The Most Traumatic Culinary Experience of My Life

Happy Thanksgiving! In the spirit of the holiday, I'd like to share a food anecdote from my visit last year, just in case you weren't already convinced by my testimony of the horrors of Nordic/Finnish cuisine:

One evening my girlfriend informed me that we would be having fish for dinner. I was very excited at this prospect, as our meals in the past few days at her parents' house mostly consisted of traditional Finnish foods. I was expecting something along the lines of hong shao yu (Chinese braised fish)—something rich in color, spices, and texture. However, when dinner time came, I was met with a glass container of what I assumed was some sort of white gelatin. As a completely genuine question, I asked Kati, "So where's the fish?" "This is the fish," she replied, "It's lutfisk." I looked at the white gelatinous substance in front of me with apprehension. But not wanting to judge by appearances, I picked up a modest chunk of the fish and placed it down upon my plate. 

Hong shao yu (Chinese Braised Fish)
This is what I was expecting for dinner.
Source: https://thewoksoflife.com/chinese-braised-fish-hongshao-yu-2/

Lutfisk
...and this was the reality. Talk about unappetizing, right?
Source: https://pauldelancey.com/lutefiskbin/

I took a bite, and I was horrified. Even now, I can barely come up with the words to describe what I experienced.

Dear reader, I'll have you know that I am not a picky eater. As a child, my mother always bragged to her friends that I was such an easy child to raise. I'd eat basically anything you'd put in front of me, even foods very unpopular with other children, from brussel sprouts to spinach to broccoli. But I can confidently say that lutfisk is the worst thing I've ever tasted aside from genuinely spoiled, rotten food. Its texture is simultaneously gelatinous and flaky. Perhaps most shockingly, its flavor is practically nonexistent. It tastes like how aerogel looks. All these factors combine to create a distinctly unpleasant eating experience. I was unable to get more than two bites down. Utterly defeated, I scraped the remaining lutfisk onto my girlfriend's plate.

Note: Kati later informed me that the menu during my visit was not very typical for her household. Her father, having spent over fifteen years in Southeast Asia (Kati's mother is Filipino, and her family spent many years living in Singapore), frequently cooked dishes that were neither discernibly Asian nor Finnish, but were certainly more seasoned than the average Finnish meal. Kati hypothesized that the menu I experienced during my visit was due to two factors:

1. I was visiting around Christmas, which is the time of year with the heaviest emphasis on traditional Finnish/Nordic foods.
2. Her dad wanted me, as a visitor, to be able to taste the full range of what Finnish cuisine had to offer as a cultural experience.

I will also note that judging from the few non-Finnish dishes he cooked during my visit, her dad is quite an excellent cook. My complaints with the food are at a fundamental level, not about the execution.

I think I've spent enough time recollecting my traumatic experience. I was left with this question: How did the Nordic people come to hail such a reprehensible substance as a holiday classic?

I did some Googling to try and uncover the historical origins of the dish. Lutfisk, which is its Swedish name, (also known as lutefisk in Norwegian and lipeäkala in Finnish) is whitefish, such as cod, which is dried and treated with lye, and then rehydrated several days prior to serving. According to Wikipedia, one theory for why this method became so prevalent is because of the limited availability of salt. Finland, Sweden, and Norway do not have major salt deposits, limiting their ability to use salt for food preservation. Instead, people from this region used drying as a method to preserve whitefish. Fish is also a valuable source of protein, and preserving it to be consumed later makes a lot of sense in a region with very long, harsh winters. These factors, along with a strong fishing culture in these countries due to their long coastlines and many lakes made the practice of preserving fish very practical. Thus, the existence of the horror that is lutfisk can perhaps be somewhat justified as a product of the Fennoscandian landscape.

The same Wikipedia page cites a Smithsonian magazine article that discusses folklore and mythology around the invention of lutfisk. Here's an excerpt from that article: 

A common legend has it that Viking fishermen hung their cod to dry on tall birch racks. When some neighboring Vikings attacked, they burned the racks of fish, but a rainstorm blew in from the North Sea, dousing the fire. The remaining fish soaked in a puddle of rainwater and birch ash for months before some hungry Vikings discovered the cod, reconstituted it and had a feast. 

The idea of hungry Vikings feasting on ash-soaked cod seems comically absurd and fitting for a dish as polarizing as lutfisk. While such folklore adds a romanticized charm to its origins, it does little to redeem the dish itself for modern palates. Regardless of why or how it came to be, lutfisk will always remain in my mind as an abomination to the definition of what can be considered edible.