I'm Depressed, but I Still Want Tteokbokki (2)
The young lady of the ducal house, reunited with me after so long, burst into tears the moment she saw my face.
She skipped every greeting and went straight for the waterworks, and beside me Eilenna's expression curdled into something deeply suspicious. The look in her eyes said, plain as day, Jinwoo. Jinwoo, what exactly did you do to her?
"Hkk— food... please give me food...!"
"Uh."
Fortunately, the words that followed Ishilla's tears cleared Eilenna's misunderstanding at once. Months apart, and the first thing out of her mouth was please feed me. For a second it struck me as odd—until I remembered that I was a cook, and that we had met as customer and proprietor. Then it made perfect sense. I couldn't say what had happened to her, but the air around her was thick with some story.
And wherever there was a story, a memory, a joy or a sorrow, food was never far behind. Yukgaejang cup ramen after a long splash in the brutal summer heat. Yukgaejang cup ramen on a break from the march. Yukgaejang cup ramen after a winter night on sentry duty. Why was yukgaejang cup ramen the only thing I could remember? Well... the point was this. You never eat food by itself. You eat it together with a place, and a feeling.
In that sense, I understood why Ishilla was begging for a meal. My cooking must have been good enough to surface even in a moment this worn-down. Besides, Ishilla was my monumental first customer—and the precious daughter of Duke Kailan, with whom I'd only grown closer since. A guest like that was welcome anywhere, anytime, payment or no payment.
Right now, though, was the one exception that left me stuck.
"Lady Ishilla... there's nothing I'd rather do than cook for you, but I can't. Not now."
"Wh-why not?! I'm exhausted, I need healing..."
"Because you're getting farther away while we talk. You're in a carriage."
"Oh."
I needed at least long enough to bake a single loaf before I could do anything for her. The carriage heading back had no intention of waiting on our reunion. It simply rolled its wheels, silent and dutiful, toward the academy's main building. The distance opened in real time until we were shouting to be heard.
"Tonight—!! I'll come here—!!!"
No, lunch service is over and I'm trying to go home. What are you saying?
Daughter of my workplace superior or not, I did not have the loyalty in me to wait around for half a day.
"Not here—!! The Calius Merchant Guild estate—!!!!"
"Okay—!!! I understand—!!"
It had been a while since I'd raised my voice like that, and my throat came away dry. Still, now I could clock out with a clear conscience. Eilenna, who had watched that little farce from start to finish, was staring at me as if she couldn't believe what she'd seen. Or... not quite disbelief. Why did she look a little angry?
"Jinwoo. That girl you were just talking to. Who is she?"
"Y-yes? She was the first customer at my restaurant, and she's Duke Kailan's daughter..."
"Is that so? That's all?"
"Yes. This is the first time I've seen her again."
"Aha. I see. Then I understand! Shall we close up?"
"Yes... let's."
Eilenna's mood had ridden a roller coaster through the course of that conversation. I had the distinct feeling that one wrong dialogue choice would end in something terrible, so I answered with great care. Apparently every answer had been correct. She started the stall's closing routine as bright and cheerful as ever.
Elves. I would never understand them.
At any rate, we shut the stall down with the ease of practice. A week in, and Eilenna already handled the kitchen work with real skill. But no amount of getting used to a hard day stops the next one from being hard in a brand-new way. The moment we reached the estate, she threw her arms up in a long stretch and groaned.
"Ugh, ugh, ugh! I'm exhausted. Good work, Jinwoo."
"You too. Are you going to rest a little?"
"Mm. Haaahm... I need to close my eyes. What about you?"
Left to my own devices, I would have rested too. I'd already poked around the neighborhood in spare moments, there was nowhere I particularly wanted to see, and nothing that needed doing. But with Ishilla's request on the table, I had to make something. I'd been thinking it was about time to change the stall's menu anyway. If I was already cooking away from home, I might as well make the students something delicious and feel good about it. The toast had been a menu chosen with nutrition in mind, and now that the market street had recovered, they no longer needed me looking after their diets. Anyone who wanted to watch their figure could buy nuts and yogurt from Uncle Chewy on their own.
I put a simple question to Eilenna.
"I was thinking of cooking. Do you not eat fish either, Lady Eilenna?"
"Fish? I've never had it, so I couldn't say. But I think it'll be fine. Not eating meat and cheese is a preference, not a principle. I think fish would be good to try!"
"Really? Then I'll keep that in mind."
"What, what? What are you making this time?"
"I'll serve it for dinner tonight. Until then, it's a secret."
"Hmm... all right! Then I'll go rest and come back."
Sadly, the fish going into this dish would not be meeting anyone in its original form. It would be processed. Even so, the taste of fish would come through clearly enough to count as a meaningful experience.
The hints were all on the table. A stall in front of the school, armed with an enormous iron griddle. A market street where students in the full flush of youth packed in shoulder to shoulder every lunch hour. And a menu capable of satisfying one thoroughly gloomy schoolgirl. Only one dish met every condition.
