The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1967, Síða 105

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
103
by Betty Jane Wylie
Ed.—Mrs. Betty Jane Wylie is the daughter
of the late Dr. Jack McKenty and of Mrs.
Jack McKenty, of Winnipeg. Mrs. Jack Mc-
Kenty is the former Inga Tergeson, of Gimli,
Manitoba.
My Grandmother came from Ice-
land. Not many North Americans can
make that statement. Iceland has a
small population to 'begin with, and
most of it has been content to stay
right there. But in -the nineteenth cen-
tury Mount Hekla, one of the island’s
many volcanoes, erupted, and the
refugees went ito Canada. The first
Icelandic settlers landed at Willow
Point, on the shores of Lake Winnipeg
(home of the goldeye and the white-
fish) in 1875. My maternal grand-
parents arrived separately from Iceland
in their teens, met and married in
Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1887, and
moved on up to Gimli, near Willow
Point, Ito raise a family.
For thirty-five years Gimli has been
the site of the annual Islendingadagur-
inn (Icelandic Celebration Day).
As a child, I went to Gimli with my
family every summer and we lived in
a cottage two doors away from my
grandparents’ house and my grand-
mother’s cooking. In Icelandic the
name Gimli means paradise, and the
focal point of my gastronomic Eden
was my grandmoither’s kitchen. Actual-
ly, there was a trinity of heavens be-
cause she had two kitchens and a shed.
In the heat of summer she used to
move down to the basement to do her
baking. There she had duplicate uten-
sils and a small wood stove whose warm
little heart was delighted to tend to
her breads, cakes, and pies as a wel-
come change from pots of starch and
bluing for the laundry. The shed off
my grandmother’s main kitchen ac-
commodated the overflow from closets
and pantry. I loved that shed. In it
were extra toaster racks, ouitsize skil-
lets, raincoats, fishing rods, wet bath-
ing suits and stockfish. Sheets of stock-
fish hung on great hooks. We used to
tear off pieces of it and use the fish
as a shovel to dig up the bultter we
at At with. No one in the family makes
stockfish andy more; freezers have
made drying fish unnecessary. Every
gain is accompanied by a loss, and
homemade stockfish is a victim of
freezers.
I remember more than stockfish. I
remember rullu pylsa, cold spicy meat
we ate in open-faced sandwiches; rusks,
sweet plain buns sliced and oven-dried,
which Grampa used to soak in his
mola-kaffi (coffee with loaf sugar in it)
and suck through his store teeth; and
thick slices of bread spread with mys-
ostur, which looks like peanut butter
but which will give a pleasant shock
to anyone proceeding to eat it on that
assumption because it is cheese. There
were kringlur, or arabellas, sweet cin-
namon yeaslt dough with caraway seeds
baked in pretzel shapes; astarbollur,
or love balls, plain baking-power
doughnuts with currants in them at
Christmastime, and steiktir partar, or
fried boats, which were a kind of wafer