Tom Isern

“The spelling bee at the Baptist church Tuesday evening was quite a lively entertainment,” so says a press report from Jamestown in April 1885. “Rev. S. N. Griffith acted as umpire, Professor Clemmer conductor and Professor Culver and C. T. Hills captains. Between thirty and forty participated in the exercises. Professor Culver and Miss Flagler were the last contestants for the honors, and finally the former staggered at the word ‘millionaire,’ and the latter was declared the best speller.”

In a lovely book of 2008, America Eats, author Pat Willard puts fish fries into her subtitle, but hardly mentions them in her book-length discussion of food events in American culture. Examining the custom in our own region, I have figured out why. Willard relies heavily on WPA interview transcripts from the 1930s. And fish fries, it turns out, are a more recently evolved custom than that. I mean fish fries as a come-all, public event for profit or charity, as a community institution.

In Bottineau during the late 1880s, there emerged an association of men “on the ragged edge of civilization,” as one of them said, in a boom town on the Manitoba Railroad. They determined to have some fun poking fun at the booster spirit and the fraternal lodges that dominated the social scene. They gathered and wrote a constitution for the Ancient Order of Sit Stills and declared themselves the Knights of Leisure. They resolved “to take things easy and never to stand when it is possible to sit.”

After spending a couple of days reading the Pioneer Mother narratives written by members of the Gardar Homemakers Club, all descendants of Icelandic immigrants, their stories preserved in the collections of the Institute for Regional Studies, NDSU, I am left with questions.

Trans-Atlantic immigration to America in the nineteenth century was truly a daunting decision, a severe test of body, spirit, and resolve. I’m reading about it in the Pioneer Mother narratives set down by the Gardar Homemakers Club, women of Icelandic descent, the files preserved by NDSU’s Institute for Regional Studies. Some are typed; most are handwritten; they capture a defining cultural experience encoded in individual stories.

Since I spend a ridiculous amount of time reflecting on the character of regional identity, as an intellectual obsession, but also think a lot about food, as a personal obsession, it is no surprise that these two preoccupations intersect and cross-pollinate. Foodways feature powerfully in the self-identification of cultural and regional identity. Recently, for instance, I talked about how German-Russians in South Dakota have deployed chislic as a cultural icon.

It’s the best week of the year for our two dogs when I’m breaking down quarters of venison in the kitchen. It’s good for their keepers, too, for as with many prairie households, venison becomes our primary protein in winter. We have a great variety of venison dishes, some of which are time-consuming, but when we want something quick and simple, with ties to the traditional culinary culture of the region, there’s an easy answer: chislic.

Echoes of the Old Country: Growing Up German-Russian on the Northern Plains, by Jessica Clark, is a landmark work in German-Russian history published this year by North Dakota State University Press. The book launched to great acclaim at the meeting of the Germans from Russia Heritage Society last summer in Mandan.

A dangerous storm has swept in today, a harsh coda to a two-day chinook that caused us to let our guard down. It puts me in mind of a favorite ballad of mine for the season, “Young Charlotte.”

This short item from the Fargo Forum of 11 December 1916: “The towns of the state seem to have taken up well with the community Christmas pageant idea.” The “idea” of a Christmas pageant—the phrasing intimates that in 1917 Christmas pageants were not traditions, but a new thing, catching on.