The Elf Enlightenment Movement (3)
The audience was all assembled.
I fetched the dough I had set aside to rest. Thanks to the yeast worked into it, the rounds had swollen soft and plump, and when I pressed a taut surface it gave with a deep, airy sigh, the gas trapped inside yielding under my fingers. I dusted the counter thick with flour so nothing would stick, then set a round down.
And then—
Squish. Punch.
I drove my fist into the center of the round without a shred of mercy. The dough put up no resistance at all and spread wide beneath the pressure, and only then did it begin to look like something you could call pizza dough. The rim, bunched where the force had shoved it outward, got the same firm pressing, all the way around.
Once the rough stretch was done, the finishing work was to draw it truly thin. I caught the edges in both hands the way you grip a steering wheel and worked fast, tossing the portion in my left hand over into my right. Shff. Shff-shff-shff. Centrifugal force joined the motion, and the dough opened out even and round. It might look too thin now, but it would puff a little as it baked. Accounting for that, the crust came out at just the right thickness.
Even being generous, my hands were hardly what you would call skilled. But these elves knew baking only as rock-hard Elskit and coarse wheat bread. To eyes like theirs, the way my hands moved might as well have been the work of a master craftsman.
"Whoa... Jinwoo, you could do that too?"
"It's like a magic trick! That's amazing!"
"Hmph. Not a bad pair of hands."
Even if their voices had all been identical, you could have picked out the speakers from tone and wording alone. Iseria, Veila, and Seiran each tossed in a line, and only Elioren kept his silence. His mouth stayed firmly shut. He simply stared, unblinking, at the tips of my fingers. There was something so grave in that look that it goaded me right along with him.
You stare at me like that, and I don't have a choice but to make it.
The most delicious pizza of my life.
I didn't bother answering them. I answered with my hands instead.
The pale dough, stretched wide, held endless possibility. Onto that blank canvas I took one red step. Splash. Slap. Tomato sauce struck the dough as fiercely as its own color, and here and there you could see little chunks of tomato and minced onion. I had cooked it down low and slow for a long time, so those bits were pure umami—flavor compounds condensed until there was no moisture left to evaporate, right up to the edge of scorching. Scattered irregularly across the surface, those little bombs of savor would only make the pizza better to eat. Filled edge to edge with tomato sauce, the dough looked like a red sun.
Over that bewitching face I heaped, rough and generous, the heart of the dish, won from the elf market: moist, plump mozzarella. It was so springy you could feel the texture without taking a single bite.
"Young miss, what Sir Jinwoo is putting on now is tofu, right? That looks delicious!"
"Mm... I don't think so. I saw some elf selling that at the market. Pretty sure it's cheese."
"Ah. Cheese..."
Veila had taken the cheese for tofu on the strength of a white, softly mounded appearance alone. Fair enough. Swap the tofu in tofu kimchi for mozzarella and you could fool anyone. She didn't seem especially fond of cheese; the disappointment on her face was blatant. Seiran and Iseria were hardly any different. Elioren, as ever, watched me without a word.
Looking at them, I thought it to myself.
These flavor-blind elf lunatics...
A people who had built a wall between themselves and cooking. And yet there had been one elf at the market who actually made cheese. Curiosity got the better of me, so while I was buying some I asked him this and that. He said he had long looked after the mountain goats and the ordinary goats up in the ranges. Then one day he carried freshly drawn milk around with him from morning to night, and when he checked it, the milk had curdled. From that moment on, he had thrown himself into making cheese.
"Sir, put the cost on Veila of House Sildiel..."
"No. Just take it."
"Pardon?"
"That cheese would be happier going to someone who knows what it's worth."
The eyes of the elf who said it looked, somehow, sad. Maybe he had spent too long awake among palates no better than a yellow mutt's. It was the lonely gaze of a man who had swallowed the red pill alone and found no one who understood.
I'll open these elves' eyes for you. So please, don't suffer anymore.
I spread the mozzarella evenly by eye, then scattered plenty of fresh basil over it. The herb's fragrance met the sweet-salty tang of the tomato sauce. All that remained was the baking. I lifted the still-floppy pizza with care and slid it into the oven I had already heated.
At this rate... seven minutes.
It didn't need a long bake. Crisp dough and melted cheese were enough. The prep was the nuisance; once the toppings were on, getting it out of the oven took fifteen minutes at the outside. There was a reason people called it fast food.
Ssszzz...
Down in the heat the dough baked, and the tomato sauce, catching the fire, grew searingly hot. Scents that had been lukewarm before the bake gathered all at once under the heat. Hmm. This was the sort of smell that made you turn around in the street... and yet I heard none of the elves' usual fussing. I shot a glance toward the table.
Ah. They're not refusing to speak. They can't.
Iseria glittered with green eyes gone faintly bloodshot, as if she had hit her limit, sniffing three times a second.
"Snff! Snff... pwaaah!"
"Haa... haa..."
"Veila, don't... hngh... make strange noises..."
Veila had gotten so drunk on the aroma she couldn't even breathe out, and she was panting for it. Seiran was pretending otherwise while hauling air all the way down into the depths of his lungs.
Elioren's still not reacting?
