Kimchi Stew, for Me Alone
I had been staying in the Sildiel family's rather lavish mansion, and yet fatigue seemed to have piled up on me without my noticing.
Maybe it was because I had slept away nearly half the day. My back was stiff, and my head felt heavy, as if it had soaked up water.
I hauled myself upright at last and set about the housework I had let slide.
"Ugh... I'm dying."
Clatter.
The table, the chairs, the shelves of every kind—all of it had been left alone for far too long. Dust lay thick over the kitchen tools, the big pieces of furniture, the floor. I propped the front door open and threw every window wide. Once I was sure the air was moving through, I beat the dust out in a hurry, and with the shop finally clean, the backlog of dishes had to go too.
Plates large and small, still slick with the oil from scallion pancakes. Washing up is a nuisance right up until you start; once you dump everything in the sink and get going, it is over before you know it. A little clattering, and the dishes were done.
Which meant it was time to open that. The thing I had been putting off.
"God, I'm terrified."
Conditioned fear dragged up a horrible sensation all on its own. Flesh necrotized so grotesquely you could no longer tell what it had been. A stench that slashed at the lining of the nose. A surface dried so hard it was impossible to believe it had ever held any life.
"A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do..."
Even so, it had to be done.
One—
Two—
Three—!
I counted down in my head and sucked in a deep breath. Then I opened the refrigerator.
The smell of rot inside burst out at a frightening speed, like floodgates opening on a dam filled to its limit. Grimacing, I pulled on gloves and cleared the corpses out one by one.
Ugh. Shit.
This was supposed to be an onion? This dark, blackish-red lump, like the phlegm some poor bastard with a brutal head cold had hacked up after a ten-minute war with his own sinuses? The green onions, once smooth, had gone yellow and slack, like snot. The herb leaves had dried to nothing and lost every trace of life.
It was hardly my first time seeing ingredients rot into mush, but somehow it was a fresh horror every time. I finished the job while desperately breathing the air on the far side of the fridge.
One step past fermentation and you get rot. How did a difference that thin turn into a transformation this violent? I am a cook, not a scientist, so the details are beyond me. Once the food waste was cleared away, though, I could finally breathe easy.
Sniff. Sniff-sniff.
Even so, the faint trace of rot still hanging in the air nagged at me. Thinking about it now, this was a place that dropped the shutter whenever the owner got tired, even if there were still hours left in the day. Lately it had even closed for nearly ten days without a word. A restaurant was still a restaurant. If a stink like this was rolling through the place, any customer who happened to stop by would be put off.
I took out the World Tree leaves and sap I had brought back from Nuardel. A few leaves on a suitable plate, a single drop of sap—
Whoooosh...
At once a clean, refreshing scent spread into every corner of the shop. The rotten smell that had been tormenting my nose a moment ago vanished without a trace. Not only did it kill off-odors, it made an outstanding air freshener. And the elves had been keeping something this good all to themselves.
"Hm?"
Even after the deodorizing, something still pricked at my nose. A faintly funky smell. Not disgusting, not unpleasant—sharp in a strange way, the sort of scent you wanted to keep breathing in.
Oh. No way.
Sour, and fiercely pungent, a smell of fermentation so strong it felt like a sneeze was coming. Eyes bright, I opened the bottom drawer of the refrigerator. What waited inside was a double-walled container, sealed tight—
"The kimchi's gone sour!"
Kimchi. Crisp, cool, the very identity of a Korean. The batch I had been keeping at the bottom of the fridge had soured all the way through. It had been over three months since I made it, so fermentation setting in was hardly strange. But it definitely had not been this sour before I left for Nuardel. I had even shut the fridge door properly. So why?
"Ah. Damn it."
Puzzled, I lifted out a head of cabbage kimchi—and found it.
Eeeing...
A fire spirit, fast asleep inside the kimchi container. It must have slipped in unnoticed while I was transferring kimchi into a side-dish box. And I, none the wiser, had clamped the lid shut and shoved the whole thing into the fridge drawer. The spirit had probably been just as startled.
