Sunji Haejangguk: Hangover Soup with Blood Sausage, Outer Leaves, Dried Radish Greens, Bean Sprouts, and Green Onion
Sunji Haejangguk: Hangover Soup with Blood Sausage, Outer Leaves, Dried Radish Greens, Bean Sprouts, and Green Onion
A cold draft slipped through the air.
An unsettling wind prickled against my skin.
I'd finished prepping the seonji, broken down every last cut of the gift meat cow, clocked out past two in the morning, and barely managed to scrub myself clean and collapse into bed sometime after three.
And now something kept dragging me back awake, a crawling sensation raising goosebumps along my arms.
A full-body shiver ran through me.
What the hell?
Something was off.
How do I put this?
It felt like someone was reaching in and snatching away the results of all my hard work.
Fresh from the shower, reeking of shampoo and body wash, I pushed myself upright.
"Something's not right."
A bad premonition yanked me out of bed.
A knight's instinct.
Specifically, the instinct of a cook knight who'd spent years running a kitchen and a restaurant.
Something had definitely happened at the shop.
Had I left the flare range on?
Did I forget to turn off the water?
Was the refrigerator door properly shut?
Or had I walked out without extinguishing the stove after all?
Possibilities bloomed in rapid succession.
I hurried toward the restaurant.
And when I got there.
Slurp. Chomp.
"So good... hehehe. The chewy-soft bite is really, really good."
I found a woman with her face practically inside the refrigerator, scooping up seonji with her bare hands and eating it.
An intruder who'd snuck into my shop. A thief.
She had ash-gray hair grown down to her waist...
Wait. No way.
Wasn't this the vampire I'd spotted at the chicken farm?
She hadn't noticed me yet.
"Delishush. Heh, heheheh."
Her expression while eating the seonji, her whole demeanor — it all radiated something strangely harmless.
Wasn't that bizarre?
Her hands and mouth were smeared with fresh blood, and she was laughing like a lunatic while devouring raw seonji, yet not a single part of me felt threatened.
Everyone carries their own aura.
Some people overwhelm you with theirs. Others put you at ease with theirs.
She radiated a very particular kind of ease.
How do I describe it?
Like a herbivore.
A harmless capybara grazing peacefully across an open meadow.
That was the vibe.
And she was definitely a vampire.
A ruler of the night, a race that had once served as the Demon King's personal guard, a creature that fed on blood — yet she gave off the aura of a grazing animal.
From our first encounter at the chicken farm, she'd clearly been no ordinary vampire.
......
I approached her, keeping my footsteps as quiet as possible.
When I was close enough to reach out and touch her.
"Hey."
I laid a hand on the vampire's shoulder.
"Eeeek!!!"
She curled into herself and froze solid, not a single twitch.
Crrrrick!
She must have tensed her neck so hard that something audibly creaked as she turned to look at me.
Were her bones okay?
Her eyes, now meeting mine, had blown up several sizes larger than before.
"Ah, uh, uwaaah..."
Hic!
She hiccuped, and her whole body trembled violently as she stared at me.
"Let's talk, yeah?"
......
She dropped her gaze, her mouth opening and closing as she muttered something I couldn't make out.
"Hey. What are you saying?"
......
I ducked my head lower to meet her eyes.
The last time this happened, she'd suddenly turned into a bat and vanished.
I wanted to catch her before she could start reciting any spells, so I forced eye contact.
"Ah, aaaa..."
The moment our eyes met again, her face went sheet-white. Then foam bubbled at the corners of her mouth and she collapsed.
Thud.
"...What, she fainted?"
That was all it took?
Seriously?
I looked down at the vampire, passed out cold with her hands and mouth still stained with seonji blood.
Now I could finally get a proper look at her.
Fangs slightly more pronounced than an ordinary person's, pale skin, violet eyes.
Her features were unmistakably inhuman.
Though sprawled unconscious with her eyes rolled back, she didn't remotely look like a vampire.
"So what do I do with this?"
I eyed the collapsed vampire.
Judging by the seonji smeared around her mouth, the smell must have drawn her in, but...
