You Should Have Cooked Only So Well
Sizzle—!
Scallion-pancake batter met the screaming-hot pan and sang, a blissful hiss almost like rain. Drawn by it, the three elves peered into the kitchen.
"Jinwoo, what are you making?"
"Something from back home... kind of like a pancake. We mostly ate it when it rained."
"Heh. What a strange custom."
Iseria's ears twitched in time with every crackle.
Hissss...
The downpour of frying slowly thinned, and the batter began to cook in earnest.
Frying and grilling are really the same thing. You drive the moisture out of the ingredient and brown the surface through the Maillard reaction. With frying, that flash of evaporating water is simply more dramatic. Wet batter hits oil that hot, and the moisture vanishes at once—and the vanishing is exactly what makes the familiar sizzle. So the food doesn't truly start cooking until the noise dies down. Which was now.
Once the scallion pancake had taken shape, I set a second pan on another burner. One pan, and I'd be standing here till next season. Same slick of oil, and this time I dropped in zucchini pancakes coated in egg wash.
Hissss—!
They sang the moment they hit the pan. Egg-washed zucchini, though, needed a slightly different hand. I watched the gold creeping over them.
Ten seconds... five. Now.
Flick—flick!
About twenty seconds in, I turned every one of them. Better to judge by how the egg was setting than by the clock.
Cook one side of an egg-coated jeon all the way through before you flip it, and you regret it. Jeon are thin by nature, thin enough that heat from the bottom alone can set the egg on top, the side that never touches the pan. Egg that sets that way never gets pressed into the ingredient—not by the food's own weight, not by the cook's spatula. And that's the problem. The proteins have to be squeezed tight against the filling and seared before they fully set, or they won't bond. Let indirect heat cook the egg first, and the bond never forms. Finish the pancake like that, and the egg batter simply peels clean off. A small disaster.
Okay. Stuck.
Both sides of the zucchini jeon had browned to a proud gold. Once each face had been seared, there wasn't much left to fuss over. I flipped the scallion pancakes browning beside them whenever they needed it, and the batch was done in no time.
You don't fry all the jeon at once and haul them out together. You serve what's ready, set more batter over a low flame, and eat while the next round cooks. That way they stay hot and shattering-crisp the whole time.
I carried the pancakes out in both hands.
Iseria, Seiran, and Veila were already at the table, waiting. Perhaps because their time here was nearly up, Kang Jinwoo no longer found Seiran and Veila quite as unpleasant as he had at first glance.
"Let's eat."
"Whoa... it's glowing. All that gold."
"And it smells incredible! So nutty!"
Reactions like that at every meal made the work worth doing. Personally, of course, Kang Jinwoo would still rather not end up any deeper in their debt.
"Hm. This isn't bad either. A pancake, is it? Rather unusual."
Seiran, right on cue, slipped into his cool-guy routine.
Until now he had clung to the Iseria shield—Iseria was eating, so I had no choice—and he had used it without shame. A few days ago Iseria, scratched raw by the act and properly furious, had threatened to tell her father and thrown a spectacular fit. After that, the shield was retired. What replaced it was this: cool-guy mode. A cold, judicious face, and chopsticks clutched in a sloppy X.
He tore the scallion pancake with a laborious grip.
Crisp. Crisp!
Every touch of the chopsticks drew out a crunch so absolute the elves swallowed hard, the texture obvious before a single bite.
"It looks like a pancake... but it's incomparably crisp."
Veila and Iseria followed his lead and portioned scallion pancake onto their plates, then dabbed the pieces in the seasoned soy sauce Kang Jinwoo had set out.
Crunch—.
Snap—! Shatter!
All three took the golden pancake at once. A tawny Maillard brown spread over their tongues, like a wheat field ripe in autumn. Crisp fried surface, thin body. With the batter kept to a minimum, texture and the ingredient's own flavor came through whole.
"Haaah, hot!"
"Hnn—haah!"
"Ahem... khem!"
Veila, Iseria, and Seiran each made their own sound and kept chewing. Thin, crackling outside; inside, the ingredient's warmth condensed pure.
Iseria worked her jaw in a trance, then bit clean through a scallion cooked just right.
Crunch—!
Neither too long nor too short, it was perfectly done. Her small molars sank into the fibers. Far from tough, the scallion chewed tender while keeping a pleasant snap, and the warm green juice it had been holding spilled out and mingled with the batter.
For an elf, the thought was a little impious. This was a plant. One of those you trip over in the woods. And yet a master cook of the first rank—pass it through Kang Jinwoo's hands, and it became an elven delicacy unlike anything she had ever tasted.
She was not the only one thinking it. Seiran, chopsticks flying beside her, thought it. So did Veila, who had given up on chopsticks and was shoveling scallion pancake with a fork. All three of them.