I'm depressed, but I still want tteokbokki.
The sovereign of sovereigns among Korean sweet-heat. The pinnacle of junk food, which spat on anything resembling nutritional balance and worshipped one thing alone: stimulus, flavor, flavor. The dish that, man or woman, young or old, ambushed every Korean now and then with a craving that bordered on madness.
Tteokbokki.
By the time we'd closed the stall and added the trip back, evening wasn't far off. I had to make the rice cakes and the fish cakes from scratch, so there was no time to dawdle. I went straight to the kitchen.
First thing: the broth. Plain water would have been fine, but a proper stock reliably raised the ceiling of the flavor, and it didn't need to be difficult. Through Mana Market I traded for kelp and dried anchovies and set them on the fire for stock.
The last time I'd used Mana Market, I'd collapsed. I'd even gone and had that hair-raising little adventure with the status window, so lately I'd been keeping a tighter leash on the ability. This, though, couldn't be helped. I wasn't making a huge batch, so a bit of mana drain ought to be all right. The broth could be left to boil on its own.
Today's cooking had two fussy jobs in it. I quickly set out all-purpose flour, potato starch, hot water, and cooking oil.
Right. The rice cakes for the tteokbokki I meant to unveil today... I planned to make them from wheat.
Personally I preferred rice tteok, but realistically it took far too long. Soak raw rice for twelve hours, drain it in a sieve, steam it properly into firm, well-cooked rice... You could jump through every cursed hoop in the book and the failure rate was still miserably high. A serious defect. Wheat tteok, by comparison?
It was already done while I was comparing them.
Somewhere in the middle of my passionate internal indictment of rice cakes, the wheat-tteok dough was ready. I dumped every ingredient into a big bowl and mixed it thoroughly with a spatula. For wheat tteok, you only had to remember two things: all-purpose flour, and hot water. That chewy, bouncy bite unique to wheat cakes depended on flour with a high gluten content, and on hot water to help that gluten form.
When I judged the ingredients in the bowl were mixed well enough—
Thud—!
I turned the dough out onto a clean counter and started kneading in earnest. At first it clung to the hands and looked stiff enough that you might think, Should I add more water? That moment, right there, was the important one.
It's asking for more water? Absolutely do not give it any.
It only looked that way because the gluten hadn't finished forming. Knead five more minutes with a little patience, and at some point you had a dough as soft and chewy as a baby's skin. After that, resting was unnecessary, aging was unnecessary, all of it was unnecessary. I stretched the dough out long, cut it to the size of the tteokbokki cakes I'd seen all my life, and dropped the pieces straight into boiling water.
Wheat tteok sinks to the bottom when it first goes in. But once it's cooked through to the center, every last piece bobs to the surface. No need to time it—pull them out the moment they float, and rinse them well in cold water, and then?
Chewy. Chew-yyy—!
Been a while. That's good.
Wheat tteok, finished: chewy, able to keep far longer than rice cakes, and not much inclined to bloat. On the off chance, I tried registering the finished cakes with Mana Market.
I'd hoped, but of course it didn't work. The sorrow of a world where cheese and gochujang were allowed, and bread and rice cakes were not. Broadly speaking, all of them were processed foods. The deciding factor, it seemed, was whether or not a thing could serve as a staple. Well, nothing to be done. On to the work in front of me.
A searing red soup tteokbokki, its clean, biting savor second to none—and the partner that carried a great share of that flavor. I still had to make the fish cakes.
From Mana Market I traded for a few freshwater fish of the salmon family, and a freshwater fish that looked something like a sea bass. Ordinarily you'd build the base on pollock flesh and give it texture with shrimp and squid. Seafood could not arrive at the imperial capital still alive. So, tears in my eyes and mustard on my tongue, I had chosen freshwater fish with a faint muddy smell.
But as always, a solution existed.
World Tree sap. What else.
Fold World Tree sap into the dough, and muddy smell, fishy smell—what exactly were they going to do about it?
Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat—!
I took up two kitchen knives and minced the fish flesh without mercy. Then I mixed in carrot and onion minced alongside it, and added starch and World Tree sap. The moment the sap went in, the earthy smell vanished without a trace. A giving tree, through and through. The effect was immediate.
Stick—
I worked the flour and starch in by degrees and stopped the dough when it felt just a little loose. The soul of a fish cake was, from first to last, the fish. Too much flour or starch and it turned strangely chewy, and you could even get an unpleasant flour taste. So I halted while it was still faintly sticky, and set frying oil in a deep pan. I wasn't making rest-stop fish-cake skewers, so I didn't need oil enough for a true deep fry. Enough to submerge a thin, square fish cake—that was plenty.
Ah, this... why is this so hard?
