OT Norwegian Christmas-food (was Re: Christmas Dinner in England (long and tedious), and is now longer and more tedious)

[Rita Winston]

No: HPFGUIDX 7090

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, Christian Stubø <rhodhry at y...> 
wrote:

> If they go to a Norwegian school, they might get served lutefisk 
> (dried fish that has soaked for a while in potash lye - sort of a 
> belak yellow jelly-like wobbly substance smelling of dried fish and
> ammonia), 

Is 'belak' a word or a typo?  

> (snip) The most prevalent theory on how lutefisk came to be, is 
> that a storage house packed with stock-fish burnt down, and then 
> the remains got soaked in a rainstorm.  Someone desperately hungry
> then to their great surprise discovered that it was in fact edible
> (not that all Norwegians would agree on that subject). 

I am spacing out on the name of the prominent American poet who 
visited Iceland with a friend along around 1910 (when he was just 
a student, not yet prominent) and reported on lutefisk that it 
resembled a cross between rotten fish and the thick skin of a big 
callous removed from the sole of a foot.

I brought that x-th hand quote to a session of our "Vikings" frp 
game, and one player explained with enthusiasm that he himself had 
visited Iceland and found that the lutefisk was saved until the end 
of winter (ice is breaking up) when there is nothing else left to 
eat, and the women say: "Oh, good, it's finally lutefisk time" and 
fetch out the barrels, whereupon the men say: "Oh, I'm so sorry to  
miss it, but I just remembered that I have to go Viking now." 

I don't know if that man ever HAD been to Iceland (he lived in 
Germany for a couple of years) but I know that modern people only 
sail replica Viking ships, not go Viking to burn and kill landlubbers.