The Best Book in the World by Peter Stjernstrom Read Free Book Online

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