The Icelandic Canadian - 01.09.2003, Qupperneq 40

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 58 #1
al kitchen and a few sous-chefs to do the
scut work, I found the cooking, adjusting,
tasting and assessing to be much more
onerous and tedious than the actual writing
of the book. The other difficulty is the
writing; the instructions must be crystal
clear. I have heard that one of the most dif-
ficult jobs for a professional copywriter is
to write simple directions for the side of a
box. Take gelatin dessert. At one time a
rival brand to the best-known one offered a
taste bud to be melted and stirred into the
hot water; this was supposed to ensure a
zingy, fresh taste. I knew a neophyte cook
who found it in the package, thought
someone had given her a gumdrop to chew
while she cooked, popped it into her
mouth and ate it. Result: tasteless gelatin.
Maybe that’s an urban myth, but it illus-
trates what you’re facing when you write
directions for strangers. You won’t be
there to help them.
Kristin solved most of these problems
by farming out her recipes. She wrote a let-
ter to hundreds of Western Icelanders,
women (mostly) whose ancestors had emi-
grated from Iceland to the shores of Lake
Winnipeg. She had gathered recipes that
needed to be tested and she asked for help
with them, understandable when you con-
sider the sources. They were family recipes,
her own and others’; church cookbooks;
little collections published as fund-raisers.
Though some of the foods had the same
name, there were many variations on a
theme, different methods, different mea-
surements, sometimes not even that, just a
pinch of this, a dash of that, or directives
such as “cook until done” and “season to
taste.”
There were also new ingredients in the
new world, different food that had to be
acknowledged and tested, for example,
whitefish, as Kristin points out. Icelanders
did not eat whitefish before they left
Iceland. In fact, they ate more salt-water
fish than fresh; the fishermen had to learn a
new method of fishing, too.
Accompanying the explanation of what she
wanted was a recipe which she asked her
correspondent to test. She asked for feed-
back and welcomed detailed comments,
which she includes with the recipes in the
book. The hardest part was riding herd on
her flock of testers, getting them to report
on time to meet her deadline. Any way you
look at it, it was a lot of work. This volume
was well on its way to becoming a saga!
Kristin added myths and legends, plus
historical food articles from the Icelandic
newspaper, Framfari, published in the first
early days of settlement. She studied
Gudrun Jonsdottir’s Matreidslubok, an
Icelandic cookery journal dating from the
early 1900s. Then she underlaid and inter-
laced her generously-sized pages with his-
torical photographs and reproductions of
handwritten recipes, along with pho-
tographs of indigenous fish and their
descriptions, as well as photographs and
thumbnail histories of the fishing vessels
used to catch them, and lots more. She
offers a capsule history of the Icelandic
immigration and an excerpt from Lord
Dufferin’s address when, as Governor-
General, he officially welcomed the immi-
grants to New Iceland in September, 1877.
Thus the book is a collage as well as a cook-
ery book, and I haven’t covered all it con-
tains. It’s a dipping book, almost a scrap-
book, certainly a saga, and one that
deserves to be passed down to future gen-
erations. In fact, every bride (or groom)
with Icelandic roots should receive a copy
as part of her dowry, with additional copies
to be added for each child.
Cooks and readers familiar with
Icelandic-Canadian food will welcome
recipes for their favourites and be pleased
and surprised to discover that there’s a lot
they don’t know. Other broad-minded
cooks will be intrigued to try out a few
tastes new to them. Now, about that test-
ing. Some people didn’t take it as seriously
as others. When a recipe doesn’t turn out
quite right, it has to be done again. Believe
me, I know.. A lot of the designated cooks
were content to try it out, make some crit-
ical comments if it didn’t turn out too well,
and leave it at that, perhaps with a warning.
On the other hand, the comments are very
folksy and the suggestions could be useful.
But if something turns out too soft, or too
runny, or too tender (as in the case of a
cake that falls apart), then it would help if
the cook made it again, and, if necessary,