More About Boy(16)
We always stopped off for one night in Oslo so that we could have a grand annual family reunion with Bestemama and Bestepapa, our mother’s parents, and with her two maiden sisters (our aunts) who lived in the same house.
When we got off the boat, we all went in a cavalcade of taxis straight to the Grand Hotel, where we would sleep one night, to drop off our luggage. Then, keeping the same taxis, we drove on to the grandparents’ house, where an emotional welcome awaited us. All of us were embraced and kissed many times and tears flowed down wrinkled old cheeks and suddenly that quiet gloomy house came alive with many children’s voices.
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Roald Dahl’s Bestemama and Grandmamma from The Witches are curiously alike …
‘My grandmother was tremendously old and wrinkled, with a massive wide body which was smothered in grey lace. She sat there majestic in her armchair, filling every inch of it. Not even a mouse could have squeezed in to sit beside her.’
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Ever since I first saw her, Bestemama was terrifically ancient. She was a white-haired wrinkly-faced old bird who seemed always to be sitting in her rocking-chair, rocking away and smiling benignly at this vast influx of grandchildren who barged in from miles away to take over her house for a few hours every year.
Bestepapa was the quiet one. He was a small dignified scholar with a white goatee beard, and as far as I could gather, he was an astrologer, a meteorologist and a speaker of ancient Greek. Like Bestemama, he sat most of the time quietly in a chair, saying very little and totally overwhelmed, I imagine, by the raucous rabble who were destroying his neat and polished home. The two things I remember most about Bestepapa were that he wore black boots and that he smoked an extraordinary pipe. The bowl of his pipe was made of meerschaum clay, and it had a flexible stem about three feet long so that the bowl rested on his lap.
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Bestepapa Hesselberg.
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All the grown-ups including Nanny, and all the children, even when the youngest was only a year old, sat down around the big oval dining-room table on the afternoon of our arrival, for the great annual celebration feast with the grandparents, and the food we received never varied. This was a Norwegian household, and for the Norwegians the best food in the world is fish. And when they say fish, they don’t mean the sort of thing you and I get from the fishmonger. They mean fresh fish, fish that has been caught no more than twenty-four hours before and has never been frozen or chilled on a block of ice. I agree with them that the proper way to prepare fish like this is to poach it, and that is what they do with the finest specimens. And Norwegians, by the way, always eat the skin of the boiled fish, which they say has the best taste of all.
So naturally this great celebration feast started with fish. A massive fish, a flounder as big as a tea-tray and as thick as your arm was brought to the table. It had nearly black skin on top which was covered with brilliant orange spots, and it had, of course, been perfectly poached. Large white hunks of this fish were carved out and put on to our plates, and with it we had hollandaise sauce and boiled new potatoes. Nothing else. And by gosh, it was delicious.
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(From left to right) Bestepapa Hesselberg, Bestemama Hesselberg, Tante Ellen, Tante Astri (Tante = ‘aunt’) with Roald Dahl’s sister Astri on a rocking horse.
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As soon as the remains of the fish had been cleared away, a tremendous craggy mountain of home-made ice-cream would be carried in. Apart from being the creamiest ice-cream in the world, the flavour was unforgettable. There were thousands of little chips of crisp burnt toffee mixed into it (the Norwegians call it krokan), and as a result it didn’t simply melt in your mouth like ordinary ice-cream. You chewed it and it went crunch and the taste was something you dreamed about for days afterwards.
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KROKAN ICE-CREAM
Ingredients
30g butter
60g sweet almonds, roughly chopped
5g bitter almonds, finely chopped
150g sugar
A tub of vanilla ice-cream
1. Smooth a piece of foil over a baking tray and lightly grease it.
2. Place the butter, almonds and sugar in a heavy frying pan.
3. Put pan over a moderate heat, stirring all the time to make sure that the mixture doesn’t burn.
4. When the mixture has turned a golden colour, pour it on to the greased foil.
5. Allow to cool completely before peeling off the foil.
6. Put the hardened krokan into a freezer bag and lightly crush into small pieces with a rolling pin.
7. Take the ice-cream out of the fridge thirty minutes before you need it, then combine with the krokan pieces.
(The Roald Dahl Cookbook)
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This great feast would be interrupted by a small speech of welcome from my grandfather, and the grown-ups would raise their long-stemmed wine glasses and say ‘skaal’ many times throughout the meal.