Under the Glacier by Halldór Laxness

Boiled fish? Twice today your emissary thinks he has noticed a smell of fish wafting out of the "old farmhouse," that part of the house whose walls are still made of turf. This smell arouses the hunger of a visitor who has not been invited to table by his hosts all day. Can it be that the woman eats fish on the sly? Fairy fish? Late in the evening, just when your emissary has arranged the items of his report and summarised the material (see previous chapter), Miss Hnallþóra is at the door of the guest-chamber saying, May I offer you a little cup of coffee? It's hard to give up hope that perhaps there might be fish as well, or even just a piece of bread. The undersigned follows the woman to the spare room. Alas no fish. The table was gigantic, as if giants had been working at it. Here stood that table loaded with an abundance of all dainties as in the Saga of the Virgin Mary-with the exception of the one dainty: proper food. A table of such plenty provokes by its very presence the same kind of hunger-nausea in a starving man as the roots of moss-campion and seathrift doubtless did during the famines in Iceland in olden times. Add to that the smell of "chicory" (dandelion root) being boiled as a substitute for coffee out in the kitchen. Still, it's obvious how much the use of gaudy colouring on the sweet-cakes has been reduced since last night. Not only were the cakes drier and neater than before, but democratic tea-cakes were beginning to play a reasonable part, such as for instance so-called Jew-biscuits, which are rather pretty in shape, about the same thickness as oysters, and with a colourless blob of egg-white and sugar on top-it reminds one of something dried up, which there is no need to mention. Likewise there were now numerous doughnuts, which had not been seen yesterday, and so coarse, almost obscene, that it nearly shocked one's sense of decency and called to mind the doughnut-mother in China who according to the newspapers is nearly half a metre in length and proportionate in girth and stuffed three times up herself. In all, six new sorts of cakes had been added to the collection since last night. And though a detailed description of such a banquet does not directly concern this report, I cannot but emphasise the crucial change that has taken place since last night, in that a new sensation has now overthrown the war-cakes-foreign wafer-biscuits coated with melted chocolate. These are Prince Polo biscuits of the kind the undersigned was offered this morning at the parish clerk's, specially manufactured in Poland for the Icelanders. Concerning this foodstuff I refer to Tumi Jónsen the parish clerk. In itself it is no small compliment to the morals of a nation to point out that when it had become wealthy and no longer knew how rich it was, it did not copy the example of other prosperous nations by eating many kinds of steaks and pâtés on weekdays and spiced peacock on Sundays, washed down with piment and claret; instead, Prince Polo biscuits were all that the nation indulged in as a sweetener after the centuries of black pudding and whale meat.

Miss Hnallþóra: I noticed last night that the bishop wasn't much for rich cakes with spices, so I made up some plain dry-cakes and ordered from Akranes a few Prince Polo biscuits, which are so much in fashion now and thought most genteel down south.