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EVERYBODY’S DANISH – Chapter – Scandinavian foods we actually eat!
By fred | March 5, 2009
Dear Friends, Family and Fellow BLOG’ers – I know that every nationality has their favorite foods, some may seem ‘gross’ to others, and I have to say that Scandinavians are no different.
Many Americans of Danish, Swedish or Norwegian decent may not even remember some of the foods their parents loved. I was told many years ago that one reason the Scandinavians made such good Americans, such good United States citizens, is that they immediately adapted to American customs, American foods, the American language and so forth. I believe that is so true in most cases, except in some of the middle upper United States areas such as Wisconsin and neighboring states that was true.
The Scandinavians in the far distant past were either warriors, out raiding, stealing and raping all over Europe or they were farmers or fishermen. Since the Scandinavians in the last century were not allowed to do any of the stealing, raiding and raping stuff anymore they were mostly farmers, dairymen or fishermen.
The state I live in, Washington, has a load of Scandinavians and Dutch (also farmers), there is also a huge population of Norwegians as in years past the fishing up here was super, and in the north around Alaska and Canada, it still is.
No matter what your ethnic background, I hope you will enjoy my this chapter about my youth and our Scandinavian store called “Lundsing & Company.” Lundsing, by the way is a Norwegian name, when my father purchased the original store from the widow of Mr. Lundsing he never bothered to change the name to “Nielsen’s” – the business name was ‘Lundsing & Company’ when he purchased it and it remained so.
So go back with me to those days of the late 1930′s and 1940′s and our store, – Lundsing & Company. To me the memory of those distant days is so clear it was like yesterday——
EVERYBODY’S DANISH
CHAPTER (Scandinavian foods we actually eat!)
Lingonberries, the Scandinavians love them, as I remember the Germans and Hollanders also prize them. Dad used to buy about fifty barrels of lingonberries from Newfoundland every year for the Holiday Season. The wood barrels would arrive in pretty bad shape. Banged up, big red stains on the sides where the juice had spilled out. Leaking badly many of the barrels had all the liquid gone, if left without juice (water) they would become dry and spoil.
The first job when they arrived was to fill the barrels with water so the berries could expand and stay nice and fresh. We would sell them by the pound and the ladies would make lingonberry jam. It was served with meat like cranberries, or with Danish and Swedish pancakes or the famous Danish Ableskiver (pancake balls).
For sales to our customers we packed the berries in heavy duty paper cartons, then weighted them on the scale to determine the sale price, of course, the heavier the weight the higher the sales price. We liked to pack them without the liquid and leave the juice (water) in the barrel, besides without liquid the paper cartons wouldn’t leak. Also this saves the customer money, by not having to pay for the juice that was nothing but water with the color of the lingonberries in it.
This did not go over with the Scandinavian ladies. The ladies said they had to have juice to cook with. Mom, Dad, and I told them over and over that when they got the berries home just add water for more juice. If you think the Scandinavian men are stubborn, try the ladies some time! They never would believe that beautiful red juice in the berries was only water. I’m sure they must have figured we were trying to put one over on them somehow.
The ladies would say, “Fill it up to the top with juice!” And so we did! Dad figured we made more money selling water, than we could make in a hundred years selling the berries. I can still hear his happy voice at the cash register ringing up another sale, shouting “more juice Fred, the lady wants more juice!”
Another hate has got to be lutefisk, of all the tasteless, crazy items to eat this one takes the cake. I can understand that maybe hundreds of years ago when there was nothing else to eat in Norway that they would eat it, in my opinion it beats starving, but little else.
For those of you that do not know what lutefisk is, it starts with big beautiful fresh cod that would taste wonderful when fresh. The Norwegians, however, dry the cod fish in the cool Nordic air until it shrinks up like a stick. It’s as hard as a rock. You could kill a man if you hit him with one. It has a very faint odor, not bad, not good! Now if you tried to take a bite of it when it was dried up, it would probably cost you a bunch of money at your friendly dentist. You certainly wouldn’t dent the dried Lute fish; the only possible way to cut the stuff is with a carpenter’s wood saw.
