Lögberg-Heimskringla - 07.05.1999, Blaðsíða 3

Lögberg-Heimskringla • Föstudagur 7 maí 1999 • 3
The Vínarterta Saga
Continued from page 1
members of the ethnic group eat them,
they are performing “a sort of historical
eucharist,” in which they connect to the
poverty, grief and uprooting of their
immigrant past.
Diverging foodways
ínarterta is a food of the immi-
grant experience—with little
remaining significance in the old coun-
try. In Iceland, it is only one of a plenti-
tude of pastries and cakes, having
evolved into a confusion of tortes and
breads. Icelandic food experts mention
seven examples of layer cakes originat-
ing with vínarterta. They vow that this is
an incomplete list.
The first vínarterta recipes called for
prune filling. This humble but delightful-
ly flavoured mash is still the preferred
ingredient in the New World. However,
it has been replaced in Iceland largely by
rhubarb, other jams and frostings.
Winnipeger Elva Simundsson,
author of a book on North American
Icelanders, found three main variations
of vínarterta when she visited Iceland—
sultuterta (jam torte), sveskjuterta (prune
torte) and brúnterta (brown torte).
Brúnterta, which she saw most frequent-
ly, is made with several layers of brown
cinnamon-flavoured dough, altemating
with creamy frosting.
Old country Icelanders are all famil-
iar with a variety of cakes with light and
dark layers, but neither the classic form
of the dessert, nor the word for it are in
common usage there. Simundsson
explained, “something in vogue at the
time of immigration is very carefully
preserved by the immigrants, but totally
disappears out of the culture of the home
country.” She noted that a similar
process has aífected the Icelandic lan-
guage: some Danish words still used by
Canadian Icelanders have long ago dis-
appeared from use across the sea, and
certain folk songs preserved in Canada
are rarely sung in Iceland.
Hallgerdur Gísladóttir, folklorist at
the National Museum of Iceland, said
that the recipe for vínarterta first
appeared in Iceland’s third printed cook-
book in 1889, but presumably had been
circulating earlier among the island’s
cooks.
Icelandic folkore has vínarterta orig-
inating in Austria as a Viennese Torte,
then arrived in Iceland via Denmark. Its
mixed heritage is not unlike the genealo-
gy of Icelanders themselves, who are
descendants of Norwegians, Irish and
others who settled there over one thou-
sand years ago.
It had become a popular festive dish
by the period of intense emigration
between 1870 and 1914, when many
Icelanders fled disastrous volcanoes.
Fully one-fifth of Iceland’s population
emigrated to Norlh America during this
forty-four-year period.
The largest single group settled on
the western shore of Lake Winnipeg
some 123 years ago—where they found-
ed the town of Gimli. Tourists can still
,buy this tangy, sweet dessert in some
bakeries in the town.
Pastry excess
he lack of grain in the old days is
part of the cause of the famous
excess in pastry and cakes in feasts and
receptions in Icelandic homes in the
twentieth century,” Gísla-dóttir said. “At
everyday meals, people consumed dried
fish or angelica
roots with butter
or fat on them, but
no bread”.
Around the
turn of the century,
Icelandic women
began to indulge
their pride in bak-
ing and served
pastry, cakes, and
other dainties.
This pastry-excess
coincided with
Iceland’s food rev-
olution, when iron
stoves were com-
ing into use and
grains became
cheaper and more
readily available.
In one of the
novels of Iceland’s
Nobel Prize-win-
ning author,
Halldór Laxness, a
fictional but very
recognizable
housewife is
described, who
feels that nothing
is so shameful as
oífering dried fish
to a visitor.
Laxness describes
her serving her
guest some twenty platters laden with
two hundred pieces of her homebaked
pastry, plus a number of large tortes.
The pastry fixation of rural house-
holds may still be a standing joke in
Iceland. For example, a visiting
Icelandic music professor in Regina
recently said he once travelled on horse-
back through the island’s countryside for
several weeks collecting folk music. The
families who graciously gave him lodg-
ing oflfered little more than sweet pas-
tries and tortes, as befits an honoure
guest. He claimed he finally got a square
meal only after he found the courage to
ask for meat or cheese.
Crossing the ethnic divide
N North America, vínarterta has
clearly crossed the ethnic divide, win-
ning acceptance in the kitchens and now
the language and artistic expression of
the larger culture.
