by Mark R. DeLong

My mother ordered the annual parcel of lutefisk from Olsen Fish Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Determined to bring some of her Minnesota Norwegian Christmas tradition to our home in Oklahoma, where our family moved when I was in high school, she phoned in the order in November or even earlier. The package appeared a few days later, fish solidly frozen in dry ice—probably the only package of lutefisk to arrive in the state. When she nestled the butcher-paper wrapped lump into the freezer, I knew we were doomed.

She was trying to invoke Christmases she had lived in Minnesota, and a big part of that had to do with smell, the sense especially tied with memory.

Lutefisk dinners were common in Lutheran church basements in the upper Midwest US, and still happen even though some never recovered from the disruption of the Covid pandemic. Nationally, lutefisk sales slumped then and only recovered to about 300,000 pounds in 2022, significantly lower than the 800,000-or-so pounds made in the early 1990s. In small towns like the one I grew up in, the feasts always took place around Christmas, and the rumor in my home village was that churches, despite their doctrinal differences, would coordinate schedules such that it was possible to have a lutefisk dinner several times during the season. The fish, I guess, drove a true ecumenical movement and drew together the large community of families whose ancestors had immigrated from Scandinavia. Generations knew the odd pleasures of lutefisk first-hand, though, no doubt, the draw of the Christmas dinner fish puzzles many of them (including me).

Lutefisk, to put it bluntly, stinks. And that, ironically, might be part of its charm. Read more »