Swedish Atrocity
LUTEFISK
INGREDIENTS
dried cod
lye
water
other stuff
PREPARATION
No! No, a thousand times, no. I will not give you a recipe for lutefisk. You got my cookbook. I have a warm and fuzzy feeling for you. So, look at the ingredients. Lye is a poison.
Furthermore, lutefisk assaults the senses as no other widespread dish. It looks like glue or broiled phlegm; there is no debate on this. It smells like, like, a rat died under the furnace supplying central heating. It has the texture of boogers. It tastes like fermented cod-liver oil. Fortunately, lutefisk cannot speak.
When I was little, my mother made me eat lutefisk to show what she had to go through when she was small. My grandmother fed lutefisk to my mother to show what she had to go through when she was little girl. My grandmother’s parents left Sweden in the 1880s to get away from lutefisk.
Vikings raided Europe with unparalleled ferocity stoked by lutefisk meal after lutefisk meal in the homeland. Many thousands of them never came back.
There are more disgusting dishes than lutefisk, but they are little known and regional. Let’s pray they stay that way.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.