It had crawled in because the smell resembled fermenting jang, only for the lid to slam down and the temperature to keep falling. Faced with a life-or-death crisis, it must have poured everything it had into raising the heat so it would not freeze. In the process, the kimchi had fermented at a furious pace. No wonder the container had felt lukewarm, even though I had put it in the coldest zone short of the freezer.
"You... you okay?"
Eeeing...
I hurried the fire spirit outside. It had not been sleeping. It had simply run out of strength, and its body had gone stiff. Little by little it felt the sunlight, and those eyes—tiny as black sesame seeds—blinked. After a short while of giving itself over to the blazing sun, it got its energy back.
All right, then.
"How long has it even been since I had kimchi stew?"
If the kimchi had soured, stew was mandatory. A self-evident truth, recorded even in the Subakdo of Goguryeo. I set out the ingredients at once.
One head of kimchi. One bowl of kimchi brine. Ingredient prep, complete.
Kimchi stew, like doenjang stew, comes in any number of styles. The snack-bar style, sweet and spicy, loaded with green onion, onion, tofu, even canned tuna. The style that takes thick slices of pork neck or shoulder and boils them until the soft fat has completely rendered. Or the one with saury or mackerel, where the oil of a blue-backed fish lifts the sharp bite of the kimchi.
The stew I was about to make was none of those.
Just the way we do it at home.
Bone broth? Anchovy stock? Not using them. With one well-ripened head of kimchi and its brine, you can pull a flavor that need not envy any ingredient that once had a pulse.
Shhk—
Shhk—
First I cut the kimchi into fairly large pieces. Leaving it whole makes it awkward to eat, but cutting it too fine is just as wrong. The heart of today's cooking was time. For a long, patient boil that was closer to a reduction, the pieces had to be big. Cut them small and more surface meets the broth, so the flavor comes out fast—but what I was making was kimchi stew, not kimchi soup. Soup is fine with finely cut kimchi slurped down alongside rice. Stew is the comfort of a long boil until a piece of kimchi turns glossy and translucent, then laying that big piece over white rice, heaping a spoon high, and eating the whole thing in one enormous bite. So I kept the pieces large, large enough to hold their shape even after a long simmer. Get them too small and they collapse into mush, and you can no longer tell whether you are eating kimchi stew or kimchi soup.
Once the kimchi was cut, I put it in a pot and poured in just enough water to barely cover it. Then I raised the heat and let it boil hard.
Today's cooking: done.
There is a method where you cut the kimchi into bite-sized pieces—not minced, just enough to save time—and stir-fry it until it wilts and the moisture cooks off. Why bother making it that much work? Rough-cut it, add water, and boil it long. That is enough. Kimchi already has every ingredient in it to begin with. Garlic, ginger, chili powder, salted seafood or fish sauce, salt, and the rest. Add nothing else. If the kimchi was made properly, the stew will be delicious all on its own.
The stew could finish itself from here. I still had something else to do.
Right. I should register the jang.
Mana Market had leveled up in Nuardel. The range of ingredients had widened, and processed foods could now be registered as ingredients too. Fermented foods that took enormous time and effort, handmade seasonings, even flavor oils like sesame oil—things I used to suffer through making stitch by stitch. No longer.
I registered every processed food in the restaurant at once.
▲
「Doenjang」
「Soy Sauce」
「Gochujang」
「Chicken Powder」
「Sesame Oil」
▼
Is this status window for real? My heart is swelling with glory...
To make those jang I had soaked beans, boiled them, mashed them, woven straw, and set meju to ferment. I had raised every kind of hell there was, and now a single click was all it took.
The chicken stock had spoiled while I was away for so long, so I had thrown it out. The chicken powder, though—dried crisp and ground—was still there. A plain, mild seasoning, nowhere near bursting with MSG, that pinnacle of modern food science. Even so, it could imitate at least the trailing edge of that flavor. This seasoning, too, was now registered in Mana Market.
