December Issue

Hard to believe it but, yes, Christmas is soon upon us and it is once again time for candles, decorations, parties, trees, wide-eyed children, gifts galore, great food and...lutfisk.

What is lutfisk, some of you may ask. Many people who know what it is, wonder how this poor man’s fare from the olden days has managed to survive and get a headlining role at the Christmas table.

Lutfisk - literally lye fish - has its origins in the period of fasting in pre-reformation times. It is cod that is dried and then boiled until it tastes of hardly anything at all. If it wasn’t for a faint smell of fish and a subtle fish flavour, it could pass off as anything at all.

Some people love lutfisk. I eat it when I have to and I actually enjoy the accompanying white sauce, the mustard sauce, the green peas and whatever else this culinary tradition dictates, but I find it hard to understand that the bland dish can be defended from a culinary point of view. or as author John Anderson put it in a Swedish Press interview: “Scandinavian recipes are handed down from mother to daughter, through the generations, for no apparent reason at all.”

This is how Roger Welsch, a professor of English, described his lutfisk encounters in a Norwegian-American home (in the World & I, December 1987):

“I had begun to realize that for the single most important meal of the year for this family, they were about to eat something they not only didn’t like, but actually found disgusting. And they offered invitations to share this horrible food only to those who were born or explicitly accepted into the family circle.”

As Welsch is also an anthropologist, he could not but help reason that “the lutfisk had nothing to do with nutrition, taste, convenience, or expense; the lutfisk meal was a recharging of cultural batteries, a single moment in the year when the family remembered its past, its humble past.

Whether lutfisk tasted good or not, whatever the inconvenience of obtaining, preparing, and eating the stuff, it had an almost religious importance far exceeding all other considerations.

Even more important than the lutfisk itself was the ritual that surrounded it. That is, it was not simply that it was lutfisk every year, it was lutfisk every year. Whatever other changes there were in the family be-tween Christmases - death, birth, marriage, divorce, prosperity, economic collapse, or alienation - there was one thing that could be counted on - lutfisk, a food that stood as so distinctive a landmark in the annual regimen that it could never be mistaken for any other meal of the year, could never be eaten casually.”