By Stephany Moore
Grandma Marlys Moore is the best cook and hostess I know. Her homemade caramel, pecan rolls are to die for and that’s just a side dish at breakfast. With the vast amount of home baked food, you would think it was Thanksgiving every meal in Grandma’s house. Tonight’s feast, for example, will include barbeque ribs, spinach salad, potato casserole, buttery green beans, strawberry-marshmallow salad, garlic butter bread, and choice of lemon meringue pie (Grandma’s favorite) or chocolate Oreo cream pie.
And that’s a meal she can whip up like it’s no big deal, and to Grandma, it is no big deal when you consider how many years of practice she has had preparing meals.
Grandma was seven years old when she began cooking, in 1938. Her mother, Marion, had to go to great aunt Helen’s house across town every night to take care of their sick parents, leaving Grandma to cook dinner for the family.
Cooking on an openhearth
“Can you imagine?” She dramatically explains. “ A seven year old starting a fire in an open hearth! If you heard that today, it would be considered abuse, or neglect, or something.”
Grandma grew up in St. Ansgar, a remote town in Iowa, just south of the Minnesota state line. Her father, Adolf, or Adie as everyone called him, raised chickens, pigs, and cows and kept a vegetable farm. He grew lots of potatoes. “We always ate potatoes at every meal” says Grandma. “And we canned everything, even the meat.” That must have eased dinner preparation for Grandma as a young girl. “Oh yea, I’d just warm up a can of meat over the fire,” she says.
Mealtime was always a big family event. “We always had a big breakfast with fried pork, eggs, oatmeal,” Grandma says. “Everyone came to eat together see, so we had to fix a lot of food. And of course our biggest meal was at noon.”
Ah, the Christmas feast
Nothing, however, compared to the feast they prepared at Christmas. According to Grandma, her family served the same meal in the same house for thirty-five years. Lutefisk, a Norwegian cod recipe, was always the main course, and is “completely disgusting” according to my dad, Kevin.
“Oh it’s not that bad!” Grandma gives a scolding glare towards her 53-year-old son, before continuing. “But we did start serving ham too as people started getting married, because none of the in-laws liked lutefisk.”
Lefsa, a potato tortilla rolled in butter and sugar, is another Norwegian dish that we still serve at Christmas Eve dinners. Then there was the side dishes: mashed potatoes with butter, cooked rutabagas – Grandma shuffles to the kitchen to grab one from the cupboard and show me – and other vegetables from the farm, dumpling soup, bread, pies, and futtigmand, a funnel cake-like dessert.
Another family food tradition was fruit soupa. Grandma bustles to the kitchen again and retrieves Great Grandma Nelson’s Cookbook. The front cover is missing, the pages are aged, and little notes are scribbled in next to several of the recipes.
Good for the sick, good for the healthy
As she flips the pages looking for fruit soupa, she tells me from memory that the soup is made with tapioca, grape juice, raisins, and prunes. According to Great Grandma Merion, it was supposed to be good if you were sick. “Mom took it to everyone,” she says. “It was probably good for you because it was like a laxative!”
Almost everything Grandma makes was and still is made from scratch, and according to her, all Norwegian food is made with eggs, cream, and butter. I stifle a laugh because now I understand why Grandma insists on putting butter on everything and why she can’t understand why anyone would pass up the chance to put butter on their caramel rolls.
Even bread was homemade; Great Grandma Marion baked rolls, bread, and fried donuts weekly. According to Grandma, store bought bread was a real treat.
“I can remember this one time,” she reminisces, “I was in home ec and they had a schooling for mothers. So my mom went to the class and they learned how to make rolls. She came home and said ‘that was the hardest thing I’ve ever eaten, we make better than that!’ And it was probably true!”
After many years of preparing meals for her family as a young girl, potlucks with the neighbors when she started her own family, and hosting great family reunion meals during the holidays, it’s no surprise that Grandma has grown tired of cooking. Her real passion is baking desserts, her specialty – rhubarb pie. “I hate every day meals, but I love to bake pies and cakes, even cookies. I always have to have something sweet around.” She says with a mischievous grin.
Only a few of the Norwegian traditions have remained present in our family today. But when I sit down to the professionally set dinner table with steaming fresh and colorful foods with aromas that make your mouth water, I must admit, I am thankful that Lutefisk never makes it on the menu when I visit.
Lutefisk
From Grandma Marlys’s Norwegian Recipies
Unsalted dry cod is used for this recipe for cod prepared in potash lye. It should be chopped in small pieces as it swells greatly when immersed in water. The fish should lie in water for 8 days, the water to be changed daily. Place the fish in a solution of 1 pint potash lie and 12 pints water where it should remain for 3 days. Remove and place in fresh water for 2 days. Cook in boiling salted water (2 ounces salt to 2 quarts water). By adding the salt after the fish, when the water has reached boiling point again, the fish will “shiver”, which is a good test of first class “lutefisk”. Serve with melted pork drippings, melted butter, or white sauce and boiled split peas.
Lefsa
From Great Grandma Nelson’s Cookbook
16 cups potatoes
1 cup butter
1 cup cream
8 tablespoons sugar
4 teaspoons salt
6 cups flour
Boil and rice potatoes. Drain potatoes well before ricing. Add butter, cream, sugar, and salt. Cool potatoes over night then take about ¼ potatoes and mix with ¼ flour, mix, roll, and back on lefse grill. (A lefse grill is traditionally a flat cast iron grill pan and griddle all in one.) Serve with butter and sugar.
