The Best Book in the World

CHAPTER 8

A Divine Pizza


Food. Food, food, food. Food! I’m hungry! Please, somebody, I must surely be allowed something to eat at least? FOOD, FOOD, FOOD!

Titus’ brain gets up speed. He charges out from the flat, runs down the stairs and out onto the street. Fresh air! A deep breath. Food! I must have some food! He looks around. Pizza! He rushes into the pizzeria on the corner and reads the menu. No specials now, Titus, it takes too long!

‘A Quattro, please!’

‘That’ll be fifteen minutes.’

‘It usually takes only ten!’

‘Okay, ten.’

‘Great, thanks.’

‘Eat here or take away?’

‘Eat here. Here and now.’

‘Help yourself to salad over there. Something to drink?’

‘A weak beer, please. No, no, no, not that! Water. I’ll have some water.’

Titus takes a helping of oily grated cabbage salad and sits at the bar counter in front of the pizza baker’s worktop. A little sheet of glass separates him from the various bowls with ingredients. He looks at the pizza guy, who whirls the round dough in the air. Pizza is tasty. In a sense, pizza is the mother of all cooked food. Tasty newly baked bread and various small yummy dishes on top. A portable smorgasbord in a hot portion-pack. Elegant and refined. Pizza must absolutely be given a star role in The Best Book in the World! Especially Quattro Stagioni, the Rolls-Royce of pizzas. He must, quite simply, get hold of the perfect recipe for a Quattro and give it pride of place in the book. Perhaps the pizza recipe is the only recipe he needs to make the cookery book perfect? Let’s be honest, a cookery book doesn’t get any better just because it has lots of long and boring recipes, does it? Surely, it is the quality that counts. What more could you need than a single perfect recipe? And you can eat pizza for lunch as well as for dinner! And breakfast, if you’ve got some leftovers from your takeaway pizza. Isn’t that right? Exactly!

The Quattro can be the main character’s favourite dish, the one the master detective conjures up for his dinner guests and seduces long-legged ladies with. The cunning detective chief inspector’s Quattro is famed far and wide and now the secret recipe will be revealed once and for all in The Best Book in the World. The mother of all culinary dishes in the mother of all books!

Titus must immediately learn more about this wonderful dish! He turns to the pizza guy and asks: ‘Hello, is it true that Quattro Stagioni is named after Antonio Vivaldi’s piece?’

‘I don’t know, mister. Where does he work? Is that the Antonio at Melini on Kungsgatan? I wonder about that, you know he has only been in Sweden about fifteen years. I think Quattro was here before him. Long before. But I know it’s tasty, his Quattro, he uses real mozzarella from Palermo. That’s why it’s tasty. Mozzarella is tasty. And expensive. They charge forty-nine kronor for a Quattro there.’

‘No, I mean was it named after the Four Seasons, Vivaldi’s piece for violins?’

‘What do you mean, named? It is called Quattro Stagioni. That means the four seasons. It’s Italian. Pizza is Italian.’

Titus decides to drop the Vivaldi line of enquiry. There are other things to find out about. Lots of things. Who knows where the road leads when you get on with your research? When you have an unencumbered mind, you’ll discover things. I am unencumbered! Titus thinks. Obsessed, possibly, but above all unencumbered. He looks at the pizza guy who scatters small prawns over a quarter of the pizza.


‘Which season is that?’ says Titus, pointing at the prawns.

‘What?’ says the pizza guy, and their eyes meet for a second. What is this guy’s problem?

‘Yes, which season are the prawns?’

‘I don’t know,’ says the pizza guy, and thinks for a moment. ‘The summer, perhaps.’

‘Why?’ Titus wonders, surprised.

‘You know, summer and swimming in salt water and all that. There are, like, more prawns in the summer.’

‘Have you ever seen a prawn when you’ve been swimming?’

‘No, but why not? What do you think?’

‘I think prawns is autumn. Look how they twitch. They twist into themselves, sort of turn themselves off. As if they were suffering from an autumn depression. Suddenly an all-powerful being throws these sea creatures into an oven and dries them, slowly but surely. Just like us humans in the autumn. We are shut up inside our houses with boiling hot radiators that pour out regulated heat while we wither up and whimper. Yes, prawns could very well be autumn.’

