Life on the farms meant eating a lot of potatoes, and Jim’s grandfather Christ Odden made lefse early every morning out of the last night’s supper potatoes. Many Scandinavian-Americans, farmers or not, still eat a lot of lefse during the holidays. For the last decade or so in Nelchina, we’ve made stacks of lefse on the day after Thanksgiving with every relative and friend who wants to be a part of the production and the noisy fun. Each family takes a stack of lefse home to eat at Christmas.
Lefse is a kind of Scandinavian tortilla made with riced potatoes, flour, butter, and lard, all seasoned slightly with sugar and salt. You roll each lefse out flat and round on a floured cloth until you can see the writing on the red-and-white rolling cloth through the thin dough. Then you pick up the delicate thing with a flat stick and transport it to a 400°F lefse griddle or the top of a wood cookstove. The rounds are delicate, so moving them is a kind of dance, with the lefse-rolling person moving aside so that the lefse-carrying person can waltz in.
Dogs are appreciative of tender, uncooked lefse that regularly breaks and falls off the stick on its way across the kitchen to the griddle. Dogs are the beneficiaries of husbands or wives who admonish the lefse rollers that they are not making the lefse thin enough. Little Lutheran church ladies, now in heaven, are also present and looking squinty-eyed down at the poor lefse rollers, whispering “larger,” “rounder,” “thinner,” and “I can’t read the writing, dear.” Why we do not carry the rolling board over closer to the cooking surface is a question the dogs believe is best left unasked.
Lefse is one of the most colorful foods in the Scandinavian culinary pantheon, which means it is not entirely white.
Despite the stressful pressure on lefse rollers, everyone wants to try rolling. A kid starts with a little roller and makes a too-thick but recognizable lefse that is eaten right after cooking with lots of butter while praising the kid. Everyone who makes lefse is soon covered with flour. No one who ever makes lefse forgets about it.
God’s way of eating lefse, according to my husband’s family, is to roll it up with warm pork sparerib meat or lutefisk, seasoned only with salt and pepper and butter. Or you are sometimes allowed to butter the hot lefse, sprinkle sugar on it and eat it that way. No other foods belong in a piece of lefse, but this rule is occasionally, secretly broken by people who have married into the family.