The Empire's First Cooking Master (2)
Onion soup could taste like this? I've wasted half my life.
Leonik finished the French onion soup that had come with the soup course, wiped his mouth with a look of deep satisfaction, and quietly revised everything he thought he knew about vegetables.
Certain nobles of the Empire scorned vegetables as ingredients fit only for commoners. Leonik had never sunk quite that far. It struck him as faintly ridiculous that men who lived under an emperor's rule should make more of a fuss about such things than the emperor himself. Even so, he had never been especially fond of vegetables. They brightened the aroma and flavor of a plate, and they cut through heavy fat—but that was all. In the end, he had always believed a vegetable could never truly become the star of a main dish.
Not until he met the onion soup he had just emptied to the last spoonful.
So this is the vegetable cooking that captured Nuardel. Kang Jinwoo.
Drive the moisture lingering inside an onion off to the very limit, and only then does its innate sweetness condense. That sugar-like sweetness had heated of its own accord and caramelized. The onions, a tempting brown, had dyed the soup a deep, rich color even without meat or any other sauce, while the faint perfume of herbs made it worthy of the name—tempered so it would not sit too heavily before the main course. Leonik turned the warmth of it over in his memory and waited for what came next.
The salad that followed, a balsamic beet salad with slices of smoked venison, was excellent in its own right. But Leonik had already climbed so high that the thrill was not what it had been. Even so, this manner of formal dining—a course meal, in which dishes arrived one after another, step by step—had seemed outlandish at first. The more that came, the more refined it felt beside the old custom of setting an entire table at once.
When food was nothing more than fuel to keep a body alive, an imperial banquet and a poor farmer's supper were, at heart, the same thing. Everything was brought out together, and everyone shared it. That was not a bad way to eat, but its flaws were plain. Served all at once, the food cooled quickly; shared by all, it was hardly clean. Cooking in bulk often dulled the quality, and presentation was difficult to mind.
A course meal erased every one of those flaws. The next dish arrived in time with the diner, so the flavor was always at its peak. Each person received a portion of their own, so there was no need to worry over hygiene. And because it was served individually, the plating could be made truly appetizing. The heart of it was that the focus rested on the one who ate. From the concept of the course to the cooking, the plating, the service, and the meal itself, everything was arranged with the guest in mind.
Leonik had never been shown such devoted consideration at table. Food presented to the emperor was always of the highest quality, of course—rigorously tasted, then borne to the table in elegant ware. He did not mean to dismiss his retainers' efforts. But the consideration woven into a course meal existed on another plane entirely.
The old way was courtesy beneath the formula of imperial etiquette: consideration that would have been extended just the same had anyone but Leonik sat the throne. A course meal, born of a fundamental reckoning with the very order of eating, set food before him and him alone—the man actually dining. He found the difference dizzyingly welcome. It was rather like the joy he had felt at his accession, when the Empire had seemed wholly his.
That foolish notion had, of course, shattered within days of the coronation. Not so with these dishes. To realize that these meticulous plates were food for him alone, food brought into being for him, sent a feeling much like that old one surging up through his chest. Dominion. Conquest. Omnipotence. Those were names that might fit it.
"Thank you for waiting, Your Imperial Majesty."
"Mm. You've come."
Just as those vast emotions took hold of him, the chamberlain entered with a great plate in his hands.
"The main course: duck leg confit with fried potatoes. A duck leg aged for three days, and potatoes fried in its fat, are the highlight, while the pomegranate sauce alongside lightly lifts the heaviness of the fat. Please enjoy."
"My thanks."
The chamberlain lifted the cloche, explained the dish, and Leonik answered him by rote. His mind was already lost to the main course set before his eyes.
Duck confit, like the onion soup before it, was food for commoners and lesser nobles. If there was a difference, it was that this at least was meat—and that the truly destitute could not afford it. As Leonik understood it, stored properly it would keep a full year: calories laid by to survive the winter. And yet, though they had offered a preserved food as the main dish, he was not greatly shaken.
It will turn the tables on me, just as the onion soup did.
The onion soup and the terrine had already beaten his prejudices out of him. And sure enough, just as he had hoped, the main course too bore every sign of having been prepared for Leonik alone. Potatoes fried to a tidy gold, and the duck leg confit; over them a pomegranate sauce, glittering like rubies, trailed down in a slow, viscous ribbon. Made, it seemed, by reducing pomegranate flesh and juice with red wine, the sauce shone in precisely the same hue as Leonik's own hair.