That wasn't coco blood. Why would she?
It was just an ordinary meat cow from the viscount.
Not a garlic-fed coco like the ones at the chicken farm.
So why had she come to drink this blood?
They'd said the cocos were raised on garlic...
And before slaughtering this cow, I'd made chicken drenched in a minced-garlic sauce.
Garlic soy sauce chicken.
Could that be it? The garlic smell?
First it was the blood of garlic-fed cocos.
Then the chicken coated in a heavy minced-garlic sauce, and the freshly drawn and set seonji.
Maybe this vampire, unlike her kin, actually liked garlic.
A garlic-loving vampire.
That's a new one.
In my old world, and in this one, everyone knew vampires despised garlic. But this one had been lured here by the smell of it.
Some kind of mutant, maybe.
Anyway, now that I'd caught a vampire, I had two options.
One: hunt her down.
Two: convince her to stop draining the blood from my livestock.
The second option had occurred to me because she'd shown such extreme skittishness — bolting the instant she saw a person, fainting the instant she saw me.
There was a real chance she wasn't as dangerous as she seemed.
So I wanted to try talking.
If even the slightest possibility of communication existed, I wanted to explore it further.
I'm not interested in killing when it isn't necessary.
No one had died at this vampire's hands, at least not yet.
A few cocos, yes, but that was forgivable.
If I handled the persuasion right, I could prevent a whole string of future victims.
She was like a skittish wild animal.
And to start a dialogue with a creature like that, luring her with food was the most basic approach.
"If it's bait, then obviously..."
I glanced at the raw seonji she'd already demolished half of.
"That's the play."
But just handing over raw seonji wasn't right.
Vampire or not, serving raw seonji offended every principle my cook knight spirit held.
"Been a while. Let's make some seonji haejangguk."
I'd planned this as tomorrow morning's menu, but now I'd be simmering it ahead of schedule.
Didn't need much.
Two or three servings, tops.
Whatever she left behind, I'd just reboil tomorrow morning into an even richer-brothed haejangguk for myself.
"Viscount Britten better be grateful."
Where else are you going to find someone this diligent about talking down a vampire?
I pulled out two pots.
I filled one with water and dropped in a portion of the seonji, cut into pieces.
Salt and soju went in with a generous splash, and I set it to simmer over low heat.
The seonji, not even two hours set, filled the pot alongside its red juices.
A low, gentle simmer was the optimal way to preserve seonji's flavor and that springy, bouncy texture. High heat fills it with air bubbles during boiling, riddling it with holes like basalt — ugly to look at and crumbly in the mouth.
Plenty of people can't stand it when it turns out that way. The sight alone is enough to trigger trypophobia.
I was one of them, the first time I tried it.
What had that senior from work said back then?
—That's because you've never been to a place that does it right.
And then he'd dragged me by the hand to a seonji haejangguk joint every day for a week. Overboiling makes the seonji disintegrate, so timing it just right was everything.
While the seonji simmered, I took out the ugeoji and siraegi I'd boiled before closing and sliced them into bite-sized pieces.
The greens, perfectly wilted, went into a bowl with a spoonful each of doenjang, minced garlic, and chili powder, plus a dash of fish sauce, then got a light toss.
This vampire seems to go absolutely feral for garlic.
Next, I slicked a pot with oil and tossed in chili powder and roughly chopped green onion to infuse the oil.
A crackling sizzle.
The chili powder, soaked in oil, bubbled and sparked.
The moment that spicy aroma lifted, I drizzled a spoonful of sesame oil over it. The heat of the chili oil mingled with the deep nuttiness of the sesame.
"Yeah, that's it."
Then in went the ugeoji and siraegi, dressed in doenjang and garlic. A quick toss.
A sharp sizzle!
The garlic-and-doenjang-soaked ugeoji wilted into the heat, releasing that unmistakable garlic aroma.
"Nnnngh..."
The vampire groaned in her sleep, whimpering at the smell.
Yeah, I get it. You like the garlic.
As the ugeoji and siraegi cooked down, I sliced up two fat green onions and threw those in to fry together.
