Jean Eells, Mildred Crim & Helen Bergman: Transcript

Webster City & Ames lefse makers
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MS.  EELLS:  My name is Jean Eells. I'm from Webster City. We're talking with my mother, Mildred Crim, and my aunt, Helen Bergman, about our family tradition with lefse and kringla and potato cakes and oostakaka, and all the fun foods that we had around the holidays.  I have started teaching my cousins how to make lefse so that the family tradition continues. It helps to connect the family.

All of us have a taste for this stuff, but not all of us necessarily learned how to make it, And then I would also want to share that food tradition, because that's an excuse for getting together, even if we might not get together any other way.  My aunt, Helen, and my mother helped teach me how to make the potato cakes and lefse. Bbut I think their story about how they got started making them is the interesting part.  

MS.  BERGMAN:  Lefse was a special treat for our family. Our aunt and cousin in Story City gave us enough for our family at Christmastime. The Christmas program at the church was on Christmas night, and when we'd come home from after the program—whether it be by sled or buggy or car, any way. When we got home, we had a special treat of lefse. Since you only get it once a year, that was special, too.  It comes crisp, and we'd soften it with putting lukewarm water on it. And then it was buttered and usually either a jelly or a sugar mixture of white and brown sugar. Each lefse could probably be cut into five or six pieces, maybe, depending on the size.  

MS.  CRIM:  Well, lefse was—we were Swede, so we did not have those at all. And I married Charles, and I found out that they had lefse, potato cakes. And we didn't have any of those, so they were completely new to me. But he liked them so well, and so the rest—and the family did. I felt that somebody ought to learn how to do it.  

We always came together at Christmas. She would usually bake them on my range. And the reason we came down to my place is because I still had the old range. We could bake it on the big flat top, and Helen got very good at putting in one or two cobs to keep it the right temperature. She baked them, and I learned to roll them.  Ruby, the oldest sister, had a big house, so she would have the family come together for their potluck Christmas dinner.  

MS.  EELLS:  When we'd go to Aunt Ruby's, I remember the big pies set out on the buffet table. And there was apple pie and mincemeat pie. And of course you didn't want to eat too much pie, because you had to have room for lefse and potato cakes and kringla and oostakaka which we had for a late afternoon lunch.  

I think it's fun to share the tradition. And one of the things about our family was that it wasn't always necessarily so much about the food,  but it was about enjoying each other. And as cousins, we all had the benefit of getting to know each other through those reunions. And the reunions happened because of the food.  So I'm just taking that equation and reversing it. And so we're starting with the food as the excuse to get together, and then use the food as a way of getting to know the later generations of cousins, because I'm the third generation to enjoy the lefse tradition, and so to pass that along and see that it continues.