A Quest For Lutefisk, Lutheran Churches And Garrison Keillor’s Upper Midwest
(TRAVEL) I was in the Dakotas and Minnesota over last year’s summer vacation — I was away two weeks — and no, I did not eat lutefisk, the Nordic seafood dish!
It’s a tradition I found out, but it’s reserved for the late fall and early winter celebrations. You cannot get it over July 4th weekend, sorry to say. Nevertheless, I pressed on to learn about the culture of lutefisk, Lutheranism and other elements of the faith-inflected Scandinavian ways of the upper Midwest.
Scandinavians, particularly those of Swedish and Norwegian backgrounds, connect with home often through this dish, consumed at Lutheran Church suppers. The debate they have is whether the Swedes or Norwegians invented it first, but regardless, its origins are in the Baltic ports.
A lutefisk interpreter
Meanwhile, when I got home to Delaware, I found a retired Lutheran pastor, Ed Boehling, who knew all about it.
Boehling said he had lutefisk at his former roommate’s house while a student at Martin Luther College in New Ulm in southwestern Minnesota.
He was from “back east” in New Jersey and delighted to go home to a local house, where there were five or six brothers, all eating lutefisk while singing carols. “It was well-prepared by his mother, but kind of smelly,” he recalled. “They lived on a farm. You could see the Missouri River way out there.”
In Lutheran church and lodge basements in America, I learned that community events are often held around lutefisk, but seasonally. There is more lutefisk consumed in the United States than in Scandinavia.
In the Baltic states, it’s considered “too musty.” The self-proclaimed “lutefisk capital of the world” isn’t in Norway, Boehling says, but in Madison, Minnesota, where a fiberglass codfish named “Lou T. Fisk” welcomes visitors.
Retired Lutheran minister Ed Boehling at one of his “big birthday” parties in his new hometown of Dover, Delaware. He spent every Christmas at his roommate’s house in New Ulm, Minnesota, where he discovered the ancient Scandinavian art of eating lutefisk — smelly but tasty. He shares his experiences and ingredients in this article by a colleague, Myna German, a professor at Delaware State University.
While I didn’t get to Madison, Minnesota, on my trip, I did sample some very good restaurants in Minneapolis where I had Swedish meatballs and great fish. But lutefisk? No. The server at a fashionable downtown restaurant viewed it as backward and out-of-date.
I had many nice excursions to the Lake district within the Minneapolis city limits, a metro ride from downtown, but the fare at the nearby lakeside restaurants had turned more bistro and seafood-y in the Boston or New England styles, unfortunately neglecting much of the ancestry of the area.
I asked Ed Boehling how lutefisk is made.
“Lutefisk starts out as cod, traditionally caught in the cold waters off Norway,” he said. “It’s then dried to the point that it feels like leather, tough like corrugated cardboard.” It’s then cooked in lye. “Tough.”
A bard of the prairie
Garrison Keillor, the former radio host of the long-running public radio variety and entertainment show “Prairie Home Companion” and the author of books such as “Lake Wobegon Days,“ often talks and writes about the Lutheran value of “being average, not standing out.” Wobegon is a fictitious town, but it could be any small town in Minnesota, on the prairie.
The prairies of South Dakota are similar to those of Minnesota, as seen in this picture of Murdo, where my bus stopped en route from Rapid City in the west to Sioux Falls in the eastern side of the state.
The entrance to Murdo, South Dakota, on a bus trip from Spearfish, South Dakota, to Minneapolis looking for lutefisk.
Keillor worked for Minnesota Public Radio and other public radio entities with iterations of the variety show from the 1980s until 2016 but now continues touring with a solo act and edits a website and blog. He refers to the fictional Wobegon as his “hometown on the edge of the prairie” and discusses The Lake Wobegon Herald-Star, which publishes the school lunch menu for the next week.
“Paranoia is the luxury of the old, because when you’re young you need to find others to fall in love with, or else your children would have pointy heads,” Keillor said, describing why the young people move away and you’re left with the old men. And then he poked fun at the fact that he’s an old man.
“This is a place … where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average — that’s the story from Lake Wobegon,” he would say before he signed off. He signed off from the program for good in 2017.
Keillor keeps on writing and says it’s the Midwest of his childhood that he likes to write about. The urge to be No. 1 is not of concern where he comes from, he thinks.
Maybe these kinds of plain and unusual qualities drew me to this quest, a journey to understand the world Keillor knew and imagined. The upper Midwest can be a place for tranquility, clean air and simple beauty. Some, like Keillor, find the average sublime.
But lutefisk, I guarantee, is not average. Have it, and you’ll think about it the rest of your life! Meanwhile, those of us who just missed the season for lutefisk on the edge of the prairie? Well, we might just have to go back in late fall or early winter.
Myna German is a professor of mass communication at Delaware State University.