North White Chef (4)
Rice.
The quiet star of a solid Korean table—the thing that holds the whole meal together.
Max took a big spoonful of it and spoke.
"Hmm… blander than I expected."
He sounded faintly disappointed, as if my big talk had set his hopes too high for what was actually in the bowl.
Well. Fair enough.
Rice is just like that.
If you chewed it long enough you might catch a little sweetness, but rice was never meant to steal the show. It laid the foundation. That was its job.
"Still, it's curious," Max went on, after another careful bite and a thoughtful nod. "It fills you more solidly than the bread we usually eat."
Of course it did. Compared to flour that had been milled, fermented, and puffed up into air, a bowl of rice sat in the stomach like it meant business.
But rice by itself was still just rice.
Just wait.
I was about to teach him how to eat it properly.
"Set the bowl down and come next door. Judging by the smell, the other one's ready."
"Ah—that? Of course."
This model house hadn't been built for living in. It was an experimental space, so the room beside us had an identical agungi set up the same way. Another cauldron was bubbling away on top of it—but the contents were different.
This one takes longer than cooking rice.
I walked over and lifted the lid.
Inside, something I'd had people start prepping the night before was boiling hard.
Max, who'd joined me in the food research from the beginning, muttered to himself.
"A strange method, I will admit. Ordering us to boil bones and marrow we can't even eat…"
"Seems no one around here ever tried it."
"Indeed. Other cuts can be made edible if you simmer them long enough. Bones and marrow never break down into a stew no matter how long you boil them."
"And even setting those aside, there aren't many parts worth eating to begin with."
The North lived on meat.
Not because people preferred it—because meat was basically all there was.
And make no mistake: northern meat didn't come from fenced pastures full of cattle and horses living soft lives. It came from wild beasts and monsters, hunted down with spear and blade in the snowbound mountains. Every day was a daily deathmatch—either you died and became a monster's meal, or the monster died and became yours.
A tear-jerking survival struggle, sure. The real problem was that the meat you won from it tasted terrible, and only a tiny fraction of it was even edible.
Why?
Because modern meat is the product of a long culinary tradition… and a lot of animal abuse.
What makes meat taste good to humans comes down to fat content. Marbling, the whole works. And that kind of meat is mostly raised on wide open ranges, free to graze and play.
I'd joked about hunting grounds respawning mobs, but the truth was the opposite: the tasty cuts people know are the result of animals raised their whole lives without stress, under the banner of "welfare" or whatever you want to call it.
If muscle takes the place of fat, the meat gets tough and foul. Gamey reek everywhere.
I didn't know the science. I wasn't a nutritionist or a livestock scholar. But I knew this much: on a frozen hellscape where even people barely survived, monsters that fought for their lives every single day were packed with combat-grade muscle instead of fat.
And I knew those were the ones that were a nightmare to eat.
"Roasting slabs of monster muscle must have been pure misery," I said. "You used them for food because you had to live, but even then there was never much of it. With this method, though, we can use not only those cuts—but the bones and marrow as well."
What we were making, of course, was seolleongtang.
A kind of gukbap—the one famous for its milky white broth.
People usually think of gomtang as meat stock and seolleongtang as bone stock. We were using meat too, so why start with the bones? Simple: meat could be forced down one way or another. Bones got thrown away every single time.
"The method is simple. Boil for about six hours per batch, then boil it again two or three more times. The nutrients in the bones and marrow leach out until the broth alone is a restorative tonic."
"My word. You're saying monster bones and marrow have that kind of effect?"
Of course they did.
Seolleongtang being a high-protein, high-calorie health food was common knowledge. Sure, it contained phosphorus that could interfere with calcium absorption and cause trouble for osteoporosis patients—but that was a problem for a well-fed modern world.
In a world where people ate poorly, phosphorus was precious: genetic material, cell membranes, vitamins and enzymes, cellular energy, and a building block of bone itself.
Back when food was scarce, the old drill sergeants used to swear seolleongtang was medicine.
Did that logic not apply here—where multivitamins didn't exist and even rock-hard bread that could double as a weapon was too precious to waste?
"And the off-smell that comes out in the process," I said, "this little guy will handle."
I picked up a cup sitting beside the roaring agungi.
Inside it was none other than salted shrimp.
"Good heavens. Remarkable that those tiny things have a use like this."
Surprisingly, this world—more precisely, this North—had salted shrimp too.
"You said they were pulled from the northern sea?"
"Yes. But they're so small no one really eats them. At best they're served as a side when roasting meat, or with bread and stew. Even then the salt is so harsh they don't get used much. Mostly they just sit in storage."
"Figures."
It was called salted shrimp, but it wasn't the kind I knew. Brined in seawater instead of pure salt and left to ferment, it had a thoroughly bizarre flavor. Still, it could do the basic job salted shrimp was meant to do.
"Diluted this far, it should be more than edible. Let's see…"
I ladled some broth into a small bowl and tasted it.
Okay. That'll work.
The gamey funk and off-notes weren't completely gone. But it wasn't inedible either.
