It’s a tough sell for what’s supposed to be a festive meal: a pile of translucent jelly with a questionable aroma.
But, as I prepared to celebrate Christmas in my native Norway for the first time in at least two decades, I found myself once again facing the food that plagued my childhood December 24s: lutefisk.
Pronounced loo-tah-fissk, the traditional Norwegian festive dish made from dried whitefish has a smell that suggests that the fish has been through something traumatic.
And that’s definitely how it starts — lutefisk translates as lye-fish because of the exposure to sodium hydroxide, commonly known as caustic soda or lye.
Holiday tradition
The corrosive, also used as a drain unblocker, is applied to stockfish, in this case dried cod, and rinsed away before serving. It’s a perfectly safe culinary technique, if a little alarming.
Besides you can’t argue with tradition. I grew up in Trøndelag, a region where many Norwegians still choose lutefisk as their main Christmas meal.
“Why do we have to eat this?” the younger me would whine, turning my nose up at the fish, and filling my lefse — Norwegian potato flatbread — with potato, butter and the bacon bits that my dad, who’s from Norway’s Westland, had negotiated into the meal as a compromise.
But now, after all these years, I was excited about a return to lutefisk. Tastes change, right?
Reassurance came from my mother, Magni Ree, for whom lutefisk is as crucial a part of festive nostalgia as tomtebrygg, a homemade fermented malt drink.
“When I was a child I didn’t like lutefisk either, but now I love it,” she said. “It’s about the mood, the tomtebrygg and the tradition. Lutefisk belongs to Christmas.”
It is true that Lutefisk once dominated Christmas tables in Norway. Swedes, Norwegians and residents of some parts of Finland have also traditionally invited rehydrated fish into their homes during the holidays, as have many descendants of Scandinavians in America.
But times are changing. Nowadays, Norwegians are less inclined to add such old fashioned foods to their plates for their main Christmas meal — and the delicate fish dish has been steadily vanishing.
Today, the national festive dish of choice on Christmas Eve, the day Norwegians typically celebrate Christmas, is usually pinnekjøtt — boiled ribs of lamb — or pork belly, with only 1% still choosing lutefisk.
But as Norwegians grow more interested in their food traditions, lutefisk has been experiencing something of a revival.
Visitors to Norway in the months before Christmas should not be surprised to find lutefisk on the menu in many traditional restaurants.
“It’s becoming trendy among young people to arrange lutefisk evenings,” says Annechen Bahr Bugge, a researcher at Consumption Research Norway (SIFO), who has observed a lutefisk comeback in the past decade. “Norwegians have become a lot more proud and curious about our own food history.”
And it seems that lutefisk’s challenging consistency, flavor and smell could become its saving grace.
“Food trends are about pushing the boundaries of the edible,” adds Bahr Bugge. “You have to shock your palate a little by eating unusual things.”
Undetermined origins
So how did this “peculiar” dish come to be? No-one knows for sure how lutefisk was invented. The story is that a rack of stockfish caught fire somewhere in the north of Norway some 500 years ago, leaving the fish covered in ashes.
Then the rain came — essentially replicating the lye bath process that would later be adopted — and to avoid wasting precious food, someone decided to find out if it could still be eaten.
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