If you can’t say nuttin’ gute ’bout LUTEFISK, den don’t say nuttin’

Scandinavians cherish their much maligned holiday dish

By Sharon Nesbit

The Gresham Outlook, Dec 13, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

Shanda Tice / The Outlook

“No lutefisk for me, please,” Barb Slyter says as she resists the Rev. Larry Jorgenson’s forceful attempts to get her to try the pungent lutefisk dish Thursday at the Trinity Lutheran Church in Gresham. Ray Nelson, left, may have better luck serving the Swedish meatballs.

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Betty Nelson reached over and whisked the cover off the roaster to reveal a gleaming yellowish pile of lutefisk, the inexplicable holiday dish favored by Scandinavians.

We pause here for lutefisk jokes:

• Fish Jell-O.

• The woman who put lutefisk under her porch to get rid of skunks, but then couldn’t get rid of the Norwegians under there.

• Or Biblical lutefisk — the piece of Cod that passes all understanding.

For more than 30 Decembers, Trinity Lutheran Church has hosted its annual lutefisk dinner as part of its Adult Luncheon and Fellowship program.

The 100 diners come in Christmas sweaters and plaid shirts – gray heads predominating – for the eventt kicked off by a concert by the Dexter McCarty Middle School choir and a prayer in Norwegian.

Three or four generations removed from Sweden and Norway, they are not people of color, unless you count white. Nor any food of color unless you count green Jell-O salad. Anyone who ever passed through Minn-a-soo-tah knows about green Jell-O.

Part potluck, part tradition, part joyous remembering, the dinner includes the infamous dried and reconstituted baked cod with your choice of melted butter or cream sauce, great mounds of mashed potatoes, Swedish meatballs in gravy, rolls and butter, Bruce and Jan Burmeister’s homemade potato sausage, a plate of lefse (the Norwegian tortilla) that vanished in a seconds, and rows of salads, homemade pies and delicate cones of sweet krumkake.

The paleness of the meal – white fish, white potatoes and white sauce – troubles the Rev. Larry Jorgenson who next year says he will bring a jar of sprinkles to adorn the plates.

Jorgenson arrived at this year’s meal wearing a gas mask as a joke. The smell of soaking lutefisk is a strongly scented memory for most Scandinavians. Pastoral assistant Tara Lynn brought a clothespin for her nose.

None of that bothers committed lutefisk fans.

Irene Kristofferson, 97, who worked 25 years at W.R. Hicks Department Store, doesn’t miss the meal.

“You can’t keep an old Norski away from lutefisk,” she says. Brothers Jim and Dave Gallant come because they are Scandinavian. Al and Ellen Fisher are a mixed couple. She is “Norwegian through and through,” but he is Dutch and asks, “Why the hell would anybody serve it?”

The dinner draws members of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Portland who come to Gresham for their “lute-fix” because their church is of German origin and doesn’t indulge.

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