This transmission of a favourite
food into the general culture has a direct
parallel in the immigrant experience
itself. Increasingly, New World
Icelanders have been embracing their
neighbours—often in the marriage
chapel.
As a result, at the last complete
Canadian census in 1991, only about
15,000 Icelanders claimed both parents
of the original Icelandic stock, while
some 50,000 who claimed Icelandic her-
itage said they had mixed national ori-
gins.
Vínarterta as art
S IT GROWS
more diflficult
for succeeding
generations of
immigrants to
actually live in
the culture of
their ancestors,
ethnic symbols
have taken on
greater impor-
tance and new
symbols have
emerged. They
are no less pro-
found or satisfy-
ing for being
symbolic or for
being new, how-
ever.
Thus, a star-
tling series of
colourful draw-
ings of “vínarterta
ladies” have
begun to appear
in the Toronto
artistic communi-
ty. They are myth-
ic figures—most-
ly of older
women, but also
of men and chil-
dren—dressed in
the altemating
light and dark stripes of vínarterta. They
are the product of Toronto artist Katrina
Koven, who traces her ancestry on her
mother’s side to Manitoba’s Icelandic
settlements.
Her aflfectionate but unsentimental
portraits (shown in the illustrations), cel-
ebrate both the dark and the light ele-
ments in the Icelandic character and the
immigrant experience. Some radiate
great dignity and beauty. Others have the
rugged features and stoope postures of
trolls. Their moods shift from joy to sor-
row and loss. Some combine this duality
of moods in the same imagined figure.
Koven has moved the vínarterta
metaphor beyond food, beyond language
and literature, to a new form of ethnic
celebration in visual art.
Her pioneer work has precedents in
literature and scholarhip. A new genera-
tion of researchers and writers concerned
with the Icelandic Canadian culture
(some of non-Icelandic background) are
abandoning the rosy myth-building of
the past and are exploring the darker lay-
ers of the immigrant experience.
For example, Daisy Neijmann, pro-
fessor at the University of Manitoba, has
edited a book, which will be published
soon, that includes Helgason’s paper on
the mystery of vínarterta, and a study by
anthropologist Anne Brydon on the
meeting and mingling of Icelandic and
Aboriginal peoples in the Gimli area.
Brydon shows that this exchange was
not as free of tension as earlier scholars
and writers have claimed.
There is an ethnic adage that holds
that if two Icelanders are put in the same
room an argument is sure to start.
Not surprisingly, a common item of
dispute is the proper ingredients and
preparation methods for vínarterta.
Icelanders often argue vehemently
whether it should have cardamom or
vanilla flavouring. Prune or raspberry
filling. Whether it should have icing on
the top or not. And just how many layers
are required.
But like a favourite family story that
siblings remember diíferently, the dis-
puted details of the recipe are invariably
laughed away—leaving the pure joy of
rediscovering the dessert itself.
Jim Anderson expresses his thanks
to Shirley McCreedy, former Regent of
the Jon Sigurdson chapter, IODE of
Winnipeg. The recipe is from the 1968
edition of the First Lutheran Church
Women’s Cook Book, of Winnipeg.
Jim Anderson hails fom Regina, SK. He
grew up in an Icelandic community in
the Libau area. His e-mail address is:
janderson @ calleregina. com
VINARTERTA
3/4 cup butter 1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup white sugar 3-1/2 cups
flour
2 eggs 2 tsp. almond flavoring
1 Tbsp. milk 1 tsp. ground car-
damom seed
1 tsp. baking powder
Cream butter well, add sugar gradu-
ally and eggs, beat until creamy. Add
milk and flavoring, then add dry ingredi-
ents. Divide into six equal parts. Pat each
part into 9 in. round cake pan. Bake at
375 degrees until golden brown, about
12 mins. Remove from pan while hot
and allow to cool. Put prune filling in
between layers.
Filling
1 package pitted prunes (12 oz.)
1 Tbsp. cinnamon
1 cup white sugar 1 tsp vanilla
Put prunes through food chopper.
Place in pot and cover with cold water.
Allow to stand until prunes have
absorbed the water. Add the sugar and
flavorings, bring to boil, and cook until
thick. Allow to cool thoroughly before
putting between layers. Ice with butter
icing if desired.
Grace Pollock