I Lefse My Heart In North Dakota

So there we were, four cousins, in Minot, North Dakota, at the Norsk Hostfest (motto: SCANDEMONIUM!), where we intended to get ourselves so saturated in personal heritage we'd come out buttery. Butter is a major reason Norwegians are nice, and also pretty much redeems the cuisine all by itself.

I was a little concerned about that cuisine, because I've mostly been avoiding wheat for over three years now. It helps me keep my weight under control. But I was pretty sure I'd have to relax my diet in North Dakota. And I was right. If you really want to lose weight, go to North Dakota and consume no wheat. You'll be dead in a month. There are buckets stationed at the state border so that celiac sufferers can just go ahead and slit their wrists and get it over with.

Klubb

Because here they grow mile after mile of wheat, and whack it up, and shovel it into gigantic elevators, and decant it directly into the grocery stores and restaurants, which then produce nothing but wheat-encrusted wheat bombs with extra wheaty goodness in the center. Norwegian cuisine in all its variety covers the spectrum from white to off-white. If anyone finds something green in their food, it is flicked away as a probable contaminant.  [Historical note: Scurvy has not been a problem since it was declared illegal by Erik the Red in 980.]

Augustana Lutheran's rice pudding

So at the Hostfest, there were several food courts offering an array of pale food. All things being equal, I decided to start off with Potet Klubb. Five minutes later, I also finished with Klubb, and looked around for a spot to sit quietly and consider my options with regard to digesting.

Klubb is made of wheat, potatoes, and mucilage, formed into wads and set to sail on a sea of butter. There were other offerings: rommegrot (wheat, milk, butter), and lefse (wheat, potatoes, lard, butter), and daringly yellow waffles (wheat, milk, eggs), plus Spud Hogs and Vikings On A Stick. Respite from the wheat can be found in Rice Pudding (still reassuringly white), cheese curds (white), or Lutefisk (white cod and Drano). Norwegian food is like polka music or Golden Girls reruns: weirdly comforting, and you always know what you're going to get. In a nod to diversity, the Hostfest also featured a German delicacy, Knoephla (wheat, potatoes, butter). I have no idea what an Oof Da Taco is.

If I have a regret, other than eating the Klubb, it is that I missed the Lefse Masters Competition. Four winners advance to the finals here to demonstrate their prowess with potatoes, cream, lard, flour, and butter, combined, rolled out, and lightly beiged in a skillet. I am not certain what makes one lefse stand out from the crowd, but I do know that each contestant must complete two rounds in order to showcase lefse in both its variety (rolled-up, and left flat). And there is, my goodness, a shotgun start. And there are only three prizes, Gold, Silver, and Bronze, leaving the fourth competitor in ignominy, even though he or she has already bested hundreds in the prelims. Nobody wants the Beige Ribbon.

These are two different dishes.

It was all very wonderful, but you can't move much in a crowd of really nice people, especially with butter in your capillaries. So my sister Bobbie and I were much revived to take a walk in a perfectly grand coulee just behind Don and Betty's house, right in the middle of Minot, where we found birds, bunnies, deer poop and its poopetrators, and squadrons of turkeys-on-the-hoof everywhere (white meat: just add wheat and butter). I was honored and happy to be there among all those nice people, but also happy to go home to Dave, who is almost as nice.

He has promised to make me a salad bigger than my head.

Calling On The Butter Fairy

Norway is suffering a killer butter shortage during the holiday season. This is tragic because Norwegian cuisine in its entirety uses only seven ingredients: butter, cream, flour, potatoes, sugar, codfish, and oven cleaner. And butter is the most important of these for a number of reasons. All dishes owe their structural integrity to butter, which keeps the flour molecules apart. Also, native Norwegians are genetically blessed with massive circulatory systems featuring arteries the size of road culverts, and butter keeps the blood from making knocking sounds as it ricochets through the tubes. Norwegians are stalwart people of sturdy temperament who are not apt to blow over in a stiff breeze, but they're rattled. Without butter the entire collective digestive system of Norway will founder and flake.

In spite of the limited number of ingredients, there is much variety in Norwegian cuisine. Lefse is produced with cream, butter, sugar, and potato. After it is rolled up with more butter and sugar, it is slightly crisp and beige. The potato substitutes for vegetables. Fattigman features more cream than butter but the loss is made up in deep-fat frying; it is somewhat more crisp and darker beige. Cardamom substitutes for vegetables. Krumkake, made of butter, sugar and flour, is beige and very crisp indeed, due to its being cooked on a special griddle. An ornate design stamped onto the krumkake from the griddle substitutes for vegetables. The much-prized gelatinous, soapy and light-beige lutefisk does not require much butter except at the table, where, in sufficient quantities, it masks the flavor of the oven cleaner. Nausea substitutes for vegetables.

In short, it should be possible to invent a cow attachment that could deliver 90% of Norway's culinary repertoire straight from the cow to the plate, but it does not exist, because Norwegian people are not lazy. What appears to be torpor is just a combination of inoffensiveness and deep satisfaction, and the satisfaction is because of the butter.

It was a perfect storm of political, economical, and natural events that produced the butter shortage in Norway.  Demand spiked due to the popularity of healthier low-carb diets wherein some of the potato is swapped out for butter. Climate change ushered in excessive dampness that demoralized the cows. And steep tariffs discouraged imports from butter-rich countries. With citizens willing to fork over up to $32 per pound of butter, a black market has arisen. Several butter smugglers have been apprehended crossing over from Sweden (of course, Sweden), but it's a slick operation. A suspected smuggling tunnel from Denmark was discovered only when it clogged up.

There is no butter shortage in the United States, but that's not my husband's fault. Dave came home a few weeks ago with a starter set of twenty-four pounds of butter and began his annual three-week round-the-clock production of almond roca, which he will distribute in decorative tins to good men and women the world over. Many who regret kicking Santa to the curb of childhood are now fervent about the Butter Fairy, and they anticipate his arrival with clenched capillaries. It's said that he's tall and he's stealthy and he creeps onto your porch like an embolism in the night. Believe it.