It’s that time of year when you can feel a cool nip in the air; leaves cover the ground; you hear geese honking as they glide majestically overhead; the first snowflakes fill the air; and you can smell lutefisk wafting from the basement of every Lutheran Church of Norwegian heritage in the Midwest! Yes, it’s that time of year again… it’s time to get in touch with our ancestry, and celebrate lutefisk. A big serving will help get the bad taste of all those dirty political ads out of your mouth.
I recently wrote about all the wonderful church dinners at this time of year. The Super Bowl of all church dinners has to be the glorious lutefisk dinner.
For all you non-Scandinavians, Lutefisk (pronounced loo-te-fisk in Norway and the United States, and loot-fisk in Sweden) is a traditional food of the Nordic countries. It’s made from air-dried whitefish (normally cod), and lye (lut). Sounds delicious, doesn’t it? It must qualify as one of the strangest culinary delights around.
In case you want to make some lutefisk yourself, here’s how to go about it. First soak the fish in cold water for five to six days (change the water daily). The saturated fish is then soaked in an unchanged solution of cold water and lye for an additional two days. The fish will swell during this soaking, becoming bigger than the original (undried) fish, while the protein content decreases by more than 50 percent, causing its famous jelly-like consistency. When this treatment is finished, the fish is full of lye, and is basically poisonous. You don’t want to eat the fish at that point, so to make it edible, a final treatment of yet another four to six days (and nights) of soaking in cold water (also changed daily) is needed. Eventually, the lutefisk is non-poisonous and ready to be cooked.
You might be asking yourself, how in the world did people start eating such stuff? No one really knows the answer, but Scandinavians are a hardy, adventurous people and if anyone was going to be the first to eat a lye-soaked fish it’s us! Most likely Scandinavians were the first to see a chicken lay an egg and say, “Hey, why don’t we cook that thing up and see what it tastes like.”
Rumor has it that a fish was accidentally dropped in a wash bowl containing lye, and because of the poverty the Vikings were living in, they didn’t want to waste a good fish. Another story tells about drying racks for stockfish that caught fire. This was followed by many days of rain. Ashes of wood, combined with water, will create lye, and again, because of poverty, the fish had to be eaten. So they picked the fish from the ashes, and soaked them in water for several days to get rid of the lye before cooking and eating them. They decided it tasted pretty darn good.
I have some theories of my own about lutefisk. I think it gave us the Viking Age! One day the women were cooking up a big batch of lutefisk and the stink finally got to the men who were just sitting around telling fish stories and drinking Aquavit. Ole said, “Let’s get out of here until dey get done cookin’ dat horrible stuff. Why don’t we all get in my boat and we’ll sail across da water for a while and see what we can find.” Next thing you know, they landed in England, did a little plundering and pillaging, and the rest is history! All because of lutefisk!
That’s probably how they conquered other countries too. They realized that if they took along a supply of lutefisk, they could threaten the people with either surrendering or being forced to eat lutefisk. People took one look at that jellied glob of fish, got a whiff of the “odiferous” smell, and quickly laid down their weapons! History books don’t tell you about this stuff. You can only find out about it here, talking across the fence.
If only the government would listen to me. We wouldn’t need to spend billions of dollars on military stuff. We get all the Lutheran church men’s groups in the Midwest to cook up a big batch of lutefisk and we take it to whatever country we’ve decided to invade and give them the same deal as our Viking ancestors did. It would take the fight right out of them. No more war, and all because of lutefisk!
Up at Coon Ridge, the highlight of fall is the annual Coon Ridge Lutheran Church lutefisk dinner. People can hardly wait for that great event. The men’s group at church isn’t exactly looking forward to it though. They love to eat lutefisk, but they hate cooking it. So the boys have been wondering if there isn’t a way they could order the lutefisk already cooked and they could just sit down and eat it. But that would require paying someone else to prepare it, and they’re too cheap to do that.
So that’s the strange smell that fills the air when you drive through Scandinavian communities this time of year. Don’t be shy. Park the car, wander in, and enjoy a delicious meal of lutefisk, meatballs, lefse, and all the trimmings. It will be a culinary experience you won’t forget!
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