Read Online Outrage by Arnaldur Indridason - Free Book Online

marginally preferable. Elinborg found the membrane of the roe off-putting, and she never touched the liver. On Thursdays her mother sometimes threw caution to the winds: one memorable Thursday, Elinborg first tasted spaghetti, boiled to within an inch of its life. She found it completely tasteless, but a little more palatable with tomato ketchup. On Friday, fried lamb or pork cutlets in breadcrumbs were accompanied by melted margarine, as with the fried fish.
    Week followed week, adding up to months and years of Elinborg’s childhood, with hardly a variation. A ready-made meal was bought perhaps once every two years or so: her father would bring home open sandwiches of smoked lamb on malted bread, or prawns and mayonnaise on white.
    Elinborg was nineteen when the first piece of grilled chicken entered her home, in a carton with ‘French fries’. That was another unforgettable day. She did not particularly like either foodstuff and her parents never repeated the experiment. She enjoyed reading about food in books, and often all she remembered from children’s stories and novels were the descriptions of meals and cooking: unfamiliar foreign delicacies, unavailable in Iceland in those days, such as ‘marmalade’, ‘bacon’ and ‘ginger beer’. She recalled reading one day about ‘melted cheese’. It took her some time to understand what it meant. She had never heard of cheese being eaten in any other way than straight from the fridge, sliced on to bread.
    Elinborg was picky about certain foods and was a constant source of disappointment to her mother, who was a firm believer in the virtues of boiling: she believed that food was inedible unless reduced to a mush, and she would boil slices of haddock for twenty-five to thirty minutes. Elinborg was always terrified of choking on a fish bone at the kitchen table. She did not like the fatty breadcrumb coating of the cutlets, found the meat bland and flavourless, and the caramelised potatoes were disgusting. Lamb’s liver in onion sauce, served on Tuesdays except when her mother plumped for hearts and kidneys, she simply could not get down. Nor did she think heart or kidney could be considered proper food. Her culinary blacklist was endless.
    It came as no surprise to Elinborg when her father suffered a heart attack in his early sixties. He survived, and her parents were still living in the same place, Elinborg’s childhood home. Both were now retired, but remained alert and self-sufficient. Her mother still boiled her air-cured fish until the windows misted over.
    When it had become clear that Elinborg’s fussiness about food was incurable, and as she grew old enough to find her way around the kitchen, her parents allowed her to start cooking for herself, using whatever her mother had bought. She would take some of the haddock or cutlets, or the fish loaf served on Thursdays after the pasta experiment came to an end, and prepare something that she really wanted to eat. And she developed an interest in cookery: she always asked for cookbooks for Christmas and birthday presents, subscribed to recipe clubs, and read cookery columns in the papers. Yet she did not necessarily want to be a chef; she just wanted to prepare food that was not inedible.
    By the time Elinborg left home she had had some impact on the family’s eating habits, while other aspects of their life had changed of their own accord. Her father, for instance, no longer came home to eat lunch and lie down to listen to the news. Her mother went out to work and came home exhausted in the evening, relieved that Elinborg was willing to cook. She worked in a grocery shop where she was run off her feet all day long, and every evening she soaked in a hot bath, her feet red and sore. But she was more cheerful than before, as she had always been a sociable person.
    Elinborg graduated from high school, left home and rented a small basement flat. During the summer vacations she worked as a police officer, having