MINNEAPOLIS – Isabella Carlson’s potato rolls are the stuff of legend.
Each holiday season, her four children and 12 grandchildren savor the fluffy rolls, which bake together in a pan and come out the size of baseballs. Hot from the oven. Slathered in butter. Tasting them now, “it’s like you’re coming home,” said Kim Hedlund, of Wadena, one of Carlson’s daughters.
No one knows the origin of the recipe; it could have been a clipping from Good Housekeeping. But to the people who knew the feisty and funny Carlson, these were “mom’s rolls,” simple as that.
The rolls are so closely linked to this family matriarch and church camp cook that her daughters put the recipe on Carlson’s headstone when she died in 2016.
In a cemetery in Ponto Lake, Minnesota, about 30 miles southeast of Walker, anyone can walk up to the stone flanked by two hummingbird figurines – Carlson’s favorite bird – and leave with the instructions to take one family’s tradition and make it their own.