It felt a little wrong to say so, but I had heard Elioren was nearly three hundred. At that age, sure, maybe taste and smell started to go. From the very beginning until now he had kept the same blank face. He seemed to be taking the occasional sniff, but it felt more unconscious than anything. Well. Nothing to be done about that. So long as he ate, there was no problem.
Right on time, seven minutes passed, and the pizza revealed itself in all its beauty. If someone called this tasteless... I wouldn't even know what to say. That wouldn't be a moment for anger anymore. It would be a moment for pity.
I cut it into four pieces, easy to eat. This was Italian pizza, and the dough had never been that large to begin with, so quarters were just right. Crack. Crack. Everywhere the knife passed, the crust gave off a crazed crispness, and in time with that sound Elioren's eyes trembled, faintly.
"Thank you for waiting."
Clack.
At last I set the pizza on the table. The cooking they had wanted badly enough to kidnap me for it. And, at the same time, something to enlighten elves who couldn't see.
"Margherita pizza."
Go on. Eat.
Elioren was numb.
That was not to say he failed to show emotion, or that he lacked consideration. He was, quite literally, an elf whose senses no longer stirred. Across some three hundred years he had piled up vast knowledge and every kind of experience, and what those years had taught him was to live the present faithfully. So when he was glad, Elioren laughed, and when he was sad, he wept. And yet, paradoxically, after three hundred years of living... novelty had been slipping away. Joy did not end after a single time, and sorrow, too, went on; that was life. But when the same things repeated without end, even a being possessed of intellect had no choice but to grow weary.
Food was no different. In his younger days Elioren had traveled the human world just as his daughter did, wandering through many countries and tasting all sorts of dishes. The more he ate, though, the more a question rose in him.
Hmm. Is that all?
However many dishes existed, it was as the saying went: there was nothing new under heaven. Longevity stacked upon itself and dulled the stimulation of his palate, until at last he came to think the elves' own way of cooking was the most reasonable of all. Elven food looked dreadful and careless at a glance, but Elioren did not see it that way. It had simply developed to suit the nature of the race. Ingredients cultivated by the grace of the World Tree. Do not harm the ingredient's own flavor any more than you must, and take in its nourishment whole. That was the manner of cooking the elves had devised in order to keep propriety.
Then what was this, now?
"Pizza? Is it the same sort of thing as the jeon he made last time...? Something's different, though..."
"Hiek. It's nothing like jeon. This is a completely different kind of fragrance..."
Iseria and Veila, who had eaten Kang Jinwoo's food before, whispered between themselves. If even they, who had met his cooking often, did not know it, then he certainly could not. And yet Elioren felt... a strange familiarity.
From the moment Kang Jinwoo began to cook, Elioren had watched him in silence. It was not that he was testing the man, or suspecting some trick played on the food. The ingredients were ones the elves ate as a matter of course, worn so familiar they had grown tiresome. To see those same ingredients cooked into a form he had never once witnessed, and lavished with such care—he simply could not look away.
And the result of all that. Margherita pizza, he had called it.
Elioren carefully lifted a piece in his hand. From the fingertips came the dry warmth peculiar to baked wheat. Atop the light, crisp dough, the blessings of the World Tree sat neat and sure. Cheese, too, was a kind of protein, and so a golden Maillard reaction had bloomed across it. The nutty scent of cheese drove straight into the lining of his nose. Wrapped in that dominant aroma, Elioren bit in.
Crack!
Against his upper teeth the cheese was soft and yielding, while the lower teeth met the dough's crispness in full. Chew, chew. The more he chewed, the more those simple flavors tangled together in his mouth. And yet the way such plain ingredients lifted one another surpassed anything Elioren had expected.
"Hah— hup."
Tomato sauce and basil had been sealed beneath the cheese, their fragrance packed down tight. Elioren's teeth broke that seal.
Whoosh—!
All of a sudden—where is this freshness coming from?
The richness of the cheese and the hearty weight of the bread had clearly been in command, a flavor that ought to have grown a little heavy if you kept eating. Then the sweet-tart tomato sauce sprang out like an ambush. The cool, refreshing scent of basil set wings on the pizza's shoulders. A flavor climbing high with no fear of the sky. Caught in it, Elioren could not gather himself.
"Hup— hup!"
He bit in from the pointed end and ate in a rush. Before he knew it, only the far edge remained—the crust alone. Desperate to get to the next piece, he popped the darkened crust into his mouth without a second thought.
And in that instant—
Crunch. Crunch!
The crust shattered, fierce and crisp, inside his mouth. It was a crispness beyond any comparison with the first bite of dough. A part made of nothing but bread. He had assumed the flavor would fall off there. It did not, not in the least. The weight of the starch, and the nuttiness of flour scorched black here and there where it had taken more heat—saliva stirred by the cheese and the tartness of the tomato sauce came out to meet a crust that was only bread. He chewed it thoroughly and savored the dough's true taste whole, and then—
The tongue. The tongue wants it. The salt of the cheese, and the tartness of the tomato.
Once again Elioren found himself face to face with his own craving for tomato and cheese. He forgot even three hundred years and, by instinct, put the food before him into his mouth. An addictive spiral of pizza, repeating without a stop. The only thing that could break that chain—
"Huh?"
—was the emptiness of a plate that, at some moment, had gone bare.