The Alchemaster's Apprentice - By Walter Moers Page 0,37
slice ever disintegrated. Without even looking, he flipped omelettes in the air as deftly as a fairground juggler. He tossed chopped herbs boldly into saucepans without dropping a single little thyme leaf. Echo saw him fillet cloves of garlic with a dissecting knife and a diamond-cutter’s magnifying glass, or lather apricots with whipped cream and shave them with a cut-throat razor because he considered their furry skins too bristly. He also witnessed an occasion when Ghoolion skewered a grain of caviar with a red-hot needle and kebabbed it under the microscope.
The discipline prevailing in Ghoolion’s kitchen was worthy of a Bookholmian fire station, its precision of a watchmaker’s workshop and its hygiene of an operating theatre. The gleaming knives were sterilised and restored to razor-edged sharpness every day. Every meat fork, egg whisk and copper kettle was burnished until it sparkled in the candlelight. The ready-peeled potatoes in the saucepan were as alike as peas in a pod, the shallots chopped into cubes of exactly equal size, the spice jars always well filled and smartly aligned like toy soldiers on parade. As for eating off the floor, in Ghoolion’s kitchen one really could have engaged in that proverbial activity without encountering a single bacterium. In those surroundings, any pathogen would have felt like a lone flea marooned on an alien planet impregnated with insecticide. The flagstones were sealed with floor polish. Sink, chopping boards, working surfaces - every cubic centimetre of the kitchen was regularly scrubbed with acetic acid and sal ammoniac. Ghoolion was afflicted with the same restlessness in his kitchen as he was in his laboratory. He blended herbs, pounded peppercorns in the mortar, mixed salad dressings, made stock from bones, salted butter, whipped cream, skimmed gravy or pickled eggs for future consumption. He never allowed himself a break.
When Ghoolion was engaged in preparing a menu his movements became so fluid that they acquired a balletic quality. The noises that surrounded him - the gurgling song of soup, the crackle of meat roasting in the oven, the hiss of flames and hot fat - combined with his clattering footsteps to produce a culinary symphony that made the saucepan lids dance to its melodic rhythms.
What surprised Echo, however, was that he very seldom saw the Alchemaster eat anything. The most Ghoolion ever did was to take a bite out of an apple or a slice of stale bread. He never even tasted the dishes he served his lodger and there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. It was as if he denied himself the substance he coveted from other living creatures.
On the other hand he took a theoretical interest in every kind of food and its preparation. He was a walking encyclopedia when it came to recipes, cooking times, vitamin content, carving methods, food preservation, knife care, seasoning, marinating, blending or macerating. He was never too busy shuttling back and forth between stove and table to entertain Echo with some informative lecture. The little Crat learnt that, in addition to being fried, grilled or roasted, food could be ghoolionised or zamoniated, and that dressing a fowl did not mean dolling it up but using kitchen string to truss it into a shape suitable for roasting in the oven. Echo learnt all about the care of copper vessels, the great art of soufflé-making and Early Zamonian pressure-cooking techniques. No food was so uninteresting, no subject so dry or abstruse that Ghoolion could not strike some entertaining sparks from it. And he had recorded all this knowledge, all his notes, all his ideas on gourmandism and the art of cooking, by jotting them down in a big book with a smoked Marsh Hogskin cover. Whenever Echo wasn’t watching the Alchemaster at work in the kitchen, he liked to look through that wonderful culinary tome, which abounded in the most mouth-watering recipes.
One evening - the two of them were standing in front of a kitchen cupboard - Ghoolion suddenly laid aside the egg he was peeling. Unlocking the door, he invited Echo to look inside the cupboard and tell him what it contained. Echo did as he was bidden, but all he could see was a dusty jumble of unidentifiable kitchen utensils.
‘No idea,’ said Echo. ‘Just junk of some kind.’
‘That’, Ghoolion said in a voice quivering with rage, ‘is my dungeon for useless kitchen utensils. There’s one such in every kitchen worthy of the name. Its inmates are kept there like especially dangerous patients in a mental institution.’