The reason for drying the fresh codfish was that in the distance past, the Norwegian had no modern refrigerator or freezer. Drying the cod was a means of preserving the fish for the winter. In the old days I guess eating the ‘lutefisk’ would beat starving, but in my book not by much!
What you have to do with the dry lutefisk is soak it for a week or so, then put lye, yes lye, in it for a few days, then soak the lye out of it for two weeks. The water has to be changed twice a day to get the darn lie out of the fish. We did this for the store, for many years in an old warehouse with good floor drains; my Dad rented the old warehouse, just for the Holidays.
As a young boy I would bicycle to the warehouse from home early in the morning and after school. Knock out the big wood pegs at the bottom of the barrels allowing the water to drain, we had a least eighty huge barrels. When empty of water, back went the wood pegs and the barrels were again refilled with water. After weeks of soaking, the lye, and more soaking, you would not believe the transition. From a hard rock stick just a few inches wide, you now had huge slabs of beautiful white meat cod more than a foot wide. Just as tasteless as it was beautiful! To eat it in this day and age has to be a ritual of some kind. Maybe some kind of Norwegian death wish!
Lutefisk is usually served with small peeled white potatoes and a vegetable. The only thing that has any taste in this meal is the “fisk senep”. (Fish mustard) This meal “has” to be consumed once a year, at least, by all true Norwegians, and a few Danes. I don’t ever remember the Swedes being nuts enough to partake in anything half so crazy. We sold literally tons of this bland, completely and utterly tasteless water soaked foolishness every Holiday season.
I have yet to meet a Norwegian I didn’t like, but they decidedly have a screw loose now and then, especially in some of the food they eat. The heavy brown goat cheese of theirs can be eaten. Not be me, but it probably won’t kill you and may make you quite healthy.
What will kill you is a Norwegian cheese they have, called “old cheese” or something like that, only in the Norwegian language. My father say this cheese (Gammel-Ost) is first wrapped, then literally buried in cow droppings, (s—t!), to age. All I can say it certainly looked like what I just said. Every year we sold about ten cases of this vile, poor excuse for cheese. I couldn’t stand cutting the stuff in the store – much less even think about eating it!
Some of the Norwegian stuff was very good. They have great sardines, their fishcakes and fishballs in imported in cans are all excellent. I am not trying to be funny about the ‘fish balls,’ these are ground pieces of fish rolled up in a ball like you would make a meatball, not what your dirty mind thought I said. They are imported in tins. I was not big on the Cod roe, which comes canned, and Dad liked fried up for breakfast.
Dad liked two thing for breakfast that his American born son could well do with out. One was the Cod Roe mentioned above, and the other was boiled salt herring. Wake up in the morning some time to the smell of Grandma boiling some herring for Dad. The whole house stunk to high heaven. The Cod Roe stinks a bit less – but not much. Dad loved it, I remember on those days Mom and I settled for a bowl of cereal.
Now one thing I did like was cheese, good Danish cheese. The Danes have a lot of different types. One has caraway seeds in it, I believe these call it Kummel Ost, that was not one of my favorites – why the hell they would ruin a perfectly good cheese with those little black seeds is beyond me, but they did. I went for the cheeses without the little black ‘bugs.’
Now some of the older Danes liked really old cheese. Dad was among them. So every time we imported a hundred cases of Danish Tilsit cheese (Havarti), we would put several cases away in the very back of our big walk in refrigerator to age for sometimes up to a year. God was it gross! Slimy, stinky, something that should be buried! Sometimes tiny white worms would be in the cheese.
The old Danes loved the stuff. They would actually cut a slice (worms and all) but it on a slice of hard black Danish pumpernickel and smack their lips. It would be washed down with a shot of Alborg Aquavit and a beer. When I saw the little white worms, I said not for me.
My idea of heaven is a platter of Danish open faced sandwiches. Cheese, herring, ham, liver pate’, smoked salmon, roast beef, head cheese, eggs with strips of anchovy, sardines, each on thin black buttered Danish Pumpernickel, each a masterpiece of art with garnish of pickled beets, pickles, red cabbage, lettuce, onion slices, or whatever. Sip a frozen cold Aquavit and have a cold beer nearby. Your old buddy Fred would be in pure heaven. Maybe this is one reason for the ‘portly’ figure I have assumed in my old age.
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