The greens and onion released their juices into the oil, and I kept everything moving until the flavors melded.
A sharp sizzle!
You need that one good fry to draw out the depth from the raw ingredients, so that later, when you pour in the water and bone broth, the flavor steeps deep into the soup.
If you're out of green onion, it's fine to skip.
The key is the ugeoji and siraegi.
But two things were non-negotiable.
Bone broth, and bean sprouts.
What kind of haejangguk doesn't have bean sprouts?
I'd prepped all the ingredients planning to cook this early tomorrow morning, so the process was refreshingly straightforward.
Into the well-stirred ugeoji and siraegi mix, I poured water and bone broth at a two-to-three ratio.
Once it hit a rolling boil, I piled a generous heap of white, firm-stemmed bean sprouts on top. A light dusting of chili powder for extra heat, a pinch of salt to balance, and I let the haejangguk burble over medium heat.
A doenjang-based spicy ugeoji haejangguk, complete.
Slice some hot peppers thin and lay them on top, and that sharp, throat-catching spice rounds it out into the true taste any Korean would recognize.
But for a vampire's first taste of K-food, I figured I could skip the fresh chili.
This was plenty.
After about twenty minutes of simmering over medium heat, I strained the seonji through a colander and arranged the pieces on a tray.
The pale brown seonji steamed gently into the air.
Freshly set, and with the salt and soju having done their work to knock out any off odors, there was almost no iron scent.
I scooped up a bit of the springy seonji with a spoon to taste.
The bouncy texture gave way to the mild, beefy notes unique to the meat cow.
The faint, characteristic flavor of seonji lingered on the tip of my tongue.
If it's this clean eaten straight, it won't taste metallic once it goes into the haejangguk.
A satisfied smile crept onto my face at the result.
I set an earthenware pot over the flame and ladled in a generous portion of the ugeoji haejangguk.
Then I cut the seonji into thick, chunky slices, dropped them in, and let everything simmer together.
Bubble, bubble.
I kept it at a gentle simmer, just enough for the two elements to come together.
Overboil, and the seonji disintegrates while its slight gaminess leaches into the broth and overwhelms everything.
Once it hit exactly the right point, I lifted the pot onto a trivet and set it on the kitchen table.
"Hey. Quit napping and wake up. What kind of vampire sleeps this much at night?"
"Nnnn..."
I roused the collapsed vampire.
"!!!!!"
Her eyes locked onto me and she froze all over again.
"None of that. Start with this. You look like you've been starving for days — no more raw seonji."
I pushed the seonji haejangguk toward her.
Alongside it: seokbakji, a bowl of steamed rice, and a plate with sliced garlic and ssamjang.
......
She mumbled something in a tiny voice.
A hesitant shuffle.
Unable to get proper words out, she shrank into herself.
"I'm not going to hurt you, so eat. You were hungry, right? That's why you raided someone's fridge and someone's chicken farm?"
......
She gave a small nod.
"So eat. We'll talk after."
......
Her nose twitched.
Sniffing it out, I see.
......
A slight bow of her head.
She picked up the spoon, cut off a piece of seonji, and took a bite.
Her instincts must have told her what it was.
Ah.
The vampire's eyes widened.
"!!!!"
Her gaze shot toward me.
"Well? Good, right?"
Her head bobbed in a tiny, timid up-and-down.
Knew it.
"Seonji haejangguk's pretty decent when you get it from a place that knows what they're doing."
I wasn't going to make her eat something inedible. But I could at least make up for the parts that fell short.
That's the hallmark of a good restaurant. The bare minimum.
No lingering sense of something missing.
The dish might not be perfect, but at least while you're eating it, you're not thinking things like "if only it had a little more of this" or "if only the chili powder had been roasted a touch longer."
"Try it mixed with the rice. And eat it with the seokbakji — it'll be good."
......
Her spoon started moving faster.
She emptied the bowl in what felt like seconds. Then, hesitating, she opened her mouth.
"Th... thank you..."
"You ate well. That's enough."
She'd spoken first this time. Maybe her guard was finally coming down.