an age-old Norwegian holiday tradition: making lefse

www.seattletimes.com/life/food-drink/gather-your-household-for-an-age-old-norwegian-tradition-this-holiday-season-making-lefse/




Lefse. It’s a paper-thin flatbread, made from potatoes and cooked on a griddle, flipped with a long, narrow wooden stick, and eaten slathered with butter, sugar and sometimes cinnamon. If you’re of Norwegian heritage, you’ve most likely eaten it at Thanksgiving or Christmas for as long as you can remember.



Growing up, when celebrating Christmas with my dad’s side of the family, lefse (pronounced “lef-suh”) was an outlier on the table, sitting on a cut crystal platter among bowls of meatballs, cavatelli, cheese-filled ravioli and platters of braciola. It was the one thing my Grandma Jean (the lone Norwegian amid her Italian husband and their seven children) had from her side of the family.



It was never the star of the show, and to be fair, how could a bland potato pancake shine when set up against ravioli and braciola? Still, I always looked forward to lefse, and as an adult I asked my grandma to teach me how to turn what is essentially cold mashed potatoes into a tissue-thin vessel for copious amounts of salty butter.



The recipe itself is simple: riced potatoes mixed when hot with cream and butter, chilled and mixed with flour. However, to create the mottled sheets, you need a griddle, a lot of flour or a pastry cloth — a corrugated rolling pin is optional, but any rolling pin must be covered with a pastry sock — and that long, flat lefse stick to transfer the raw lefse to the hot griddle and to flip them while cooking.



It took me a long time and many attempts to achieve my Grandma Jean’s level of thinness, as making lefse truly is a labor of love. After she died in the winter of 2019, I found myself in possession of her original Bethany Heritage Grill, her corrugated rolling pin, her pastry sock, and the realization that I could never again call her for a lesson or a conversation on how she first came to making lefse. Only then did I fully understand that, like many family recipes, lefse is so much more than potatoes.



Daytona Strong, author of the cookbook “Modern Scandinavian Baking” and the host of the forthcoming podcast Kitchen Counter Conversations, says lefse ranks “near the top of all Scandinavian foods because of the associations and memories I have with it.”