It is Christmas time once again and for the first time in 10 years Mary and I are not hosting the annual Vahl Family Christmas, a tradition in our family since my fathers parents, Carl and Ruth married after separately immigrating from Sweden in the 1920’s. This year my brother, Rick, short for Eric and his wife Jennifer are hosting. Because Christmas is such a busy time of year with so many competing events, family gatherings and the like we hold the party early because we want everyone to have no excuse not to come. This year it is the earliest ever December 12, 2010.
Mary and I are heading from cold but sunny Baltimore 6.5 hours northwest to 3+ feet of snow, really frigid temperatures outside to spend some really warm indoor time eating mass quantities of Swedish food and drinking mass quantities of Glogg. Mary and I are especially looking forward to heading north tomorrow, we had planned to go today but we both felt sick and had trouble sleeping last night, because we have duel colonoscopies scheduled for Friday morning. Tomorrow will not be pretty.
I volunteered this year to make the Lutefisk. The idea being that after eight months of culinary school in NYC and Italy I should be able to make the Lutefish edible. I know that comment will hurt my sister Cathy’s feelings as she has been making it for years. But it is not her fault for the Lutefisk not tasting so good because Lutefisk isn’t supposed to taste good.
Lutefisk is merely a “poor food” designed to provide very poor people, living hundreds and even thousands of years ago a way to obtain some basic nutrition in the cold and dark of winter when the ice was too thick to catch fresh fish through and the snow was too deep to hunt game and because codfish were so plentiful in the summer and salt was scarce the preservation method of drying and soaking in lye was the only way to preserve the fish flesh to be eaten months later.
In Italy they had plenty of salt but no codfish so they traded salt for codfish beginning in the late 1700 and that started the continuing but confusing Italian tradition of eating Baccalà, (salted cod) literally everywhere in a country which is surrounded by warm water that has no codfish swimming in it, that never freezes, where winters are mild and where fresh food is cherished.
There are actually many preparations for lutefisk. They vary from family to family. In the Vahl family we typically reconstitute the lutefisk, make a white sauce, (bechamel) seasoned with clove and white pepper, and sauce the lutefisk and boiled potatoes. We also, mix the lutefisk into the sauce and use it as a gravy for the potatoes.
What exactly is Lutefisk? Here are a couple of links for the interested. Lutefisk#1 and Lutefisk#2.
Here is a Lutefisk joke that Swedes find particularly funny now that their smaller brother’s, the Norwegians own all the oil in the North Sea.
One old swede says to another ” Well, we tried the lutefisk trick and the raccoons went away, but now we’ve got a family of Norwegians living under our house!”
Check out this video. If you have been eating lutefisk since childhood you will laugh hard about half way through the video. Having watched the video myself I am not going to be able to doctor the lutefisk with bacon as I was considering.
I am still thinking of my method to recreate the lutefisk. A reciepe that holds to the traditions, the ingredients, the seasonings but one that looks, smells and tastes really good. Perhaps is will be the first recipe in my fist cook book entitled “Modern Swedish Cuisine”.
Chefs, Baltimore
The Journey Continues 