Not-so-mysterious mysteries of the midwest

I've got loads of Lutheran cookbooks, but Kitchen Korner Cookbook (Lutheran Brotherhood Bond, 1963) might be the most explicitly Scandinavian one short of the volume actually titled Scandinavian Recipes. 

I mean, The Lutheran Brotherhood Bond really expects you to know your (Scandinavian) stuff. The Krum Kake recipe assumes you not only know how to mix the batter, but also have a Krum Kake iron, know how to use it, know that a Krum Kake is a rolled cake, and have the skill to roll it.

Mrs. Audrey L. Hagen is not one to coddle home cooks by spelling it all out (though she definitely doesn't mind sharing a couple paragraphs of biographical information).

The book seemed a bit intimidating at first because so many titles are written in a Nordic language, but most recipe titles are translated for outsiders. The Sild Salat is just a Herring Salad, a kind of modified potato salad that also encompasses beets and (obviously) herring.

I guess you've got to use the hard-cooked eggs as a garnish instead of mix-in to make it seem fancier than a run-of-the-mill midwestern salad.

And for every even moderately-intimidating-to-a-non-Scandinavian recipe, there's a balancing typical midwest-American-of-vague-whitish-ancestry recipe, like the Shrimp Salad Supreme.

If you can't handle the thought of chopping up herring and beets, just suspend some shrimp, eggs, celery, and walnuts in a froth of mayonnaise, whipped cream, and whipped lemon Jell-O, and nobody at the church potluck will think the worse of you.

If you want an "exotic" starch, Schinkennoodle ("exotic" for the "schinken" and reassuring for the appended "noodle") might fit the bill. 

It's just noodles baked into a ham custard and topped with corn flakes, so reassuringly carb-heavy and actually, pretty familiar...

If the name still makes it too intimidating, though, you can get your carb-on-carb fix the proper midwestern way with Wild Rice Casserole.

Just cook your wild rice in a couple varieties of canned soup and top it off with chow mein noodles! 

The similarities in cuisines are just about enough to make you think that there's a pretty strong overlap in the Venn diagram of Scandinavian recipes and midwest-American-of-vague-whitish-ancestry recipes. You've got to have hard-boiled eggs and plenty of mayo in a salad, and you've got to have a whitish binder in a carb-heavy casserole topped off with another carb.