kind of drastic treatment could make it digestible, and the favorite Norwegian treatment is to make it into lutefisk. "Lut" is the Norwegian word for "lye" and lutefisk is made by soaking dried salt codfish in lye, then washing it endlessly in clear water.
Although the dish is greatly prized by Norwegians, it is not, as you might imagine, at the top of everybody’s list of gourmet foods. (If you listen to A Prairie Home Companion, you have probably heard lutefisk jokes. Garrison Keiller once said they had a self-imposed quota: no more than one lutefisk joke per broadcast.) Perhaps the best indication of the great difference of opinion about lutefisk occurred at a Sons of Norway dinner we attended in Santa Cruz, California. It happened that one of the Norwegian girls had recently married a restaurateur of Italian extraction, and he was called to cater the annual Sons of Norway dinner. It was an informal affair, more like a potluck church supper than a formal banquet. Dishes were laid out on a long table, picnic style, and the members filed past and helped themselves. It was all very fine, except for one thing: near the end of the table, the Italian caterer had set a very small platter of lutefisk. To his astonishment, the first two Norwegians down the table cleaned up the entire
platter.
He was shocked. He couldn’t understand it. He – quite naturally,
I think – believed that lutefisk was some kind of Norwegian relish;
he thought that those who liked it would put a little piece on the side
of their plates for flavoring. It had never occurred to him that people
would treat the stuff as the principal part of the evening meal! After a good many Christmas dinners, I became sufficiently accustomed to lutefisk that, although I can’t say I ever developed a true Norwegian taste for it, at least I didn’t blanch when it appeared on the table. On the other hand, our son recently confided that, while he was growing up, he believed that our Christmas Eve dinner was the price you paid for pleasure to come. You had to eat your lutefisk, he thought, or you wouldn’t get any Christmas presents. |
