Lefse - It's Just Not Thanksgiving Without It!

We populate our tables at any holiday season with traditional, festive dishes that make the occasion special. Perhaps the food makes it special for some symbolic reason, or they may just be the foods we grew up eating and remind us of home.

As proof of this, I spent 12 hours in a kitchen yesterday prepping for Thanksgiving dinner, and it's not even dinner at my house with my family. I am not traveling home this holiday season, so I'm having Thanksgiving dinner with my housemates and their family. And as they graciously said I could do, I'm making an extra effort to put dishes on the table that my family has on Thanksgiving, so it can feel like my holiday, too.

While there is a very specific and very long list of "Thanksgiving foods" at my house every year, there's one thing that I cannot imagine gorging myself on without: lefse. It's just not Thanksgiving without it.

Piles and piles of lefse

Lefse is a Norwegian potato flatbread that you make by adding some flour to mashed potatoes, rolling the dough out very thin, and frying it on a griddle. It's quite a bit like a potato tortilla. Take a bit of everything that's on your Thanksgiving plate, stuff it inside, and roll it up. Now you've got a Norwegian Thanksgiving Burrito, and it's one of my favorite, decadent, I-can-only-eat-this-once-a-year-or-I'll-explode foods.

However, this being Vermont and decidedly not Norse country, if I wanted lefse on the table, I had to make it myself. And clearly, I had to make it myself. It's tradition.

But what exactly about this is traditional?

Here I've just described a staple of Norwegian cuisine (which varies widely across different regions in Norway) by saying that it's like a staple of Mexican cuisine which has been taken by American cuisine and morphed into something that may or may not be recognizable to Mexicans (because clearly they all eat tortillas and all of their tortillas are the same). Perhaps it's only a comparative illustration, but if you saw my Norwegian-Thanksgiving Burrito on a menu in a hip gastro-pub, you would most definitely see it labeled as "fusion food."

The point is, calling a food 'traditional' has its problems.

As I scoured the cupboard for things that would approximate the special equipment apparently essential to making lefse, I didn't feel like I was doing a disservice to my ancestors because my rolling pin wasn't grooved.

As I stood and griddled bread for an hour, I didn't feel connected to the motherland, like I was being a better Norwegian-American. I really only cared about making it taste good.

In fact, at home, I never would've gone through all of this trouble. In Minnesota, lefse magically appears once a year in the grocery store so that people like me can more efficiently shovel plateful after plateful of other equally starchy, fatty foods into their mouths.

Perhaps this is also unfair. If there wasn't something important about it, what would impel me to go through all of the trouble of making such a time-consuming and labor-intensive dish which, in all likelihood, only I will notice or appreciate?

Perhaps our holiday foods are traditions because they make these days distinct from the rest of the year. They are special markers which tell us, "notice today." What foods we choose for this purpose may have to do with our locality, our heritage, or our family. But they're the foods we choose.

And I will choose to enjoy my lumpy, slightly over-buttered lefse this Thanksgiving. It's what I do. It's my tradition. It's just not Thanksgiving without it!