‘All right, then, if prawns are autumn, then what are mushrooms?’ the pizza guy goes on, having now joined the match. ‘Mushrooms must be autumn, surely. Wild mushrooms are picked in the autumn. Not by me, I mean, but by people who pick mushrooms.’

‘Yes, damn it, of course you’re right about that,’ says Titus and puts his hand thoughtfully on his chin. ‘Okay, mushrooms are autumn and shrimps are summer. But what about the ham and mussels?’

The pizza guy laughs as he slides the peel under the pizza and loads it into the oven. ‘You are a funny one, mister. I have never thought about that before.’

‘So, what do you think? Aren’t mushrooms just as much summer as prawns?’

‘No, no. Mussels are women. Women are spring. When life awakens in the spring, it’s full of women. I know, we Italians love mussels. They open up in the spring. Like flowers that produce buds and then come into bloom, you know. Mussels are spring. The best season, that’s obvious’

‘Then ham must be winter. And that goes with Christmas ham and so on.’

‘Yes, perfect! We have solved the pizza mystery, mister.’

‘Have we? Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely. It was easy!’

‘But we haven’t finished. The artichoke in the middle. What’s that then? It can’t be a fifth season. Is it the sun, perhaps?’

‘No, not the sun. It’s grey. A bit brownish, sort of. That’s no sun. The sun is yellow. Then there would have been a pepper.’

‘But what is it then?’ Titus wonders, sincerely worried by the mystery.

‘God, perhaps?’ the pizza guy hazards, and makes the sign of the cross on his white shirt.

‘Greyish-brown… yes, perhaps,’ says Titus, almost to himself. ‘An elderly man with a beard. Like in the pictures of God at primary school. Yes, perhaps it is God… who watches over the world…’

‘You know, not all pizza bakers have artichokes in their Quattros.’

‘No? Why not?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it. Perhaps they think it’s a tastier pizza without it.’

‘Deism. Deism-baker. God has left the world,’ says Titus thoughtfully and looks into the oven. ‘He is no longer a part of the pizza. He only watches it from a distance.’

The surface of the pizza bubbles a bit. It begins to turn nice and brown. A little part of the rim of the pizza is even burnt. God is certainly still on this pizza. The planet is in flames and he sits like a Buddha in the middle, his arms crossed, without so much as lifting a leaf of his artichoke overcoat. He is seemingly completely unperturbed and still has the same nuance that he had when he first came to the pizza. Why doesn’t he do anything? What’s he waiting for? The Big Bang?

The pizza guy takes the beautiful newly baked Quattro out of the oven. He puts it on a large plate, shakes a little oregano over it and slides it over to Titus.

‘Bon appétit!’

Titus devoutly tucks into the part with the prawns. But hang on a minute. You must surely start eating a Quattro in the middle of winter, after New Year? The seasons can’t begin in the middle of summer. There must be some damned order, even on a pizza. That means that you must begin about one third of the way into the ham. Then you eat your way clockwise with the mussels, the prawns and the mushrooms, ending with the ham again.

Titus starts afresh. He turns the plate round and puts the knife into the New Year’s night of the ham.

Then he discovers something horrific. The prawns come after the ham! The seasons come in the wrong order! This was bad news, very bad news. But he makes up his mind not to say anything to the pizza guy. Why trouble him with it? He has been friendly and helped Titus to sort out all the difficult Quattro concepts. It would not be right to burden him with this. The pizza costs only thirty-nine kronor after all.

Titus bears his cross and eats the pizza in the correct order, despite the confusion on the plate. It looks a bit strange with the pizza bits on either side of the plate. But what would that matter in a hundred years?

The calories calm him down, and with his self-control secure, he can eat the pizza with a degree of devotion. He thinks that The Best Book in the World and the pizza should have the very best of ingredients. Genuine mozzarella, mushrooms from the market, the day’s catch of prawns and genuine Parma ham. But should it have artichokes or not? Which philosophy would suit the heroic detective best?

Titus is energised by the delicious season-pizza. For once, he has had a reward without poisoning himself with alcohol and nicotine. He is on the right path. He’s going to like this.

There is writing to be done!