(TRAVEL) I was in the Dakotas and Minnesota over last year’s summer vacation — I was away two weeks — and no, I did not eat lutefisk, the Nordic seafood dish!

It’s a tradition I found out, but it’s reserved for the late fall and early winter celebrations. You cannot get it over July 4th weekend, sorry to say. Nevertheless, I pressed on to learn about the culture of lutefisk, Lutheranism and other elements of the faith-inflected Scandinavian ways of the upper Midwest.

Scandinavians, particularly those of Swedish and Norwegian backgrounds, connect with home often through this dish, consumed at Lutheran Church suppers. The debate they have is whether the Swedes or Norwegians invented it first, but regardless, its origins are in the Baltic ports.

A lutefisk interpreter

Meanwhile, when I got home to Delaware, I found a retired Lutheran pastor, Ed Boehling, who knew all about it.

Boehling said he had lutefisk at his former roommate’s house while a student at Martin Luther College in New Ulm in southwestern Minnesota.

He was from “back east” in New Jersey and delighted to go home to a local house, where there were five or six brothers, all eating lutefisk while singing carols. “It was well-prepared by his mother, but kind of smelly,” he recalled. “They lived on a farm. You could see the Missouri River way out there.”

In Lutheran church and lodge basements in America, I learned that community events are often held around lutefisk, but seasonally. There is more lutefisk consumed in the United States than in Scandinavia.

In the Baltic states, it’s considered “too musty.”  The self-proclaimed “lutefisk capital of the world” isn’t in Norway, Boehling says, but in Madison, Minnesota, where a fiberglass codfish named “Lou T. Fisk” welcomes visitors.