Sunday, November 28, 2010

Lutefisk and Lefse, Holiday Anchors

Food ties generations together. As luck would have it, our ties involve lutefisk. (If I resisted joking about lutefisk, I'd be kicked out of the society of third generation Scandinavians who keep the fish, uh, I mean faith.)


Lutefisk season begins in earnest in November. Our church has an annual dinner that, as I now know, is one of a series of options across the Twin Cities. My daughter and I volunteered at this year's fest; she waited tables and I dished up meatballs. 


To my relief, the lutefisk lacked its typical, shall we say, aroma. I'd been kvetching about it beforehand; I had to eat my words.  People in line carefully chose their lutefisk, gave precise instructions regarding melted butter or cream sauce, and merrily added meatballs. In the dining room were fruit soup, lefse, rosettes, and krumkake. One man came back to the kitchen for allspice; another showed surprise that we didn't have rutabagas. My favorite was when a white-haired gentleman leaned in and confided that he had been at another lutefisk dinner the week before. He confirmed that Bethlehem's fish was the best; theirs had been mushy.


The dinner also was a parade of sweaters.  For a knitter, this is a Superbowl of stranded colorwork, embroidered cuffs, and button bands. 


Of course, all this ties right back to Grandma Sigrid, knitter and consumer of lutefisk. In 1913, she wrote "Today is Thanksgiving Day, 27th, and we have been company to brother Knut. We had a lot of good food. It would take too long to name everything, but there was lutefisk and lefse, and that was the best of all, I thought."


Amen.









 
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Live Well Letters by Kristie Nelson-Neuhaus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.