Lutefisk for Christmas

Mom loved Christmas :) This is her in 2011, joining in on the Christmas Eve Nerf gun battle :)

I think now I’ll describe how we celebrated Christmas in Kjettestorp when I was a kid. Christmas was the biggest holiday that we celebrated. Preparations started way before December. Making the Julost or Christmas cheese was the first part of Christmas preparations and that was done in late July or August like I described before. They used the bigger cheese molds for the Julost. It was usually the biggest cheese they made that year, and the Christmas cheese was called that from beginning.

There were some meat dishes that they really only made at Christmas. They used to make two different kinds of sylta. One was calf sylta. That was made with ground veal. They mixed in gelatin and you sliced it and ate it cold with red beets.  Oh that was good! The other kind was called pressylta. It was made in a big mold, like a cheese mold and you had a cheesecloth in there. Then they layered different pieces of meat. It was often made of the less-desirable cuts of meat because they didn’t have to be big pieces. They put in lots of different kinds in this mold. This kind was also very good, but the other was my favorite.

Fish drying on a wooden rack in Norway.

Then there’s the lutefisk. Lutefisk had to be put in lut before Annandagan. That was the 9^th of December and that was the last possible day to start the lutefisk. It had to be put in lye—how long I don’t know. I was too little to help with that. Then after it had been in the lye the right amount of time, it had to be watered out and that took several days too. It was a long process. Many people have asked me what lutefisk really is. The fish was called långa in Swedish. It is

A Långa!

a cold salt water fish. I think it is a kind of cod. They catch it up along the coast of Norway and in the North Sea. Then they sun dry it. Along the coast of Norway and down the coast of Bohuslän in Sweden they would have long tall racks – high as a house. They would cut the head off and clean the fish and then hang the pieces of fish on these racks. They’d leave

Our Christmas Lutefisk

the tail attached and that was how the fish would hang over the rail. The sun was hot against the cliffs there and there was always a breeze from the sea. When I was small, when we got the lutefisk, it was so hard and dried that you thought it was made of wood.   By the time I was old enough to help cook the lutefisk, though, we bought it frozen like we do today. I don’t know how much of this drying is still done. I think you can still buy the dried if you want to do your own lutefisk but most people buy it frozen.