Scandinavian Treats: Grand Forks woman writes cookbook for Scandinavian-Americans with gluten-intolerance

GRAND FORKS – Phyllis Johnson has written a cookbook that is sure to please many people who love traditional Scandinavian goodies but, because of gluten intolerance, are unable to enjoy them.

Johnson has produced “Gluten-Free Scandinavian Treats,” which is expected to be published and available in late July. This is her first cookbook; she is not gluten-intolerant.

When she decided to write it, she searched online for a similar cookbook, but “there isn’t a book out there like this out there,” she said, “so I’m filling a need.”

Gluten-intolerance affects Scandinavian people more than any other ethnic group – a bitter pill for the estimated 400,000 to 500,000 Scandinavian-Americans who cannot eat gluten, she said, but who really relish the Scandinavian goodies they enjoyed when they were younger.

“Food has so many values,” Johnson said, “because we bond over food,” especially as it applies to family traditions and around the holidays.

“It’s especially difficult when it’s Christmastime at Grandma’s house and everyone else is enjoying the treats, but you can’t. It’s kind of tough.”

Among the three dozen recipes in the cookbook, readers will find many of the most common treats, including krumkake, spritz, fattigman, lefse and berlinerkranser, a Norwegian butter cookie – treats that Johnson grew up with, she said.

Among Scandinavian treats, “there’s a fair amount of overlap” in recipes from those countries, she said.

Her book features sections, such as cookies, cakes, lefse and quick bread. The recipes are suitable for holidays, weddings, graduations and other special occasions; some, like the Norwegian Almond Bars, are “good for every day; they are easy to make,” she said.

Among the Scandinavian favorites are Icelandic recipes she received from her husband’s aunt. Her husband grew up near Mountain, North Dakota, which is heavily populated with people with Icelandic heritage.

At least half of the recipes have been passed down from her family members – and revised so they can be enjoyed by anyone who is gluten-intolerant or gluten-sensitive.

Johnson, who started baking at age 5, dedicated the cookbook to her mother and her grandmothers, she said, “because, between the three of them, that’s how I learned to bake.”

The lefse recipe is derived from a recipe her maternal grandmother used; it’s from a church cookbook published in 1952, she said. Her Bestemors Sukkerkjeks, Norwegian for “Grandma’s Sugar Cookies,” came from her paternal grandmother.

“And everybody needs a sugar cookie recipe,” she said.

Some of these older recipes would have instructions, like “add enough flour” to achieve a certain consistency, but not give precise measurements.

In the distant past, recipes also “wouldn’t list baking times or temperatures, because they were baking in wood ovens,” she said. In this region, rural households did not get electricity until after WWII.

Johnson became interested in writing the cookbook about seven years ago, after learning that some of her family members couldn’t consume gluten, and that doing so causes digestive problems.

When her daughter’s boyfriend, who didn’t eat gluten, was a guest in her home, Johnson remembered, “My daughter said, ‘By the way, Mom, can you make gluten-free lefse?’”

When COVID pandemic struck, the project gave her something to keep her busy.

Exactly why people of Scandinavian lineage are more prone to gluten intolerance than other groups can be explained.

“There’s a genetic component to this,” Johnson said. There are a couple types of gluten intolerance; celiac disease is the most severe and leads to gastrointestinal symptoms.

The condition is usually not diagnosed until people are older, she said. “And there are people who just feel better when they don’t eat gluten.”

Experimenting with different flour brands became an important focus in Johnson’s quest for delicious – and gluten-free – treats.

“It’s tricky working with gluten-free flour,” she said. “Gluten provides elasticity.”

She noticed that, among the gluten-free recipe books she was able to find, the authors “wanted you to mix up your own flour, with this, that and the other thing. That is not the way people want to bake. … They want to get flour at the store like everybody else does.”

When Johnson first began testing recipes, she said, “the first tries went straight into the trash.”

In all, she worked with nine brands of gluten-free flour. She tested every recipe with multiple brands of flour, she said. The process was challenging given the fact that flour ingredients are listed on packages, but not the amounts – which are considered a trade secret.

“Working with gluten-free flour, sometimes it was as simple as adding flavoring,” she said. Most flour of this type “is based on rice flour, which really has no taste,” so she would add vanilla or almond flavoring.

Sometimes other adjustments were necessary, she said. “It was just a lot of fooling around in the kitchen.”

“Every single recipe has a picture, so people will know what it’s going to look like,” which will be especially helpful for those who are not of Scandinavian descent and who pick up this book, she said. “They wouldn’t have any idea what these things are.”

Johnson credits her friend Sally Pyle, a retired UND biology professor, of Grand Forks, with taking the photos.

Some recipes are fairly short, she said, but some will take up two-and-a-half pages in the cookbook.

She made and tested the recipes in the book, some of them for quite a few times, tweaking the recipe until it met her standards.

She tried recipes for aebleskiver, Danish pancake balls, 17 times, she said, noting, for that recipe, she probably used 11 dozen eggs, 73 cups of sugar and “about the same amount of butter.”

When the Herald visited her earlier this week, Johnson was using her electric double krumkake griddle, “one of the biggest inventions in the whole wide world,” she said. “It makes things so much easier.”

At the precise moment of doneness, she deftly wrapped each krumkake around a wood cone that “is made just for this purpose,” she said. “They work well.”

Johnson has long honored her Norwegian heritage, serving as the first woman to be elected district president of the Sons of Norway organization. The district consists of North Dakota, Montana, Alberta and Saskatchewan. She also served four years on the International Sons of Norway Board of Directors.

Johnson, who earned a doctoral degree in chemistry at UND, did postdoctoral work in the U.S. Human Nutrition Research Center in Grand Forks. She continued to work there for about 18 years.

“I applied my Ph.D. to human nutrition,” she said. “Metabolism is based on chemistry, when you get right down to it.”

Johnson went on to work in a federal human nutrition research center, part of the Agricultural Research Service, in California, and, later, in a research facility in the Washington, D.C., area.

“Along with cookbooks, I have a lot of books on the science of cooking and baking,” she said.

Her extensive background and knowledge in science have proven to be valuable in her quest to create gluten-free Scandinavian treats.

She understands exactly why corn starch, for example, works differently than potato starch in recipes, she said. “Corn starch has more thickening power.”

She also determined which of the commercially available gluten-free flours have arrowroot starch in it.

“Since 1942, in the U.S., wheat flour has been fortified with vitamins and minerals,” she said, “but only one or two kinds of gluten-free flour has been fortified that way.”As Johnson worked on testing and revising recipes, she filled two lab notebooks with hand-written notes, like the scientist she is.

When she got to the point she had the recipe down pat, “I’d type it up, but then, after trying it, I found it wasn’t quite right, so I’d tweak it.”

These days, she is working with a publisher in Florida and, after she approves the final proof, expects the softcover cookbook will be published in late July. She is setting up a website,

www.glutenfreescandinaviantreats.com

, to accept pre-orders for the book in the near future.

Looking back at the project, Johnson said, some of the gluten-free food sold in stores “is awful; it tastes like sawdust.”

With her cookbook, “what I really aimed for,” she said, “and what I really hope is that people can’t tell it’s gluten-free.”