Learning about Norwegian Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
"How do Norwegians make any money from their fundraising dinner when no one wants to eat the main dish?” I asked my mother during my first Wisconsin winter. My question concerned lutefisk, dried salt cod reconstituted in lye that is boiled and steamed to make it palatable…supposedly.
I knew that in its Italian form as codfish, you could fetch top dollar for this delicacy. I wanted to see what the Norwegians did with codfish.
Lutefisk dinners are no small time affair. One of our Lutheran churches in town served 2,500 meals in one day in well orchestrated shifts. My great-aunt bought the family tickets to attend one of these events, because she was 104 and “not feeling like cooking this week.” On the appointed day, we arrived at church. Smiling ladies in starched white frocks with flower embroidery led us to our tables and served us.
The pale, white lutefisk flaked away and did not have much flavor; it tasted better with butter. The Norwegians cook the fish outside in a hut, so the church will not have a fishy aroma. I discovered that the older generation of Norwegians did eat lutefisk and enjoy it just like little my daughter.
We supplemented our token lutefisk portion with Swedish, or rather Norwegian, meatballs made from ground beef, pork, and veal and seasoned with meat sauce. The pan gravy from the meatballs covered the boiled potatoes and went under the green beans. Homemade, flat, tortilla-like sheets of potato bread called lefse accompanied our meal.
The lefse tasted good with cinnamon and sugar, but was merely a prelude to dessert. We started out with a warm pudding called rommergrot made from cooking heavy cream, milk, and a little flour together. Brown sugar tops off the rommergrot, but that is not the end of the Norwegian dessert fare we sampled.
Bonde Pike sounds like you should be eating another fish dish, but it is another delectable sweetie. The church ladies make a crushed graham cracker shell for this dish, add a thickened cherry filling, and top it all off with whipping cream.
You do tend to put on a little weight during a Wisconsin
winter supporting all the church fundraising efforts, but supporting the community
in small town America certainly is tasty.
Lutefisk dinners form the backbone of winter entertainment small town Wisconsin. Our little town newspaper had just run an article about the Sons of Norway going to net the year’s catch of lutefisk in the local river. The spoof article heralded the new season of Lutefisk dinners organized by the local Lutheran Churches.
By Ruth Pennington Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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