The Snack Bar Owner Hides the Tteokbokki (3)
The misunderstanding cleared up faster than I'd expected.
"Here. The thing you wanted."
"Kyaaah! I-it's spicy... water!!"
They'd been carrying on so endlessly—that thing, that thing—that I simply set a bowl of tteokbokki, spicy stir-fried rice cakes, in front of them, and they quieted down all on their own. Quiet in a different sense, admittedly. Still, better to be mistaken for a shop that sold fiery food than one peddling aphrodisiacs.
The three young noblewomen took careful little bites with their prim mouths, and then they had absolutely no idea what to do with themselves.
"Would you... like some more?"
"N-no! I'b fine. I'm fine, so just—something to cool my mouth...!"
"Here. Have a drink."
"Th-thank yuu..."
Thank you, I figured. I poured a little peach smoothie for each of the young ladies as they writhed under the heat.
It's a famous bit of trivia by now, but spiciness belongs to the sense of pain. That doesn't mean it fails to count as a flavor. Unlike saltiness or sweetness, which the body takes in chemically, heat sits closer to touch—pain born of a burning sensation. Because of that, spice never dulls the way other senses do, no matter how much of it you eat. There is no adapting to it.
And what does that mean?
"Mmph—hah! Sweet, and so smooth... I-I think I could manage one more bite!"
"Uuugh... spicy...!"
It means you get to watch a human being, so-called lord of all living things, drop in a single instant to the intelligence of a fish. They know it hurts, and still they eat. Then they eat again. Spice was a terrifying flavor—terrifying enough to pulp a person's wits into mush.
And so the young ladies shuttled between heaven and hell until they had cleaned out every last piece of the tteokbokki I'd given them.
"Haaah. So this is what Lady Ishilla and Lady Kariel were talking about. Not some kind of potion..."
"I thought as much. Those two would never take strange medicine. Lady Elianor, you really do leap to conclusions."
"What? You're the one who begged and begged me to come along because you were too embarrassed to show up alone, Lady Pailrose...!"
"Elina, Perion, I don't care which is which. How did you even know about the tteokbokki? It isn't something I sell."
Even if a visit never turned into a purchase, that was fine. From a shop's point of view, a customer simply pausing at the door was welcome enough. Other passersby would glance in on their way past, and before long they became potential customers themselves. Even so, the least anyone could do was look at the menu that was actually there. Barging in and making demands out of nowhere made them less customers than nuisances.
I asked after the route by which they'd discovered the tteokbokki—the heart of the problem.
"It's not Elina, it's Elianor! And how we found out was just... it sort of happened."
"It sort of happened? You expect me to be satisfied with that?"
"If you aren't satisfied, there's nothing to be done. It really did just sort of happen, so it's the truth!"
"Haa... I wasn't going to bring this out."
But the young lady—Elina, no, Elianor—met me with shameless, brazen defiance, as if she were the injured party. We'd only met today. I couldn't imagine where that confidence came from. I'd been ready to let it pass if they simply answered a polite question. That was no longer an option. Customers: failed. Troublemakers: passed with honors.
I played the trump card I'd meant, if I could help it, never to use.
"W-what is that? You think the proud House of Elianor would fold over a mere threat?"
"I'll file a complaint with Principal Ermia."
"Eh?"
"I'll tell her that a restaurant operating properly, with every permit in order, was slandered on a whim as an adult shop selling aphrodisiacs."
The moment I said I would take it to Ermia, the color drained from the young ladies' faces in real time. Exactly. They should have looked into who they were dealing with before they came. Ermia Belfast—supreme authority within the Academy, power without limit. And that woman was in my debt. A name they could never have imagined in their wildest guesses left my mouth, and their attitudes changed at once.
"N-no, it wasn't just 'somehow.' Lady Ishilla and Lady Kariel, every night..."
"Every night, those two did what."
"Every night... they came out of the same room soaked in sweat!!"
"What."
This... I had the feeling I shouldn't hear any more. A situation I hadn't imagined in the slightest had just come out of a noble girl's mouth. The young lady, who had been wavering over whether to speak, seemed to decide it was all out now. She gave up and spilled the whole eyewitness account.
"They come out of the same room almost every single night, and every time they're drenched in sweat. And there's this sweet peach scent! Put that together and anyone would have no choice but to believe it was... that!"
"Whoa, whoa. Calm down."