Roughly on the level of that sixty-year "tradition" gukbap joint I'd hit on a business trip to Busan. The kind people either loved or hated.
"Give it a try."
"Very well… Wait—what?! You only simmered bones and marrow, and the flavor runs this deep?!"
"Not inedible, right?"
"Inedible? At this level it could grace the Grand Duke's own table!!!"
Preferences? For northerners who lived half-starved, there was no such thing. This was maximum approval.
"Here, try the solids too."
Just because seolleongtang was bone broth didn't mean there was no meat. The usual cut was brisket—but Busan-style gukbap threw in every edible scrap it could find and called it seolleongtang anyway.
"It's tender! How does a cut this tough…?!"
Even wild boar was infamous for how tough its meat could be. Monster flesh had to be worse.
But tough or not, meat was still meat.
What are you going to do after twenty-four hours of a hard boil?
Deep broth. Meat soft enough to fall apart. Even the toughest scraps had been broken down completely by the long soak of salt from the shrimp paste.
And when that met a scoop of freshly cooked white rice—
"Ohhh! The seasoning is perfect!!"
He went at it like Mr. Robert discovering his first hot stone pot, double thumbs-up flying in every direction.
"Young Master, what is the name of this true delicacy?"
"Ah. That," I said, "is called gukbap."
"Gukbap!! Young Master—what if we served this gukbap as a special ration to the other soldiers tonight?"
"A special ration?"
"Yes. It's nearly dinner hour as it is. We may not manage everyone, but we could at least feed the men on duty."
"Not a bad idea. Do it."
We already had a cauldron full of seolleongtang. The ingredients were leftover bones, marrow, and the tough cuts—brisket, shank, the stuff people threw away because it was too hard to eat. Nothing to feel precious about.
Once I gave the word, Max summoned the duty soldiers and started ladling out the gukbap by the bowlful from the overflowing pot.
The men crowded in, wearing faces that said what in the world is this. Then they took one spoonful of the generously filled bowls—and their eyes went wide as praise started flying.
"The meat just melts!!!"
"Hooo… I've never tasted anything like this in my life…!"
"The broth is incredible!!"
I was still Korean, after all.
I'd never felt any great attachment to that fact before—but when it got this far, something was bound to rise in your chest.
"To your liking?"
"Khhh!! This is meat…? Then what the hell have I been eating all this time…?"
"I thought I was chewing meat—turns out it was rocks! That has to be it!"
"Throw out every stew left at home! I can't live without broth anymore!"
Grrr—!
I couldn't take it.
This was a high.
What they were drinking wasn't just soup. It was a bowl full of Korean pride.
"Butler. Does the castle still have any stock of monster bones, marrow, and tough meat that hasn't gone bad?"
"Heh. As you well know, in the North you can toss meat in a warehouse and the cold will keep it for months without spoiling. Shall I bring it all?"
"Yes. Fire up every cauldron you've got. Two shifts. Don't stop. Keep them boiling."
The old saying went that joy shared is joy doubled.
They had filled me with pride. The least I could do was fill their empty stomachs, no?
I put the soldiers who'd already eaten to work hauling water to the pots, then boiled the surplus bone stock, shank, and brisket hard and opened a free distribution event in the central square of the lord's castle.
Northerners were a stew people by nature. Oversized pots were never in short supply.
As soon as a cauldron of seolleongtang came to a rolling boil, we transferred it and kept the ladles moving without rest. At first the locals only wandered past to stare and wonder what was going on. Then, one by one, they gathered and started knocking back bowls of gukbap.
And news of this out-of-nowhere free meal reached the ears of my original body's older brother—Darius Wintershield—who had just returned from an external subjugation.
"Little brother. What is all this?"
"Ah, Brother. It's a dish I newly developed. It's called gukbap."
Even in this freezing weather, Darius came back coated head to toe in what looked like the absolute hottest, freshest blood imaginable. He eyed the bowl I held out—and downed it in one clean shot.
Is that gukbap or a milkshake?
"Hah. I was already getting hungry. Can you spare another bowl?"
"Of course. I'll have it distributed to the knights and soldiers as well."
Darius—my blood brother in this body, and living proof that a kind face could hide a bottomless gut—proceeded to demolish five bowls of gukbap on the spot in a full-blown food show.
I half-wondered if it was even physically possible, but the pure two-hundred-percent rush of Korean pride was so satisfying I just squatted down beside him while he picked his teeth with a twig he'd grabbed from somewhere.
"How is it? Rice cooked from a grain newly imported from the Imperial trading companies—called bye—paired with broth drawn from monster marrow and bones we had so much of in the North we didn't know what to do with them."
I explained the method as a way to ease the North's food crisis. Darius let out an impressed indeed.
But the way he put it was nothing like what I'd expected.
"Monster bones, you say? No wonder…"
"What is it?"
"Mm. Little brother—you're not a knight, so you probably wouldn't know. This seems to have an additional effect."
"An additional effect?"
Besides the swelling tide of national pride you got from watching people eat it?
"Yes. When you eat this gukbap of yours…"
Darius thumped his lower abdomen—right around the dantian—with a solid thump-thump.
"Mana fills the dantian."