I set the fish-cake dough on the cutting board and patted it into pretty squares. The stickiness was so extreme that I suffered through some trial and error, but after one or two I got the hang of it. While I shaped them, the oil heated through. With a thin knife I carefully lifted the dough and laid it gently into the hot oil.
Chaaaa—!
A rain of oil, lovely to hear no matter how many times you heard it. I repeated the process for several sheets, and the fish cakes were done.
Did Ishilla know? That after clocking out, without so much as a rest, I was frying fish cakes for her sake.
Ah. This one I should register.
The wheat tteok had failed, but fish cakes ought to work. I set a hand on a freshly fried, savory cake and registered it as an item.
Shaaa—
Whew. Thank heaven the fish cakes took. If I made tteokbokki again later, I could muddle through the wheat cakes somehow, but the fish cakes were genuinely a pain.
With every ingredient assembled, the rest was a straight road. All I had to do was dump it all in and boil it. With rice cakes I would have had to start cooking after Ishilla arrived; wheat cakes didn't have that problem.
Hey. I'm the big brother. I don't puff up over just anything.
Far from bloating, Big Brother Wheat Cake was the genuine article: the longer you boiled him, the deeper the flavor soaked in. First into the broth I'd already brought to a boil went the wheat cakes, the fish cakes, and assorted seasonings. The seasoning changed with the style of tteokbokki, and what I was making today was soup tteokbokki. Spicy, sweet, and with that clean biting heat as the biggest kick—so the proportion of chili powder mattered. I put in gochugaru and gochujang at equal measure; soy sauce was only there to support, so half the gochujang. And sugar... twice the chili powder.
Selfish bastard. You're fine with Lady Ishilla putting on weight, is that it?
But there was truly nothing to be done. Look at the ingredients alone: refined carbohydrates, fried fish cake, and for vegetables, a scallion and that was the end of it. Tteokbokki was a food you ate in the spirit of today, we die!!, surrendering your body to a blazing red stimulus. It was not a food you ate while thinking about your health.
Of course, Ishilla had never actually asked me for tteokbokki...
Ah. So I really am a selfish bastard?
Now that I thought about it, yes. Then for today, I would simply be a selfish bastard. I was at least going to take proper care of the flavor, so it would be fine. All that remained was letting the tastes boil together into one, and that left me with a little room to breathe.
I stepped out of the kitchen for a moment and looked through the window. The sun was going down, and the world was already deepening to a thick orange. My tteokbokki broth, though, would be darker than that sun. I was idling on that thought, watching the grounds, when I saw the estate guard who had been posted at the main gate come running in a panic.
Hm. What was this? A late shift change? The unwritten rule was to relieve the last watch a neat five minutes early, and nothing stung quite like the opposite—someone running late. I watched the guard as if it were none of my business.
But... those urgent footsteps did not seem to be someone else's problem.
Bang—!
"S-Sir Kang Jinwoo!! Where are you, Sir Kang Jinwoo?!!"
The guard burst in as if he meant to break down the estate's front door. The gate and the entrance weren't far enough apart to leave a man winded. Even so, his face was flushed deep red. His shoulders jumped with excitement, and his hands shook. Eyes full of fear, as if he had just witnessed something overwhelming.
What... had a monster shown up? Something like the Ear-Yanking-Until-They-Turn-White Elf Abomination?
I answered his call without much sense of alarm.
"I'm here. Wh-what happened?"
"No... that's what I want to ask you!!"
"Huh."
The guard's reaction, though, was too real to wave off. He spoke as if I had caused some enormous disaster. At that point a unease began to creep up from deep in my chest. I went stiff with tension and waited for him to speak.
"What have you been doing out there, that Her Highness the Imperial Princess is coming to have dinner?!!"
"What? Her Highness?"
"Yes!! Her Highness!!!"
The imperial princess, paying a visit out of nowhere? I hadn't invited her. To this estate, shabby beyond words beside the imperial palace, to eat my food?
I would like to withdraw the selfish-bastard thing.
Faced with a heavyweight of historic proportions appearing without warning, I couldn't hide my own panic. If I'd known, I wouldn't have put sugar in the tteokbokki. No—I wouldn't have made tteokbokki at all. I would have made something finer!
"Th-then what do I do? Should we... roll out a red carpet or something?"
"What red carpet. I don't know either! How would a mere merchant-guild guard know imperial etiquette?"
"Ha. Shit."
And so the guard and I flailed, stamping in place and getting nowhere—until, in that exact moment—
Click. Click. Click—
From the entrance came the sound of bewitching high heels, ringing through the estate. Clear as a death sentence being read, and drawing closer, step by unhurried step.
"H-hurk."
Hair of a crimson red, like a rising sun. Beautiful eyes, as if luminous obsidian had been set in their place. An arrogant, provocative smile, as though she looked down on all under heaven.
That's the princess. Kariel?
The most beautiful flame of an empire that never sets. Kariel Ardia von Imperium had come to the estate.
To eat the soup tteokbokki Kang Jinwoo had prepared.