February 28, 1995
Recently I had an ethnic Norwegian dinner. We had lutefisk and lefse, or what
my hostess called Norwegian Tacos. You start with a sort of tortilla made of mashed potatoes and flour, rolled and baked. It becomes lefse when a wedge of it is laid out and filled with boiled lutefisk, more mashed potatoes, drizzled with melted butter - as in real butter - and rolled up. You eat it with your fingers and wipe the dripping butter off your elbows. It's great eating, but it would blow the top off today's food pyramid. The Norwegians call it white food to match the landscape.
Lutefisk is a salt cured white fish and the Vikings loaded kegs of it on their ships when they sailed off to discover America.
It may seem odd for a cooking impaired person like me to be writing about food, but I don't have to fix it to like it.
Food has been an integral part of literature through the years. One wonders whether a steady diet of lutefisk contributed to Hedda Gabler's suicidal tendencies in Ibsen's play. On a broader scale, Linda Wolfe has written a great book called The Literary Gourmet, great food scenes from world literature, which is full of interesting information.
Chaucer wrote a lot about food and said of one of his pilgrims, "His house was never short of bake-meat pies // of fish and flesh, and these in such supply // It positively snowed with meat and drink." The author includes a recipe for partridge from A Noble Boke of Cookry, written circa 1467. "...roste him . . . Mynce hym and sauce hym with wyne, pouder of guinger and salt, and warme it on the fyere and serve it."
Jane Austen's Emma tells of her father who seemed otherwise to be a sane man. His favorite supper was, "thin gruel consisting of 1 tablespoon of oatmeal, 1 pint of water, salt and butter, boiled together and strained." Poor man!
Tolstoy in Anna Karenina has one of his characters say, "Show me what a man eats, and I will tell you what he is. The sensualist untormented by guilt or conscience wants oysters, turbot with thick sauce, roast beef. The ascetic leading a spiritual life deriving its guidance what is essentially Russian eats porridge, Russian cabbage soup, bread and cheese.
Ichabod Crane had his own set of values as he entered the state parlor of Van Tassel's mansion. "Not the charms of the bevy of buxom lasses . . . but the ample charms of a genuine Dutch country tea table with heaped up platters of cakes of various and almost indescribable kinds. There was the doughty doughnut, the tender oly koek and the crisp and crumbling cruller; sweet cakes and shortcakes, ginger cakes and honey cakes and...apple pies and pumpkin beside slices of ham and smoked beef ----" and on and on. He writes of Ichabod, "whose heart dilated in proportion as his skin was filled with good cheer, and whose spirits rose with eating."
In Moby Dick, Herman Melville describes a fish chowder from the New England whaling days. "It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely larger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuits and salted pork cut up into little flakes! the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt."
Thomas Wolfe in Of Time and the River writes of an almost primitive hunger. "Food! Food, indeed. The great icebox was crowded with such an assortment of delicious foods ... as made his mouth begin to water... Should it be brawny bully beef, now, or the juicy breast of a white tender pullet, or should it be the smoky pungency, the half nostalgic savor of the Austrian ham? Or that noble dish of green lima beans, now already beautifully congealed in the pervading film of melted butter? ..." Oh to have a refrigerator like that!
Food in literature did not stop with the classics. Modern writers are cashing in on appetite. There is a book of Little House on the Prairie recipes, which tells us how to create prairie food in our own kitchens. I am told that Mary Ann wrote a book called Gilligan's Island Cookbook, full of desert island food, no doubt.
Look at the train of thought the lutefisk started. Food for thought!