Dave Wood

After my mother’s death in 1945, my father remarried in 1948 and lots of things were to change. His bride, Edna Johnson, owned a restaurant on Main Street and never again did I eat a single scoop ice cream cone. Edna was a lavish cook, so money spent on food was no object. Since Edna was 100% Norwegian, we initiated into mysteries of potato dumplings (potatiskory), fried blood sausage (blutklub), sandbakkels, krumkake (diplomas, my father called them), sharp-edged and ornate rosettes (like eating razorblades, Dad said), feathery light lefse and of course, lutefisk.

It's not that I hadn’t eaten lutefisk before. My grandmother had cured it from scratch, getting the baseball bat-like slabs that were piled up outside Erickson’s store after every leashless dog in town had peed on it (“That gives the dish its distinctive flavor,” said Grandma). She’d soak the hard fish in lye water, followed by several baths of fresh water, then poached it in cheesecloth and served it swimming in melted butter. I liked it. A lot! But we never ate it on Christmas Eve. That was the night when my Yankee grandpa insisted on oyster stew. 

But then came the night in 1948, when Edna served a meal for the newly formed family. Before the presents were to be opened, the whole tribe gathered around the dinner table make-shifted out of card tables pushed together in the kitchen, which was hot and steamy. The smell of lutefisk was in the air, but there was something else that wasn’t smellable, a rich unctuousness that filled the room. And it wasn’t the unmistakable smell of brandy that usually originated around the person of our well-to-do uncle.

But what was it? The first course, of course! Steaming bowls of oyster stew. My God was it going to be oyster stew followed by lutefisk, which was even slipperier than oysters!

That’s right. Edna, God bless her, wouldn’t eat an oyster if she was an Armenian trapped by those godless Turks. But she wanted to make sure her new relatives were comfortable, so everyone received a bowl of plump bivalves and tiny crackers swimming around in a buttery slurry of half-and half. My new brother Doug wouldn’t touch it. Neither would my sister Kip, who didn’t like anything, ever. But I slurped it up in Starving Armenian time. Edna gamely ate the soup’s liquid and slid her oysters over onto my plate.

After the stew came huge platters of lutefisk, homemade lefse, mashed rutabagas, coleslaw, boiled potatoes and butter which my buttermaker father announced, “made better lovers.” I dispatched the second course with gusto, but somehow the chemistry—and I don’t mean that metaphorically—wasn’t just right. The diners that night learned a valuable lesson: Oysters and Lutefisk just don’t mix, chemically, that is. Had we been cows, blessed with two stomachs, one for the oysters, one for the lutefisk we’d have been hunky dory, but we had only one and inside it burbled the bivalves and the lye. The first to excuse himself was the well-to-do uncle—the Christian Brothers guy who opened what he thought was the back door and promptly hurled on Edna’s new pantry floor!

“I thought that was the back door,” he explained sheepishly.

“Nay,” said Edna’s father Emil Johnson, “Not since we remodeled.”

“Oh,” said uncle and to his wife “I guess we better eat and run.”

When I retired to my bed when the festivities were finished, I opened my new Boy Scout Handbook; there was a burning in my being that had little interest in campfire safety or tent etiquette. So I said my prayers and thanked God for giving our new family Edna, who only wanted “to make us comfortable.”