When I first learned what the ability could do, I never imagined a cheat on this scale. Getting ingredients in exchange for a little mana was already a cheat, so I had been right not to expect more. And yet the blessings refused to stop.
Registering the World Tree? Anxious because you cannot tell what it is? Hey. It's your big bro. Your bro will make you gochujang anytime, anywhere. You smother a controversy with an even bigger controversy. Whatever the status window really was, overwhelming convenience had covered it up.
The jajang-jajang fruit I used to treat as half a joke. Now... wasn't it actually possible? Summoning jajang inside someone else's head would be difficult, sure. Then again, jajang is closer to a finished dish than a processed food. If anything were possible, it would be chunjang.
Chunjang-Chunjang Fruit. Possible?
If my life was ever in danger later, I would have to put it to good use. Not inside the head—just trade for a whole tub of chunjang and dump it over them. Thinking it through that way, maybe I would be better off making capsaicin once and registering that instead.
While I was spreading my imagination like some wielder of demonic power, a smell I could not refuse came rolling out of the kitchen. The signal that the kimchi stew was about halfway done.
"About time to get the rice on."
I started a pot of rice with the grains I had left to soak. Rice cooking down to a nutty sweetness, and kimchi stew boiling sharp and hot. A taste you could feel without taking a bite. A taste you could eat every day and never tire of.
Now and then I added a little water so the stew would not turn too salty. When it had reduced to a gentle simmer and the kimchi had drunk back, in one long pull, the umami it had given off—that was the moment. I killed the heat, poured in a generous amount of sesame oil, and finished it with the lid on. Perilla oil would have been far better, but I still had not found perilla seeds, so there was nothing to be done.
Before long the white rice was done as well, glossy and loose.
"I can't hold back. Grrr."
This was a homey table made by me, and only for me. No fussy presentation required. I scooped a bowl of rice, carried the stew over pot and all, and sat down.
Fwaaah—!
I lifted the lid on a kimchi stew packed with heat, and in the brief interval the seasoning had sunk deeper, the color richer. Honestly, it looked closer to braised kimchi than to stew.
So what. Who else in this world even knew what kimchi stew was?
"This right here... is Kang Jinwoo-style kimchi stew."
I ladled broth and kimchi up in one go and set them carefully over the bowl of rice. The snow-white grains were slowly overtaken by the dark red stew. The rice drank the kimchi broth evenly between the grains and turned glossy with it. I laid one large piece of kimchi on top, lifted the whole spoonful intact, and then—
Waaah—!
I opened my mouth wide enough to shut my eyes and shoved it in all at once.
"Haaah, for real..."
For real. It was too good. This was it.
They say that the more genetically similar another human is, the worse their body odor smells to you. The scent of someone genetically different, on the other hand, registers as attractive. If that instinct exists for the sake of reproduction, then what was this phenomenon? This phenomenon, where the aroma of kimchi stew made me lose my mind and jump out of my skin—what was I supposed to call it?
The natural sweetness of glucose drawn out of the starch in white rice. Wound through that sweetness, a fierce pungency that beat the taste cells on my tongue half to death. The sharp bite of kimchi that had soaked up concentrated umami and salt—violence on the level of an eight-week hospital stay. And the sesame oil covered that violence, nutty and smooth. This was really, truly—
"Sex."
Not only with kimchi stew. The experience of emotion detonating because a flavor has reached the absolute peak. It drives a catharsis straight into the peripheral nerves, comparable to the reproductive act of the creature called a human being. If this isn't sex, then what is?
Beads of sweat broke out on my head. I did not care. As if I were venting the grudge of eating nothing but Western food the entire time I was in Nuardel, I simply fell on the kimchi stew in front of me and devoured it.
By the time I had finished off two bowls of rice and half the stew, the sun was still high. Broad daylight. The hour when ordinary people were farming hard or minding their shops, when the work of society was at its busiest.
"This... is sex."
From the middle of the day, I had thoroughly carried out the instinct called appetite.