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    Lutefisk lovers

October 9, 2008

Bethany lures lutefisk lovers

By Brian Ojanpa

MANKATO — If one man’s meat is another man’s poison, it also could be said that one person’s humble cod is another person’s haute cuisine.

Bethany Lutheran College held its annual lutefisk supper on Thursday, and aficionados began lining up a full hour before the first plate was served.

“I love it. It’s better than lobster,” Lucille Miotke of Janesville said with a straight face as she and sister Lois Ziniel of LeMars, Iowa, waited in a hallway.

The pair owned the dubious distinction of being the first diners to arrive for the 4:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. supper, hunkering down on chairs at 3:30 p.m.

Why?

“Because we wanted to get home before dark ... and to make sure we got a seat,” Miotke said.

The Bethany event is the Mankato area’s lutefisk season opener of sorts. The traditional Norwegian dish is typically served at churches, and Ramona and Everett Schlingmann of Mankato plan to make their annual rounds following Bethany’s affair.

Everett Schlingmann laid it out:

“We go to Hanska, Norseland, Blooming Prairie, Scandia, Medo Township, the Elks Club — plus eating it at home.”

To many people, there’s a reason the words “ludicrous” and “lutefisk” sound similar. But to loyalists of the lye-soaked, dried, then reconstituted fish, a plate of it is pure nirvana.

Steve Jaeger, one of many Bethany employees helping serve the dinner, said lutefisk is serious business for his 91-year-old mother, who goes mum as dinner time approaches, deigning to speak only after the first forkful passes her lips.

Then there is Orville Sampson, a retired Bethany custodian, who was escorted to the supper by a young male relative. The two provided a snapshot of the generational divide that lutefisk engenders.

The young guy had his plate piled with meatballs, mashed potatoes, carrots — anything but lutefisk — while Sampson sat down to a plate of nothing but.

Bethany began putting on the suppers as a fundraiser in the mid-1980s.

The fundraising purpose has long since diminished; now it’s a simply a Bethany tradition that each year serves several hundred mostly elderly diners, who often get a little global diversity with their Scandinavian repasts.

Jaeger said when a few of the school’s international students help serve, diners experience some cultural short-circuiting.

“They’ll ask, ‘Oh, where are you from?’ And the students will say, Chile, Peru ... It just blows these old Norwegians away.”

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