The Dinner Files

Last night my world fell apart. And thus so too did dinner. Just a bit.

My Very Tall Cousin’s Norwegian girlfriend had been home over Christmas and made lefse from scratch with her stepmother. Lefse, in Norway, is a traditional food and made, she said, really mainly at Christmas time. Most people buy theirs – often from old ladies who make them at home – but her stepmother thought she’d try it and was amazed as how easy (just time consuming) it was. She came back full of will to make lefse – and to teach me how to make it.

So on Sunday she and My Very Tall Cousin showed up, with lefse ingredients in hand. They came upstairs and she unpacked the ingredients on the kitchen counter: flour, milk, butter, and sugar.

Where are the potatoes? I asked.

What potatoes? she responded.

Isn’t lefse a potato bread?

(And here all you Minnesotans will want to hang onto your hats because your minds are about to be blown.)

No, lefse is just plain and you fill it with butter and sugar.

I thought it was a flat potato bread.

No, that’s potato lefse. Just lefse is plain, with butter and sugar.

And, according to Wikipedia, she is right about the food of her country. According to the stack of English-language Scandinavian cookbooks on my shelf, she is on crack. But these books were all written by Americans for Americans. In Minnesota you can buy lefse at plenty of grocery stores. It is always potato lefse. Always. I had literally never heard of lefse being anything else until last night.

Forge ahead. The dough is very cool – just 2 cups scalded milk, 1 stick melted butter, and 2.2 pounds of flour beaten until it holds together in a shiny mass. It’s soft and pliable but holds together and doesn’t stick.

Then came the extensive rolling –

The rolling actually takes both time and a fair amount of effort because you want it paper-thin. Really, what you want is to get it read-through thin –

Getting each lefse this thin is, as you might imagine, a total pain in the ass. The best combination for this feat was the much-used (and thus constantly well-oiled and seasoned) cutting board and the rolling pin with actual handles. Rolling on the almost-never-used-for-direct-food-contact side of the kitchen cart with the handle-less French-y style rolling pin was not so much fun. In a way, it’s easy to roll out. It has the consistency of playdough and doesn’t stick much, but it has a tendency to bunch up and fold onto itself if you’re not paying attention or you’re using the above-mentioned poor combination of location and pin. We all took turns, and drank beer or wine (or, in Ernest’s case, a rare treat of ginger ale), and made a good time of it as we rolled, cooked the lefse on a pancake griddle instead of an authentic lefse grill, and – and I believe this is quite different than with potato lefse – layered the lefses ain between damp kitchen towels to soften them. Once properly pliant, they were spread with a butter-sugar mixture, folded, and stacked – ready to freeze as you see at the top of this post.

Then it was time for dinner. I had defrosted a top sirloin roast from my meat CSA, salted and peppered it and let it sit in the fridge overnight. Then I just roasted it at 450 until a meat thermometer read 135, let it rest so the temp would go up to 145, sliced it and served with butter braised cabbage and celery salad. And no potato lefse.

The problem was that none of the three thermometers in my kitchen drawers were registering any temperatures at all – but I didn’t realize that for awhile, what with all the lefse rolling business at hand. The meat all got cooked to medium well, which was a shame. Luckily, I had made a horseradish whipped cream (whip some heavy cream until it thickens and soft peaks form, stir in freshly grated horseradish and salt to taste). It was delicious. Beyond delicious, actually. And, as My Very Tall Cousin pointed out, it was like putting Cool Whip on meat. In a good way.

After letting the cream melt like butter onto the steak, and enjoying the horseradish tang on the deeply savory and seasoned meat, we headed back to the kitchen, for more spreading and folding and to eat our fill of lefse. Or, as my dashing husband dubbed it, “sugar bread.”

As in love as I am with this Terrine cookbook, it is not for the feint of heart. Not only are many of the recipes for rillettes and patés and other creations that not everyone wants to see made, much less make themselves, but it is also clear that tested though the recipes may have been in the gram/milliliter measurements, the American measurements were not. Lots of details are missing, too – things like what size pan to use.

Don’t get me wrong: this terrine was delicioso. Mucho so. It just doesn’t look a thing like the picture in the book, which was cut into neat slices and had a whiter overall color. Granted, I used smoked black cod instead of smoked haddock, less black radish because I don’t see how three would have fit into the mix, and added some extra horseradish because that root rocks the house, but none of that fully accounts for the softer, less set texture. Nor does it account for the giant chunks of fish in the picture when the recipe calls for one to “thinly slice” the fish (me thinks a stylist took some liberties). As for the color, I’m assuming my fancy-pants, orange-yolked eggs from free-ranging, active birds who scratch for weeds and bugs might have given the custard its decidedly golden tinge.

I would make it again to fix the texture and report to you about it then. I’m tempted, I really am. It was a hit with the whole family. But look at that list of ingredients – it’s not exactly the kind of thing I feel like eating everyday. Plus, the book is filled with layered creations I want to try. I’m looking forward, not backwards. So it will be awhile before I make it again. Here’s what I did. If anyone out there wants to firm it up, experiment on my behalf, would you, and report back?

Winter terrine of smoked black cod, horseradish, black radish

This is a lovely, gentle, rich creation. Equally good warm after unmolding and cold out of the fridge the next morning.

1 medium black radish (a.k.a. Spanish radish)

8 oz. smoked fish, I used black cod, haddock or halibut are mentioned in the original

1 1/4 cup heavy cream

5 eggs

1 Tablespoon freshly grated horseradish

2 shallots, as finely chopped as you can manage

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon freshly grated black pepper

Heat oven to 350. Line a small (8-inch) loaf pan with plastic wrap, letting it overhang over the edges by several inches.

Scrub the radish clean (don’t peel it, you want that black skin to show) and then cut in slices as thin as you can – a mandoline is useful if you have one.

Remove any skin or bones from the fish. Cut or pull into bite-size pieces.

Whisk cream, eggs, horseradish, shallots, salt, and pepper in a medium bowl. Pour a thin layer of cream mixture in the pan. Lay down a layer of radish, cover with egg mixture, layer in some fish, cover with egg mixture, and continue layering until all ingredients are in the pan.

Bring the edges of the plastic wrap over the top of the terrine to seal in.

Set the pan in a larger roasting pan. Fill the roasting pan with boiling water – it should go at least half-way up the outside of the terrine pan, three-quarters of the way up is even better.

Bake until terrine is set, about 45 minutes. Remove from water bath and let cool to warm before unmolding the terrine onto a serving platter or cutting board.