Family Recipes: Love Of Scandinavian-American Recipes

As immigrants from Scandinavia flooded into sparsely populated areas of the U.S., they helped create a particularly Scandinavian way of life, melding the varied religious, culinary, literary, and linguistic traditions that they brought with them with those that they found in their new country.



Through recipes, family anecdotes, photographs, and historical musings, the story of the relationship between a young bride and her mother-in-law, each coming from different worlds, yet united by family love kitchen, the land, and each other.



With this fleeting taste of rural life, when she married Mike Bertelsen, Cynthia had a lot to learn from her Norwegian-American mother-in-law Ethel. Knute - Danish husband and Ethel raised six children on a small family farm amid the challenges of the twentieth century: the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, polio epidemics, the social upheavals of the 1960s, and the fluctuating economic fortunes of dairy farming. The day-in-day-out routine of milking, tending to crops and livestock, preparing immense meals for threshing crews, and sometimes dealing with poor harvests meant much hard work, and often heartbreak.