strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Jan 8 04: cold fish
I don’t really know much about my father’s mother at all. Her name was Esther. She grew up in Minnesota and spoke only Swedish in the home until she started going to school. She met my grandfather Ed in the mountains. In the early 1970s, and presumably before that, she wore killer black-framed cat’s-eye spectacles. And oftentimes, as Christmas drew near, she made lutefisk.
Lutefisk is—well, it’s fish that has been encouraged to rot by prolonged soaking in lye. It is famously stinky and disgusting. It is equally famously beloved by the Swedes. My father goes just a little pale when describing what the presence of lutefisk did to his home. He has never attempted to describe its flavor, but still: there are few things described so vividly by my father and his brothers, where boyhood memories are concerned, as the smell of lutefisk. As a result, the stuff has a semilegendary place in family legend among the Willetts of my generation. There are so few points of specificity.
I was delighted, therefore, to read Clay Shirky’s very funny Ode to Lutefisk today. Granted, Mr. Shirky’s tale is set in Norway, but still: it illuminates the family touchstone nicely.
(An aside re: Clay Shirky. He wrote a few things that I greatly enjoyed back in the days when the web was new and still called the World Wide Web, and Yahoo! could catalog the whole thing using actual humans. One was “This Essay Won’t Fit On Your Screen,” thoughts on the problems and promise of the WWW vis-à-vis nonlinear fiction. I had this shiny new English degree at the time and my mind was freshly blown by Professor Hite’s Postmodernist Fiction class. I loved it. The other was the World’s Worst World Wide Web Page. It’s still terrifying. There are still pages being made that look like it. Shirky’s website hasn’t changed a jot in at least six years and probably longer. It’s a museum piece, but in a good way.)
Anyway: it seems like lutefisk is sort of Scandinavia’s answer to ‘advanced sushi.’ You know, the ones whose little picture on the stand-up card at the restaurant is discreetly marked ‘advanced.’ The cards are made by beer or sake manufacturers; they’re the same everywhere. And you see this innocent little ‘advanced’ under the little photo and you wonder what the hell it means, advanced, how weird can it be, and you realize that you aren’t going to be the one to find out. Instead it was John, in the end, who took the bait. John ordered the uni. This was mere days after we got the Bleecker Street apartment, at a local sushi bar whose name we habitually mistranslated as ‘three round guys.’ It really meant something to the effect of ‘a circle of three.’ Wait. I’m digressing again.
Uni is essentially orange-pulpy-blob-of-sea-urchin with some rice, wrapped in nori. Urchins are remarkably undifferentiated beneath the spines. They’re mostly a big glob of reproductive cells. Yeah, eew. John put the glistening rondel in his mouth and there was a long pause; and then I watched his face attempt to crawl off the surface of his skull. I am told that uni tastes like something somebody scraped off the underside of a pier, but I myself will never know.
(Yet another aside: European friends of ours who have yet to lose their sushi virginity are hereby reassured that we will never slip them ‘advanced’ sushi for our own amusement. And that this story is not sufficient excuse for declining a little hamachi negi when next we see them. Maybe some unagi. Or a spicy tuna roll. Mmmm.)
Lutefisk is apparently the same, only it tastes more Norwegian. Or more Swedish. Like something you dredged up from the bottom of a fjörd, maybe.
It probably depends on the grandmother.