Monique Keiran
Families gather holiday traditions from many cultures
Nature Boy sketched out his holiday plans last week. In addition to chauffeuring his mother to and around the region, he meant to persuade her to teach him how to make lefse, a traditional soft Norwegian flatbread.
“You know, you can find recipes online,” I said. “Of course, but that’s not the point.” “Should I stand by with the fire extinguisher?” “Do you think we’ll need it?” “Not for cooking fires, but you both have short fuses when you’re working together.”
Many variations on lefse exist. They include something very tortillalike, a sweetened snack resembling the beavertail or a flat cake to be served with coffee, as well as various lumpier or cheesy versions.
But the ingredients for the basic, traditional form are mashed potatoes (including fat and milk or cream) and flour. Once those are mixed, you scoop the dough up in balls, slap or roll it into tortillas, then cook them on a hot griddle.
In Nature Boy’s family, it is considered good form to serve lefse at family feasts alongside the roasted oversized poultry, jellied salads with green peas, overcooked Brussels sprouts and mashed potatoes. (All good, prairie-raised farm kids from a certain era understood it is impossible to serve too much potato at a feast.)
Lefse’s addition to the Nature Boyfamily feast menu has long served as a source of conversation and speculation. As far as anyone knows, the family contains no other Norwegian link.
A clear British-Newfie connection, with sides of mashed turnips, boiled cabbage and salt beef or cod, exists on his mom’s side. But mystery shrouds his dad’s family tree — from which lefse’s role in the family hangs.
The family name suggests northern Italian-Swiss or possibly some minor, impoverished branch of Hebridean Scots. Although Viking raids might have diversified that gene pool long ago, the more recent lefse link remains unclear.
So little is known that family members routinely rehash conjecture and fable amidst the mashed potatoes. They circulate oft-repeated speculation around the table as they chase peas around their plates.
Then they mop up the last of the turkey gravy with lefse.
More likely than any distant bloodline influence, however, the menu’s addition probably stems from a recent ancestor eating the potato bread at a neighbour’s table a century or so ago. When Canada’s dominion government sectioned and parcelled off the prairies to immigrant farmers and townsfolk in the early 1900s, a great culinary mixing ensued.
Marketing campaigns to settle this “Last Best West” targeted: • the British and those of British descent — which, according to the government, included many eastern Canadians • northern Europeans — stereotyped as good farmers, and therefore welcome • Americans — of the approved cultural and racial background, but risky; after all, settling the Canadian prairies was meant to protect the territories from American expansion • southern Europeans
The government chose not to invite most other cultures, races or peoples of other geographic origins to the party.
The pioneers preferred to settle where others from their regions of origin and language were moving, but here and there cultures intermingled. Land farmed by, for example, a Ukrainian family might share a fence line with that owned by, say, folk from Quebec. The local German baker’s daughter might marry the Swedish farmer’s son. An Irish craftsman might bring his family to town to help build the French Catholic church.
Somewhere on the prairies — possibly on a cold winter night when the stars and the snow sparkled and the wind whistled through the uninsulated, wood-frame farm houses — a diverse community came together to share a meal.
Someone brought ham. Someone brought venison sausage. Someone else brought cabbage rolls. Mrs. MacSo-and-so brought mashed neeps. Her neighbour brought boiled potatoes or biscuits or gravy or pie or doughnuts.
And that family who had immigrated from Norway or from northern Minnesota — they brought lefse.
The food was eaten. It was deemed good. Recipes were requested and exchanged.
And on Monday, 100 years or so later, a group of decidedly non-Scandinavians will be eating traditional Norwegian lefse at their own Holiday Feast.
Happy feasting, everyone.