After being forced to stomach snake-blood cocktails and rooster-head soup, one afflicted traveler discovers that revenge is a dish best served by Norwegians

By Tim Cahill

I looked down at the quivering, white, gelatinous globules on my plate and then glanced over to the table where the Chinese were sitting. There were three of them, two men and a woman, a scientist and two scientific technicians: bone workers on their first full day in Livingston, Montana. They were in my hometown to help disassemble a display of Chinese dinosaurs at the Natural History Exhibit Hall here, and I had run into them at the Seattle airport the previous day. They had just flown in direct from Beijing.

The only one of these distinguished visitors who spoke English asked me to call him Brian, which, he said, sounded a bit like his actual name but was easier for Americans to pronounce. And now Brian and the other two Chinese folks found themselves sitting at a long table in the basement of the local Lutheran church staring at heaping plates of lutefisk, a traditional Norwegian Christmas dinner.

Lutefisk, a fishlike substance, seems at first glance a revolting jellied putrescence. Consumption is a matter of some courage. I find it necessary to sit before the dish and center myself, breathing deeply and consciously, staring at the plate as I would at a meditation mandala. Steam rises like an offering, like the soul's longing for oneness. Lutefisk, I propose to myself, is consciousness made tangible, in the form of fish, and that when I eat it, I partake of the Universal. Thus fortified, spiritually and morally—and with my courage on the rise—I finally allow my eyes to refocus on the plate before me and see lutefisk for what it truly is: a revolting jellied putrescence.

Traditionally, in the ranching and farming communities of the West and Midwest, lutefisk dinners are served in Lutheran churches during the winter, just before Christmas. These are fund-raising events, and it is said that some eat lutefisk to show their devotion to Lutheran doctrine, rather in the manner of medieval saints flogging themselves bloody with whips. The Norwegian word lutefisk means "fish washed in lye" and refers to an ancient manufacturing process that involved drying fish and soaking it in lye. Lutefisk, a staple on long voyages, fueled the Viking rampages through Europe. This is because any person forced to eat lutefisk two nights in a row is certain to become a savage warrior.

Lutefisk won't actually kill you, though there is a rumor that, in the tiny rural town of Wilsall, about 50 miles from where I live, lye-soaked scraps of lutefisk were left out in back of the church—the fish is sometimes boiled in tents outside, so that the odor doesn't stink up the building for the rest of the year—and that cows from a nearby field got through the fence, ate the fish, and died.

I recently called the distributor of the lutefisk used there and in many other communities throughout America. The Olsen Fish Company of Minneapolis sells about half a million pounds of lutefisk a year. A representative of the firm assured me that the dried fish is "luted" not in lye, but in caustic soda (sodium hydroxide), a kind of bleach used in laundry products as well as in the manufacture of explosives. Caustic soda is said to "revive" the dried fish and plump it back up, though I suspect its main virtue is that it breaks down fats to form soaps. Which would explain why lutefisk is a sort of jellied fish.

The Olsen Fish Company buys its dried cod direct from Norway, lutes it, then soaks it in water a couple of times. When the consumer receives a shipment it is free of toxicity and ready to boil and eat. So the rumor of the cows dying from eating lye is entirely false. They died from eating lutefisk.

I'm kidding. Lutefisk is something you kid about. Anyway, I eat it and enjoy it precisely twice a year: once at the Lutheran church in Livingston, and once at the Lutheran church in Wilsall, where you have to climb over piles of dead cows to get in the door. I'm kidding.

In Livingston, I watched the Chinese as they considered the quivering fish on their plates. We had gotten there late, which is to say, somewhere around 6:30 p.m. Latecomers don't get large gelatinous portions of fish, but only small quivering bits the size of marbles, which are difficult to manipulate with a fork. It is, in the words of the late poet Richard Brautigan, like trying to load mercury with a pitchfork.

The Chinese hadn't yet tried a bite. They spoke urgently among themselves.

I could sympathize with the Chinese, but there was another emotion tugging at me. These fine visitors, I thought, were in for what I can only describe as a culinary comeuppance. Please understand: As a travel writer, I'm usually the guest sitting at the table, staring at the food before me and wondering: Are they making fun of me here?

In northern Australia, I was served baked turtle lung, which tastes a great deal worse than it sounds. In the Peruvian Andes, I wondered what to do with the rooster's head floating in the soup, and whether I was really supposed to eat the little stringy portions of guinea pig I'd been proudly served. My hosts in Irian Jaya treated me to a plate full of fried sago beetle grubs, corpse-white wormy-looking little guys about the size of my index finger from the second knuckle up. They were pretty good and tasted rather like creamy snail.

Western travelers often discuss various grotesque foods they've consumed either out of politeness or curiosity. In fact, two of my favorite recent books chronicle bizarre gustatory adventures. Man Eating Bugs, by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio (with a foreword by Tim Cahill), concerns itself with the consumption of insects from Uganda and Indonesia to Australia and Cambodia. Menzel has sampled sago grubs in Irian Jaya and describes them—erroneously, in my opinion—as tasting "bacony." Peter and I get together to argue this point about once a year.

The just-published Strange Foods, by Jerry Hopkins (a man who has eaten with local folks on six continents), features descriptions and pictures of pig-ear cartilage in garlic sauce, worm meal shakes, and five penis wine. Hopkins's thesis? "What is repulsive in one part of the world, in another is simply lunch."

Or dinner, in the case of lutefisk. Perhaps the Chinese were wondering if the meal was an elaborate joke. The tables, I thought smugly, have turned. Consider, for instance, my last dinner in China.