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Say what you will about Norwegian cuisine. It doesn't involve a lot of fancy ingredients. The finished dishes aren't very pretty—most assume a grayish matte finish resulting from hours of slow cooking. Plus, making Norwegian food usually involves some inane piece of equipment—a paddle or hammer or iron of some sort—that must be resurrected from a box in the basement, used for an hour, and returned to its box, where it waits for another year with all the other unwanted kitchen gadgets. And—let's be honest—most of the food doesn't taste very good.

Most of the world's cuisine is rooted in necessity; a particular food can be traced back a few hundred years to the kitchen of a peasant woman, making the best of whatever meager ingredients she could gather. Where most of the of the world continuously updates its cuisine, we Norwegians have decided to cling to our ungentrified peasant food, thank you very much. We're fully aware there are new ways to preserve cod, but we'll stick with our lye.

Now, before you smack me with your lefse sticks, let me name the one thing Norwegians excel at: pastry. Kringler, rosettes, sandbakkeler—all are gorgeous desserts and and pretty dang tasty.

But my favorite Norwegian pastry, krumkake (pronounced "KROOM kah kah," not the oft-anglicized "crumb cake"), is also one of the simplest—a very delicate cone-shaped cookie made from eggs, sugar, flour, butter, and some vanilla or cardamom, if you want to get fancy. Krumkake is my favorite for the same reason that thousands of Minnesotan families break out the old family recipe book each December and stumble through Grandma's secret sandbakkel recipe or Aunt Ingrid's "Scrumptious Swedish Meatballs" every holiday season: tradition.

Every year, a few days before Christmas, my family transforms our kitchen into a Norwegian pastry shop. My mom and sisters hunker down on one side of the kitchen, making sandbakkeler and frying rosettes and squeezing butter cookies through a cookie gun. My father and I tackle the krumkaker, which, on paper, seems like a simple three-step process: make batter, cook batter, roll cooked batter on a wooden cone.

But somehow Dad elevates this process to a complicated ritual, not unlike the lowering and folding of the American flag. First, he diligently covers every available surface with aluminum foil, turning our half of the kitchen into what looks like a a postmodern art exhibit. Then, using his mother's recipe, he beats eggs with equal parts of sugar, butter, and sifted flour until it hits the correct consistency. ("No lumps. Not one. None.") Then he heats his six-inch Nordic Ware stovetop krumkake iron (which looks like a flat, circular waffle iron) over medium-low heat and smokes a cigarette until it heats up.

He drops the batter, a half-tablespoon at a time, onto the hot iron, closes it, and gives it a little squeeze, enough so "if it were a bird, it couldnąt fly away, but you wouldn't hurt it." The batter hisses and squeaks (much like Dad's analogous bird would if it was squeezed between two discs of hot iron). Exactly 28 seconds later, he flips the iron and cooks the opposite side for 24 seconds.

He separates the two halves of the iron and carefully coaxes the krumkake off the top half and onto the foil-covered counter in front of me. I must now take the piping-hot disc and roll it around a wooden cone before the krumkake cools and hardens into a misshapen cone. And I must perform this task knowing full well that my fingers will burn in the process and the next hot disc will arrive in exactly 52 seconds.

My father could perform both the cooking and rolling process by himself, but, just like hanging Christmas lights, it's always better to have an extra pair of hands and ears around, absorbing the delicate intricacies of holiday tradition that fathers pass down to their sons.

Over the past 20 or so years, I've made hundreds, perhaps thousands, of krumkaker. I think I've eaten four. They don't taste like much, really, just thin, crumbly, under-sugared cookies that are best masked by melted chocolate. But all those hundreds of uneaten krumkaker play a more crucial role than mere gustatory satisfaction. They fan the family flame, preserving a cultural tradition. So Dad and I continue burning both batter and fingers, interminable soldiers of the Norwegian heritage army. Just don't ask us to eat it. MM