How does one become a conqueror?
The kitchen metaphor was not something Jonas had simply plucked out of thin air. The father of Jonas’s best friend, Little Eagle, was in fact a chef. He didn’t work just anywhere either, but at the imposing Grand Hotel in the very heart of Oslo. And not only that, but also at the very heart of the hotel, in a kitchen which, among other things, provided the sumptuous fare for one of the city’s most distinguished restaurants, the Mirror Room. Everyone who was anyone at that time had, at least once, to have trod the red carpet under the crystal chandeliers of the ‘Mirror’, as it was popularly called.
It was not uncommon for Little Eagle and Jonas to take the bus from Grorud to the city centre along with Mrs Larsen, and while Mrs Larsen did her secret errands in the department stores or met a woman friend at Halvorsen’s cake shop, she left the boys with her husband in the kitchen of the Grand Hotel, if he was on the early shift, that is — the Mirror opened at noon — and only with the blessing of the Italian chef de cuisine, naturally; he, like everyone else, had a bit of a soft spot for Mrs Larsen. ‘Madam,’ he would say, kissing her hand gallantly. ‘Your name should not be Larsen, it should be Lollobrigida.’
The kitchen was an enormous open space with white-tiled walls and two massive stoves, each standing under its own extractor hood. One stove was for the café and the Grand Basement, the other, at which Eagle’s dad worked, was where the food for the Mirror and the function rooms was prepared. If there was one thing Jonas never tired of, it was this: to sit on a chair on the fringes of a bustling kitchen chock-full of pots, pans, ladles, sauce-boats and gleaming silver platters; to sit there and watch as many as forty chefs dashing back and forth between spotless shelves and cabinets, between all manner of raw ingredients and spices with names that were a fairytale in themselves; to watch and listen to how they chopped and sliced, whisked and stirred, how orders were called across the room, peppered with splendid French words, to result in mysterious dishes such as Fillet of Plaice Tout Paris, Tournedos Chasseur or Lobster Thermidore, usually after the work had been split into stages, with one chef doing the frying, one making the sauce and one arranging the garnish, while a forth made a final, critical inspection of the plate before it was grabbed by one of the kitchen assistants and taken upstairs to the waiters. Almost like clockwork, Jonas thought.
Above this sizzling, seething world, with its odours to set the nostrils quivering and the stomach rumbling, in a glass-fronted booth, sat the chef de cuisine himself — first Hans Loose, and later the master chef Nicola Castracane — surveying the proceedings, as if from the bridge of a ship. Occasionally he might tap the glass with his pen and point to someone or other, for instance the trainee in charge of the sauce, whereupon the person concerned would immediately rush over with a bowl and hand this up to the booth so that the chef de cuisine could sample its contents and possibly issue an order in broken, but perfectly understandable, Norwegian: ‘You’ll never learn, Syversen — a little more salt, I said!’ It was like Father Christmas’s workshop, Jonas would think as he sat there, engrossed in the hectic activity around hobs and ovens, the pounding and chopping, all the steam and the sputtering mingled with the shouts, not least from waiters fuming with impatience: ‘Get a bloomin’ move on with that cod, will you, Anni!’
From where they sat, Little Eagle and Jonas could also keep an eye on the cold kitchen and pâtisserie section. Often they would sneak across to the counter in front of the latter — the main attraction here being the creation of the Grand’s most celebrated cake. ‘Aha, a couple of spies,’ Mr Metz, the pastry cook, would say. ‘Trying to steal the recipe for the best Napoleon cake in the world, eh? Well, well, then watch closely.’ Mr Metz would give them a sly look and whisper in his Danish-accented Norwegian: ‘The secret is to make the cake on the spot.’ As if to demonstrate, he would then place a cake base on the worktop. ‘The bases must, of course, be baked that same morning, so that they have that very special crispness. And there has to be plenty of rum in the cream filling.’ Drooling at the mouth, Jonas and Little Eagle observed how elegantly Mr Metz shaped the cream into a flat-topped cylinder in the centre of the circular base almost like a bricklayer with his trowel. ‘And the icing should be added only just before it’s served, so the base doesn’t go all soggy. Like so. Here you are, boys, try one.’ Jonas stuck the fork with the first bite into his mouth, feeling like an invincible commander-in-chief — like Napoleon before the battle of Austerlitz.
What Jonas liked best of all was the feeling of having gone behind the scenes, as it were, to the place where the real action was. It was like being granted a peek into the innards of Norway. Or like visiting a factory: seeing where the values were formed. For this seething, reeking, hissing room here below, fraught with screaming and yelling, was just as much the reality as the mirror-clad restaurant and the smartly dressed diners upstairs. Jonas realized that, as with a coin, there were two sides to reality. And he didn’t know which side he liked best. There was also something a bit scary about the kitchen, like the time when they were taken on a quick trip into the meat larder, where whole carcases hung in rows and people in heavy clothing were jointing the meat. This sight confirmed Jonas’s impression of the kitchen as a kind of underworld, a hell as much as a paradise.
Ørn’s dad was one of the kitchen’s head chefs — ‘Three-Star Larsen’ they called him — and Little Eagle was manifestly proud of his father, garbed in his chef’s hat and jacket and, not least, his gingham-check trousers, bawling out orders to right and left: ‘For God’s sake, don’t scorch that sauce, Berg, it’s for Mr Mustad’s fish.’ Or: ‘A Porterhouse steak for James Lorentzen the ship-owner. Remember, he wants it rare and with a good rim of fat.’ Sometimes he would come over to the boys, point to a mouth-watering plate: ‘That’s for Wenche Foss, the famous actress,’ he would say with a wink.
On one occasion they were allowed to leaf through the menu. Jonas had no idea what all these things were: turtle soup Lady Curzon, Sole Colbert, Crêpes Suzette, Caviar Mallasol served on crushed ice. But what impressed him most were the prices. He had never thought about it before, how anyone could afford to eat here — that Norwegians like themselves actually entered these premises and sat down to eat under the crystal chandeliers. His parents had never been here, nor anyone else from the estate, as far as he knew. The Mirror, the Grand, was another world, like some dazzling Hollywood film set, a totally unimaginable realm — the exclusive province of the very rich or certainly the well-to-do.
And this, Professor, is one of the points of this story: how, when he grew up, Jonas Wergeland forgot this: how he thought nothing of frequenting the finest restaurants in Norway, in the world for that matter, and stuffing himself unconstrainedly with all manner of delights, without pausing for a moment to consider what a miracle it was, that he — only one generation removed from a breed of thrifty folk, scrimpers and savers — dined in restaurants as often as he ate at home; in the blink of an eye he had been transformed from a spectator, with his nose pressed against the restaurant’s windowpane so to speak, to a gluttonous, gastronomic participant — now that is a story about Norway today, and it’s something to think about.