Author's note: I got an email from Rob Olason asking if I had any vínarterta stories. He is the editor of the Icelandic Roots newsletter. I said no. However, I wrote the following description.
I find it hard to believe that anyone hasn't heard of Icelandic Roots. The people in it have done absolutely amazing things with their research into our Icelandic roots. If you are the slightest bit interested in whatever Icelandic genes remain in the collection that is you, look Icelandic Roots up and join. I'm not surprised at the success they have had. Some of these people are the descendants of those who left New Iceland and walked (WALKED) to North Dakota. Icelanders were great walkers. There were no roads in Iceland. No carts or buggies. There were trails that went over mountains, over lava deserts, across rivers. If you were rich, you rode a horse. Most people walked. The trips were measured in how many Icelandic shoes were worn out. That was a three day slipper walk. Anyway, check out their website. Send them a cheque.
I've seen lots of articles on vínarterta around at various times, but I never wrote one (at least, that I remember). This is what I wrote back to Rob:
My Irish Vínarterta Making Mom
My mother was Irish. Like Irish, Irish. Her parents immigrated to Canada from Northern Ireland, her father before WW1 and her mother, after WW1.
There were no air conditioners in Winnipeg in the 1930s. If they could, people took the train to the beach. The train had come to Gimli in 1906. If a family was lucky enough to have a cottage, the family came down to the various beach towns like Gimli. The family stayed at the beach and the father took the train down on Friday evening and went back to Winnipeg on Sunday night.
My Irish grandfather was a labourer on the railway. They didn´t have much money, but a lot in Gimli was only fifty dollars. They visited with friends, liked what they saw, bought a lot and got a local carpenter to build them a cottage. It was small, with a kitchen area, a living area, and two bedrooms. The walls separating the rooms did not go to the ceiling. It was a workingman‘s cottage but it was at the beach with its sand and cool evening air.
The family story is that my father was working with his father, the carpenter, putting on shingles. He came up the ladder, my mother looked out a window and they saw each other and that was it. Their fate was sealed. They got married when my mother was sixteen and my father, nineteen.
Think about that. A sixteen year old, wrenched from city life, to live in a town where you went to the well for water. Where you used an outhouse. Where the roads weren't paved. For the first year, my parents lived with my father's grandfather, Ketill Valgardson. My mother learned to cook on a wood stove and wash clothes on a scrub board.
My mother's parents made a down payment for them on a house. The house cost fifteen hundred dollars. My mother was used to Irish food. Meat and potatoes and corned beef and cabbage. However, she joined the Ladies Aid and the Lutheran Church. The church women catered for weddings and funerals and my mother got to bake and cook items for these events. She learned to make pönnukökur and kleiner and, even, rosettes. First, with a borrowed iron, then with her own. We were not allowed into the kitchen when she was making rosettes in boiling hot oil.
She also learned to make church food, funeral sandwiches, and rolled cheese and pickle sandwiches. I remember being sent to the bakery to pick up the long loaves of white bread that were cut lengthwise. She then trimmed off the crusts, put on the Velveeta cheese from the jar, then lined up dill pickles at one end, and rolled the bread to make a tube. She cut that into sections. My brother and I hovered because we knew we would get the end pieces.
She learned to make vínarterta. She was proud of how thin her cookie circles were. The house at vínarterta-time was filled with the aroma of prunes being cooked so they could be spread. We were icers. There always was a big debate about whether vínarterta should or should not be iced. My mother and father both had a sweet tooth. My mother made the traditional white icing. No vínarterta had a long life. It disappeared at the kitchen table and with guests at the dining table. I can't imagine how many she made in her lifetime. She didn't add any Irish embellishments. No four leaf clovers.
Her teachers were the Icelandic ladies from the church. There was a fierce pride in the making of this Viennese tort, brought sometime in the distant past to Iceland, historically made with prune filling, brought across the ocean to New Iceland, spread across North America, now a symbol of our identity and history.
When the chef, Fred Bjarnason, was cooking at the Lieutenant Governor's here in Victoria he had the use of the large kitchen with its many ovens. One year he held a baking class in that kitchen. We all made vínarterta. Some may have had cookie tiers that were thicker than my mother strove for but that didn't stop us from taking them home and downing them with strong coffee.
There we were, a long way and time from New Iceland and the settlers in the crude log huts doing their best to survive; even further away in distance and time from Iceland, but Icelandic settlers came here even before the arrival of the railway. At one time there was a whole community of Icelanders in Victoria in Fernwood, and I know they had musicals and readings and political debates and that coffee and vínarterta were served. We have the word of Kay Sessions who was born and brought up in the Ross Bay graveyard close to the ocean. Her Icelandic father was the caretaker. There also were Icelandic communities on Smith and Hunter Islands and you can be sure that dried prunes were in the cargo of the boats that brought supplies.
If you have a vínarterta story or a photo of a vínarterta you would like to share, email it to vínarterta@icelandicroots.com We'll share your story in an upcoming blog post or on our Facebook page: The Twelve Thousand Vínarterta's of Christmas