To have devised a sauce with even that in mind—this was Kang Jinwoo's labor, for Leonik and no one else. Moved by a consideration that full, he drew his knife lightly across the duck leg.
Crrk.
Even beneath the restrained edge of a dinner knife, the flesh parted without a fight. Call meat by another name and it is an animal's muscle. Between himself, seated in this lavish private chamber and slicing a duck leg, and the act itself—what difference was there? This too was a killing. An exercise of violence.
From the fingertips closed around the knife, the sensation of parting the duck's flesh came through with terrible clarity. At the same time the fat that had filled every gap between the fibers melted away so softly that, though he was unmistakably cutting meat, he felt only the faintest resistance.
And Leonik shuddered.
His sensibilities did not stray far outside the ordinary. Put simply, he was no antisocial criminal who thrilled at cruelty. And yet, even so, this duck leg confit had woken the instinct of a man who reigns. Strength and motion no greater than the pointing of a finger. The omnipotence of taking a whole life with so little. That feeling—arrogant to the point of hubris—rose and filled his mind. In this moment, he could dominate the food upon the plate exactly as he pleased.
Haaah—
Eyes gleaming, Leonik put a thick-cut piece of the leg into his mouth. The confit's notorious funk, the salt sharp enough to numb the tongue—the unclean character of a food once eaten only to keep—none of it was there. What met him was a softness it felt almost rude to call soft, teasing his tongue. Would frail come closer? Truly, the slightest pressure of the molars and it burst apart, offering no resistance at all.
Lost in the rapture, Leonik did not bother to moderate his strength. He chewed with a fierce hunger, and the longer that powerful work of the jaw went on, the more the perfume of the aromatic oil sunk deep into the grain stirred his nose. Within the storm of herbs and spices, a faint note of pine cone rang out. It was none other than juniper berry.
As the duck's savor and the richness of its fat, concentrated to the extreme, exploded in the most literal sense, the juniper's freshness let him behold those flavors whole. Without that cool clearing of the palate, his mind would have been caught in the blast, and he would have swallowed the meat without ever tasting it. Aged three days in its own fat, the leg possessed a destructive power that great.
Insolent. A mere beast, and you dare—!
The blade a handspan long in Leonik's grip came rushing down. Each time that stroke passed, the duck leg was sliced away without recourse, reminding him of his omnipotence.
Thud. Thud—!
His heart beat faster. Blood spun through his brain, and his breath grew short as it drove strength into every muscle. Oxygen, pumped through him by sturdy lungs, made those muscles bunch and strain. His whole body, readied for battle. Without hesitation he swung the knife and severed his opponent's muscle. The duck leg was smothered in pomegranate sauce like fresh red blood.
And as a beast that has finished the hunt devours its prey, Leonik thrust the leg into his mouth with a rough hand.
Chewed down with the blood, it is finer still.
It was not blood. It was sweet, tart pomegranate sauce, reduced with red wine until it was thick with the depth of dark grapes. Leonik, however, took it for the scarlet blood of this feeble prey, and he himself found nothing strange in the thought. The freshness of the juniper that had seeped into the leg joined that sweet-tart sauce and conducted the already-dead prey into paradise. A vision wavered before his eyes: a duck grown plump and heavy, gliding at its leisure along an emerald river, and, the swim finished, sitting in the shade of a juniper tree to eat the seeds of a pomegranate. The flavor was supreme enough to summon such an image.
Set beside it the potatoes fried crisp in duck fat, and protein and starch fell into balance. A festival opened inside his mouth—a grand festival celebrating the success of Emperor Leonik's hunt. In the heat of a festival, people lose their reason. A crucible of the crowd, brimming past the point of bursting with joy, pleasure, and delight. Caught in the press of it, Leonik took the waves with his whole body.
After the main course came a caramelized apple tart filled with almond cream, and Nuardel's mysterious tea. Only when he had eaten through those two as well did the festival's frenzy at last go down. Leonik closed his eyes and drank deep of the catharsis. Then his mouth opened, low.
"Summon the chef... Chamberlain."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
Kang Jinwoo had meant to seize his palate and land a very large fish. Leonik had seen through the scheme. It had been a silent contest, begun only after he had already caught on. But before an overwhelming difference in strength, seeing it coming meant nothing at all.
Whatever Kang Jinwoo desired, he would grasp it entire. Leonik affirmed as much within himself. He had dealt the Emperor of the Empire a defeat; that was only the natural order.
The man was worthy of it.