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Lefse demonstration, tasting honor (March 5, 2008) – The Betty Strong Encounter Center will present “Honoring Siouxland’s Norwegian Heritage with Lefse” at 2 p.m. Wednesday, March 12. The program will include a demonstration, a tasting of the delicate potato pancakes, and stories about lefse’s place in Norwegian culture. Lois Stolpe will lead the event. Admission and samples will be free. “Making lefse can be tricky but it’s worth doing right. But I worry that the art isn’t being passed on,” says Lois who learned lefse-making from her mother, the late Geneva Dahl.
Like most heritage recipes, Lois’ lefse uses a “handful of this” and a “sprinkling of that.” She prefers russets to red potatoes and recommends a light touch when it comes to adding flour. “Too much flour makes lefse tough.”fse tough.” The process requires patience, peeling a lot of potatoes, and a love for authentic food. Lois will demonstrate how chilled potato dough is rolled into thin circles and then transferred to a hot griddle for quick cooking. A dab of butter, jelly, jam, cream cheese or peanut butter are common toppings. Lefse also is part of traditional lutefisk dinners. Lutefisk is fish, usually cod, that’s soaked in lye, thoroughly rinsed and then boiled. The lefse program and heritage recipe project were inspired by research that resulted in the Center’s two Sioux City Stockyards books. Author Marcia Poole heard first-person stories about life in the South Bottoms and East Bottoms neighborhoods where immigrant families lived alongside indigenous peoples from many tribes. Most people worked for packinghouses or the railroads. Farm and ranch families brought additional richness, both through the food they produced and how they prepared it. Ongoing immigration to this area has continued to contribute deeper complexity to Siouxland’s foodways. For more information about “Lefse” and the Siouxland Heritage Recipe Project, call 712-224-5242. The Betty Strong Encounter Center is connected with the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center on Sioux City’s riverfront. It was built and is sustained by Missouri River Historical Development, Inc. (MRHD).
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The event is presented as part of the
Center’s Siouxland Heritage Recipe Project
which celebrates traditional recipes and
helps preserve them for future generations.
The project is particularly interested in
recipes that reflect cultural identity.