"So I wanted to know what on earth the two of them were so devoted to, and I followed them during the day... and they only ever stopped at this shop."
Fwoosh—!
Lady Elianor's soft, fair face ripened to a brilliant red. Mm. Er. What was I supposed to say to that...
"Lady... Elianor has quite the imagination. Yes."
"It isn't that I have a rich imagination! When you see a lily romance like that, of course anyone would—"
"Stop talking, Lady Elianor! Stop!"
Mmph—mmph!
Lady Elianor had gone runaway, like a locomotive whose brakes had failed. Lady Pailrose—Perion, no—who had been watching with a nervous face, couldn't bear it any longer and clamped a hand over her mouth.
"W-we'll leave the payment here. We're sorry for making such a disgraceful scene!!"
Clink—!
"Ahem, ahem! Honestly. Nothing but indecent talk, and then off they go. Isn't that right, Jinwoo?"
"You're not wrong... whew."
The young ladies, suspiciously devoted to lilies of the romantic sort, fled just like that. The money they left as payment... a full five silver coins. Generous spenders. For that much, I would forgive the would-be complaint. Eilenna and I breathed out in relief at the storm that had passed.
But young ladies like these were only the beginning.
"Excuse me, is this the place that sells that sticky, burning item?"
"We heard you sell a certain... solution. The peach-scented kind."
"I came because of the rumors... do you still have any left?"
Once business hours began, half the customers bought toast and ate it with every sign of enjoyment. The other half were nuisances who had come hunting a rumor no one could say where it had started. The ones who bought a piece of toast and only then asked about the rumor were the respectable ones. Most of the troublemakers simply appeared, got in the way of business, and left. It wasn't one or two of them, either. More than ten a day kept showing up to do exactly that, and at this rate it was going to sour our reputation...
"This won't do. I'll have to make it."
"Hm? Make what?"
Worn out from dealing with the nuisances, Eilenna barely managed to lift her head and look at me. You've come all the way across the world to a foreign land, and the hardship never lets up, does it, Eilenna.
There was nothing to be done about the rumor having spread. As the old saying went, put three people together and they can conjure a tiger; a baseless rumor could not be stopped from forming, or from traveling. So the heart of the problem was not suppressing its spread.
"Let's make peach purée."
"Peach purée? All of a sudden?"
In the end it was nothing but a cloud of empty controversy. Controversy like that only needed to be buried under a bigger one—under something hot enough to become the talk of the town. The stock of frozen wheat-flour rice cakes was piling up anyway, and if I could make peach purée and simply register it in the Mana Market, I wouldn't have to borrow Eilenna's Wind Cutter.
The snack bar owner hides the tteokbokki.
It was time to officially release, upon the Academy, the tteokbokki I had kept locked tight away. Together with its sweet, cool partner: peach drink.
Thud—!
The moment I got home, I exchanged a huge quantity of peaches through the Mana Market. A mountain of them rose high enough to fill the wide counter. That distinctive peach fragrance—the kind that lifts the mood from the smell alone—filled the whole mansion. My own mood, though, was not particularly pleasant.
"Lady Eilenna, are you prepared?"
"W-wait. When are we supposed to get through all of this..."
"I am."
Stand still and serve, and in the end you get left behind. Even if today was going to be rough, I had to renew my resolve for the sake of a new leap forward.
The peach smoothie I had made for Princess Kariel last time had been pleasant enough, with the soft chew of fresh peach, but it was not the drink I had been aiming for. I hadn't had time to make purée then. Today was different. Mayonnaise, ketchup, even tomato sauce had all been registered in the Mana Market. There was no reason peach purée should be any different. If peach purée failed, that would be pure bad faith—proof the status window didn't know the first thing about cooking.
First I took out a large pot. Not merely a big pot—the biggest pot in the kitchen. I filled it with water and set it over the fire.
Purée: grinding an ingredient fine until it becomes thick and smooth. It varies with the ingredient, but most purées are heated without any added water, so the ingredient's own moisture can evaporate. Drive off that moisture, and the original flavor and sweetness concentrate by just that much. Even so, the reason I was boiling enough water to submerge every peach was simple.
"Lady Eilenna, until that water boils, please score the peaches on the side opposite the stem."
"Got it. But we're not peeling them?"
"We'll peel them right along the cuts we make."
