Prelude

The parsley was cut in very thin pieces before it was added to the water. (Although maybe “water” was the wrong term in the wrong place.) The bacon, which was Iberia pork based, but then smoked on old oak bark under a layer of pine, in a process which took him several years to develop, was also sliced almost microscopically and ready to go. In total, he would throw in about .6 grams, but its taste was as strong (but much better) than any other known adding of meat weighing more than twenty times its mass. And that was almost all he used.

But it wasn’t sufficient. And he knew that.

§1

Ever since his rise to stardom in the world of haute cuisine, people had regarded him as “special,” due to a number of reasons. But the main one was that, after a few years in the business, he only offered soup in his infamous establishment “Den Gamla Kyrkan.” Nobody really understood why, because he had earned his three Michelin stars in no time, based on a variety of original dishes for which even the most refined noses of the world couldn’t guess how they were created. And that made him “special” in the first place. It was magic – no more, no less.

Even after transferring his focus entirely to soup, he remained a three-star-chef with ease, essentially because of the same reason he earned them originally: nobody had a clue as to how the recipes worked. But one thing was for sure: men became almost drunk, and women almost sexually satisfied, after a taste of the wonders of his kitchen.

§2

But is wasn’t sufficient. He had realized over and over again that although he needed much less ingredients as time went by and experience grew, he still was reaching a taste which became more and more profound. And the extrapolation of that very idea was what eventually became the driving force behind a dream.

Producing soups which were almost indistinguishable from water, even on the molecular level, even by modern day standards of chemical research, but having the divine taste that all his soups had had until now.

§3

It became an obsession.

He compared himself to some extent with the genius clock maker Zacharius from Jules Verne’s story “Maître Zacharius ou l’horloger qui avait perdu son âme,” before his downfall, when the clocks started to stop ticking. But different than Zacharius, nothing would stop his leap to perfection. And certainly not pride. Or maybe a comparison to Süskind’s Grenouille was even better. But again, he wouldn’t lose his mind nor die after having made the heavens.

He started to keep notes on every idea which could bring him closer to his goal. Paper notes, not electronic notes – he didn’t trust his recipes to computers, whose data could be fed to the beast called internet. Every page was copied twice by hand; one copy went to his solicitor, the other to a vault in Switzerland.

He enrolled in a Bachelor, and later Master’s program on Applied Chemistry in an Ivy league college in order to understand what was going on on the micro scale level.

It became an obsession indeed.

Due to lack of sleep and an inner restlessness which was governed by the fact that he could not wait to take the steeples of vast course notes and dull interrogation, he often wandered through the chemistry departments as if he did not notice the others. For some, he appeared to be in deep concentration; for others, he just was the next loony with a mid life crisis who thought that the adventure of college would change life’s pace. He became the Ghost of Fenden Hall. The Ghost spent nights in the library, and even slept there from time to time. The Ghost did not talk, but seemed to listen – sometimes. The Ghost meditated under the pine trees near the main entry of Fenden Hall. The more eager he seemed, the less appropriate he was dressed. Many a times, other students observed him leaving the building in the morning, after another night of god knows what, with a smile on his face as if he had found an important piece in some ancient puzzle, only dressed in pajamas.

Little did they know.

His wife did not quite follow his quest to this particular horizon: she left with almost half of his ridiculous fortune after an easy divorce settlement, in which he signed every paper which was handed to him, simply because he did not care. That is to say, he did not know. His mind just wasn’t there.

That fortune was estimated at more than seventy million dollars on one of the many famous people net worth sites at the time, mostly due to the extremely successful sales of his three books, and the profits of his sole restaurant, which was widely regarded as the best in the world. His top cook colleagues did not understand how he did it: running the most profitable and expensive restaurant around, with the entire personnel consisting of one cook (himself), and two waiters (both being among the best sommeliers and both having a very deep knowledge of the spectrum of tastes).

It was beyond comprehension.

§4

Shortly after graduating, he lived in a Lapp community in the North of Sweden for more than two years, while his restaurant kept operating and performing at the exceptional level he required, through the necessary use of the internet beast. There, he learned the wonders of pine needles, reindeer and moose meat, and cooking with different sorts of ice and snow. There, he learned the subtle palette of tastes which can be extracted from animal fat. There, he also learned the power of meditation, which appeared to reveal itself to him in an optimal way when balancing between a feeling of almost comfortable warmth and its opposite. Ideally, he sat down on his favorite reindeer skin outside in the snow, far away from humans, under a number of blankets which almost covered him. Almost.

The distortion of the balance between his body warmth which the covers tried to capture, and the utter cold which sneaked in through the cracks, was what he searched for. A mental orgasm which lived somewhere on the (in this case) thin boundary between vasoconstriction and goose bumps.

§5

During the final academic year in which he finished his Master’s degree, he had noticed through shear experience – as the Ghost of Fenden Hall – that he could easily work for 48 hours straight without having to make compromises on the quality of his work. And after a couple of hours of sleep, he could resume his tasks with the same vigor. The fact that no woman was around anymore to stop this kind of lunacy was a great help.

Not much later he started living in his kitchen. Mind you, the “kitchen” was really as large as a small house, but he only used a tiny part of its capacity as his new residence. He slept in the herbal room, which was adjacent to the main kitchen, and which was – in his belief – the best room to meditate on taste. There was a shower and bathroom nearby. And there was wine nearby. Lots of wine.

And although he detested the monster of the internet, there was a premium laptop which gave him instant access to the monster, because sometimes even he was in the need to ask the oracle for information. Ghosts had to make friends sometimes to do what they had to do, so why not to a monster ?

(To be continued …)