Iseria set her fork to the zucchini jeon waiting alongside. Not as crisp as the scallion, but soft under the tines. The nutty smell of browned egg and the sweet scent of zucchini rose into her nose. She didn't hesitate.
Schlrp—!
One hearty bite, and a fierce illusion.
What did I just eat... zucchini?
The sort of vegetable people grilled plain, or chopped roughly into a stew. Sweet enough, but always with a green rawness in the way. This was different. One press of the molars and the juice rushed out as if it had been waiting. Sweet and warm alone, she might have missed it. The juice flooding her mouth carried savoriness, and salt.
What? How does it taste like this?
She couldn't know, but Kang Jinwoo had salted both sides before the batter ever went on, and he had done it for exactly this. Osmosis drew the surface moisture out and took the raw green smell with it, and a little salt lifted the zucchini's own sweetness higher. Care and detail, packed even into a single bite. Iseria never caught the process. She did know a flavor like this was rare. And so, with painful clarity, she understood it all over again—she could not leave him. Not even for a little while.
Both plates were already showing their bottoms. She licked her fork, reluctant, and spoke.
"Jinwoo, this... jeon. Is there any more?"
"There is. Hang on."
Rattle—thud!
Pleased by the request, Kang Jinwoo gathered the plates and headed for the kitchen.
That was when the three elves' eyes met. Iseria, Veila, and even Seiran.
They hadn't meant to do this. Not at the start. But these three days had been nothing but his cooking, three meals a day, and in only three days that food had surpassed anything they had eaten in their lives. So they betrayed the line they had drawn. Desire, long asleep, rose up, and the morality that said you must not do this collapsed before it. Even Iseria, who was used to his cooking, was won over. That was how completely the last few days had been dopamine itself. Bibimbap, mounds of seasoned greens, soybean-paste stew, pan-fried tofu, and now scallion and zucchini jeon.
Ah. I can never go back. Not to the days when Elskit tasted good. Never to a life without Kang Jinwoo's cooking.
She had realized it.
Seiran drew an unidentifiable white powder from his pocket. Iseria took it and tipped the powder into the cup of water Kang Jinwoo had been drinking.
Hiss...
It dissolved in an instant. The water did not change color. It did not change scent.
"Here. Brought more."
"O-oh! Thanks."
Innocent as anything, Kang Jinwoo set the jeon down and took his seat.
Gulp. Gulp.
Thirsty, he drank the water straight down.
They're eating even better than usual today.
I went to the kitchen at Iseria's call for a refill. Right on time, the jeon that had been gently browning over low heat were showing off a golden finish.
Even I have to admit, these came out well.
Lately I'd been feeling it—my cooking had gotten better than it ever was back on Earth. Experience is experience, whatever shape it takes. Maybe living in this other world was doing me good. Or maybe it was Mana Market. A cook who can always get his hands on the finest ingredients is a lucky cook. Ever since I'd gained the skill, in season or out of season, I'd stopped caring.
Hm. Still, if varied experience really did raise the craft, I did want to see Nuardel someday. The imperial south I could visit whenever I felt like it, so that was fine. Nuardel, the country of the elves, was another matter. A thoroughly closed nation. Without an elf to guide you, even finding the road was a misery—I'd heard they tangled the way in with magic of their own.
Well. I'm not going now.
Someday. Truly someday. For the moment I had Calius's caravans to look after, and the hardtack I supplied to Duke Kailan. Traveling the empire came first. Easier to see my own country than some foreign land I knew nothing about, wasn't it?
Turning that over, I carried the jeon back to the table.
"Here. Brought more."
"O-oh! Thanks."
Iseria startled a little as I set them down. Had she really not expected this much to be left? Seiran and Veila were watching me too, their expressions oddly hard to read.
"Everyone full? You all right?"
"Ahem—ahem! I can eat more."
"Yes...! Thank you!"
Weird. The reactions were a little off. I didn't particularly mind. I drank the water waiting at my place—best to rinse everything down before round two—then picked up my chopsticks in high spirits, ready to cut the jeon into easy bites.
A sway...
Huh? All of a sudden...
Crash—!
"Uh... uh?"
Before I even registered the dizziness, I was on the floor. Worse than the vertigo of bolting upright after lying down too long, and it had come with no warning at all.
"Iseria. Help me up..."
I reached for her, right there beside me.
But—
tap.
She lightly knocked my hand away.
Why?
The question climbed all the way to my throat. Before I could get it out, Iseria, Seiran, and Veila rose and looked down at me where I lay.
And they said it.
"What...? Iseria. What does that mean..."
"Sleep deeply for a bit. It won't be long."
Wishing me a sound sleep, she stroked my head. The touch felt far too gentle.
"Urk."
And just like that, I was asleep.