<i> Lutefisk, </i> you see, is as much an essence of culture as it is of fish.

The Sons of Norway Norrona Lodge, a plain stucco building in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood a block or so east of the courthouse in Van Nuys, has often caught my eye and always struck me as an institution in decline.

Over the weekend, the Sons of Norway put the lie to that hasty conclusion.

On Friday and Saturday, 1,200 descendants of Norway and their spouses, many humbly wearing badges that said “Norwegian by Proxy” trekked from all over Southern California to perform a ritual that reaffirms something essential about who they are.

They came to eat lutefisk.

That’s a form of cod, fished from Norway’s fiords, dried till it’s as hard as wood, then cured about 20 days in a lye solution that renders it into a translucent white, jelly-like flesh that melts in the mouth in a pure essence of fish.

Some profess to like the taste. Others intimate they could live just as well without it if they weren’t Norwegian.

“Either you love it or you hate it,” said George Brown, last year’s lodge president. “I think the thing is that we’re all raised with it and get a taste for it. I don’t like the stuff. My wife does.”

A badge on sale at the lodge defines lutefisk as “a little piece of cod that passeth all understanding.”

The two-day lutefisk dinner, thrown twice each year by the lodge, gives testimony to that mysterious power.

People come from afar to eat it with strangers. They’ll wait for an hour to sit no more than 30 minutes. They don’t sing Norwegian songs or do Norwegian dances. They just eat.

“It’s that fish,” a waitress in a blue Norwegian-plaid apron said. “ It brings them.”

The first of them arrived at 4:30 on Friday afternoon.

Brown, a Litton engineer wearing a beige plaid suit, controlled the flow from a small waiting area to about a dozen long tables set with paper tablecloths and green plastic settings, 16 to a table.

When the servers had a table ready, Brown would let some people through.

“All right, six people,” he said with an almost gruff efficiency. “Come on, let’s go. Go to table six.”

In about an hour, all the tables were full and so was the waiting room.

About 60 volunteers worked two weeks to prepare the dinner, beginning with the rolling of lefse , a tortilla-like bread made of potatoes.

On Friday night, they worked in controlled pandemonium filling platters with coleslaw and meatballs, making up cups of rice-pudding desert, rushing dishes back and forth.

Two cooks boiled the lutefisk in a dozen yellow porcelain kettles.

“Eight years ago, I started in the kitchen,” cook Stewart Engebretson observed. “Now I’ve worked my way up to president, and I’m still in the kitchen.”

Outside, Kris Oeland, a student at Van Nuys High School, cut 18-inch filets into palm-sized pieces. When he filled a bucket, he slid it through the trap door into the kitchen.

On a portable gas stove in the backyard, Odd Reiersen, an inspector with the Department of Water and Power, boiled potatoes and reminisced about the old country.

“Back at my house, we had three cows, one work horse, a pig, half a dozen goats, then some sheep,” Reiersen said. “That’s what we lived on. We didn’t have electricity. At Christmastime, grandma would knit up socks made of wool and goat hair. I hated them.”

“Potatoes,” someone called from the kitchen.

“OK,” Reiersen said. “Coming up.”

But he dawdled, recalling lutefisk.

“When I was a boy, we used to preserve it in the snow,” he said. “The stuff is dry. It’s as hard as a baseball bat. What brings it back to life is the lye.”

Almost everyone had a lutefisk story.

“I tried it when I was 7 or 8 and couldn’t stand it,” said Bob Pederson. “Then, when I was 13, I couldn’t get enough of it.”

Pederson came with his sister Alice Lyon. His wife, Norwegian by proxy, didn’t want to come.

“She’d rather go to McDonald’s and have a Big Mac,” he said.

When their turn came, Ed and Roma Grudt and Ed’s brother, Norman, and cousin, Ray, with his wife, Edna, took their places at a table in the corner where photographer John McCoy and I had been seated for our first taste of lutefisk.

“Well, your first time you kind of turn your nose up at the fish,” Edna Grudt warned us.

“What is it about this fish?” McCoy asked.

“The taste and consistency,” Grudt said flatly.

“You don’t like lutefisk?” asked waitress Audrey Hedlund, showing displeasure.

“Of course I do,” Grudt protested.

Hedlund would eat with the volunteers after the doors were closed at 8. Until then, she was enjoying the scene.

“It takes me back to when I was a child,” she said. “We had these big community dinners.”

Lutefisk, you see, is as much an essence of culture as it is of fish.

It comes with the tone church basements in Minneapolis, the feel of the goat-hair stockings and the sound of simple, strong Norwegian words.

“Det er fint som snuss,” said Gregg Palmer, a barrel-chested character actor who drove from Hollywood and grinned with pride as he delivered what he said was an old Viking expression.

It means, “That’s as good as snuff.”

And it was every bit that good.