The Perfect Edges

“Huh,” Mom responded with her characteristic arched left brow and slight shrug of her shoulders. Her open newspaper was firmly grasped with thumbs and forefingers, and she continued to read through the bottom half of her trifocals without even a glance in my direction.

“But your edges don’t get crispy and curl,” I stated with a near accusatory tone. Mom continued reading with an air of having not heard me.

A holiday tradition, lefse was, and still is, a coveted addition to Thanksgiving and Christmas meals. Coveted because not everyone does, or even can, make it. The ingredients are easy to come by—potatoes, flour, oleo (a throwback reference to margarine), and a tad of salt, sugar, and half and half—but the equipment is another matter. The “griddle” is very specific, and can now be ordered, I suppose, on the internet, but when I decided to take on the family tradition and learn how to make it, I had to wait for my next visit to Wisconsin when I could go to the Farm and Fleet where any good Norwegian knows that anything needed for making lefse, krumkake, sandbakkels, or rosettes can be purchased on the spot. Making it also requires a good bit of time and patience as the process cannot be rushed. There are no shortcuts.

Lefse resembles a tortilla in both shape and size. The difference is that lefse is far more pliable, and much softer, especially around the edges. Potato is the base ingredient and flour is used to give the dough enough bulk for rolling each piece out nice and thin. The remaining ingredients give it just a tad of flavor. “Fixing” a piece of it requires some finesse. I have always eaten mine with a thin layer of butter and a sprinkling of sugar. But Dad would put everything from fried egg to leftover turkey on his.

When I was a child, it was my great aunt Bea, one of Grandpa Anderson’s sisters, who most frequently provided the lefse I ate during the holidays celebrated with Dad’s side of the family. Grandma Heller usually had it on the table for family get-togethers with Mom’s side of the family, but she never made it herself. She would have been the first to out herself on her domestic shortcomings—didn’t sew, cooked only plain food, and wasn’t much of a housekeeper—but nevertheless, Mom expended a lot of energy perfecting distaff functions, and thus proudly surpassed her own mother. Mom’s desire for perfection was no different when it came to learning how to make lefse, which she did with such righteous fervor that to try and subsequently learn from her was to learn the meaning of failure instead: “You haven’t waited for the potatoes to cool enough,” “You’re rolling it too thin,”  “You’re waiting too long to turn it,” “You can’t eat those now, they’re for Thanksgiving Day,” “Stand aside, [sigh of exasperation] I’ll do it.”

Therefore, my first real practice run was with my cousin Karen whose Grandma Rowen (not related to me) was such a consummate expert, she made half her year’s income selling lefse during the holiday season. Karen and I dutifully watched the videotape that had been recorded of Grandma Rowan in action, and then got busy making lefse for the first time. Did we have several irregular shaped pieces? Yes. Did we have a few pieces with holes where we had rolled too thinly? Yes. Did we have a couple where the desired brown spots were a tad too dark? Yes. Did we drink just a little too much wine? Yes. Did we have a blast doing it? You betcha! But it was the slightly too crunchy and curled edges that really bothered me most. None of the lefse I had eaten had this peculiar trait, which is why I told my mother about it many times over the years, hoping for her sage diagnosis.

The diagnosis finally came when Mom was quite literally on her deathbed. Or, rather, her death couch. I was in Florida for what I knew would be her last few days, and Dad asked if I’d make lefse for him. I said I would if he would peel the potatoes, which is the part I dislike the most. While Mom slipped in and out of consciousness, Dad and I went to work. At the critical point when it came time to add the flour, Mom awoke and rasped out what certainly was some sort of admonition as her left forefinger was pointed right at me as she spoke. She was difficult to understand at the end of her life because she had a tumor pressing on the part of her brain that controlled her speech.

I turned from the lefse dough bowl and asked, “What was that?” She again pointed her finger at me and said what sounded like, “Too much flour.” I mulled her statement over for a moment before it dawned on me what was happening here. “Are you trying to tell me that I use too much flour?” She nodded her head. “So you’re telling me that the reason my edges are too crunchy and curl up a bit is because I use too much flour.” She nodded again. I wasn’t angry with her. I was actually a bit amused because it was so quintessentially my mother in so many ways. “You wait until now to tell me?” I asked with a wry grin. Her big smile, the one that everyone remembers her for because it contained just a hint of mischief, appeared on her face as she struggled to then say, “But I tell you.”

I won’t go as far as to say that I make perfect lefse, that superlative will forever belong to Grandma Rowen. But I am thankful that almost the last words Mom said to me have at least helped me achieve perfect edges.

Copyright DJ Anderson, 2014