Snick, snick—
Score the skin in a cross and blanch the fruit briefly in boiling water, and the peel comes away far more easily. If you're only peeling one or two peaches to eat, a knife is fine. To get the skins off a mountain of peaches like this, though, a single blanch was efficient beyond any comparison. I opened the conversation while cutting crosses into the skins with a paring knife. The water would take a while to boil anyway. A bit of quiet talk would make the wait less dull.
"Lady Eilenna, do you miss Nuardel?"
"Mm... sometimes I think of how peaceful it was, but I'm all right for now. Set against the span of my life, this moment is only an instant, so I ought to feel it fully."
"Hah. Must be the years. A sage. A proper sage."
"W-what?! I'm not that old! By elven standards I'm still a youth!"
"Oh? Then how old are you?"
The usual WWE of teasing Eilenna.
Crack—!
Today, though, it seemed I had accidentally booked a UFC match. The moment the subject of age came up, the peach in Eilenna's hand exploded.
"Jinwoo... shall we focus on the peaches?"
"Yes, ma'am."
Right. What did age matter, anyway? Plenty of young people shuffled through life half-dead. Mindset was what counted. Yes. In that sense, Eilenna was the very spring of youth. A fresh green sprout, no question—a young woman through and through.
We talked pleasantly, and before I knew it most of the peaches were scored. The water was starting to bubble as well. The timing was perfect.
"Lady Eilenna, could you fill that big basin with cold water?"
"Mm, got it."
I asked her for cold water to plunge the peaches into the moment they were blanched.
Splash—!
Then I dropped every scored peach into the water at a rolling boil. Cool fruit went in, and the temperature dipped for an instant. That didn't matter much. What mattered was heat enough to break the cell walls between skin and flesh. Those walls failing, so the bond between flesh and peel went slack—that was the point.
After about thirty seconds, I scooped the peaches out with a large skimmer.
Plop—!
Each one went straight into the ice-cold water Eilenna had prepared. The boiling water had already broken the cell walls, and the skins had started to loosen along the scores. Drop them into cold water right away, and the swollen cells contract. So you can peel a peach almost the way you'd peel a banana.
"Oh... I knew you could blanch tomatoes to peel them, but I didn't know it worked on peaches. This is easy!"
"Right? Set the peeled ones beside the cutting board. I'll slice them."
Wow. With two of us, it could be this easy. I was starting to regret all the groaning I had done alone until now. Eilenna or anyone else—I was going to put them to good use from here on.
Takatakatak—!
I sliced the peaches fine. Not into pleasant bites—as small and thin as I possibly could. Now the peaches' moisture had to evaporate, and for that to happen efficiently there needed to be plenty of openings for the water to escape, and plenty of surface touching the heat. Compare pieces cut thin and fine against pieces merely cut to eat, and the speed of evaporation was the difference between heaven and earth.
By the time I had sliced like a madman and both the board and my hands were wet with juice, I dumped every last bit of chopped peach into the big pot.
Ssssszzzz—!
Moist peach met the fiercely heated bottom of the pot and raised a sound like rain. I caught my breath and opened my mouth.
"Whew. That's everything, then."
"Huh. Really? It's simpler than I thought."
"That was a lie, actually."
We had only cleared the biggest hurdle. It wasn't completely finished. Still, what remained was stirring in sugar and lemon juice and cooking it slowly, then, once it was soft enough to fall apart completely, straining it fine through a sieve until it was done. Beside me, Eilenna was stuck on the word.
A lie? What's a lie?
"What I mean is, it might as well be finished. Time will take care of what's left."
"Aha. But does making it this way taste better?"
"Hah. Now that's a hurtful thing to say. Of course it tastes better."
For easy math, call it ten peaches at three hundred grams apiece. Even if you subtract the weight of skin and pit and call what remains two kilograms, turn it into purée and you get five hundred milliliters—a liter at most. Evaporate the moisture from those sweet peaches, compress them into something sweeter still, then add the sugars drawn out by the heat and the sugar you stir in on top of that. If that didn't taste better, the laws of the world were wrong.
More than an hour passed while I cooked them down until the moisture had evaporated just enough. Straining it all fine through a sieve and portioning it out took another two. Now and then Eilenna tasted the purée, ears pricked straight up, hands shivering. Yes, yes. It couldn't help but be delicious.
"Hurry, hurry and make it, Jinwoo!"
"Yes, yes. Just a moment."
I set aside a little of the finished purée and set about renewing the peach drink. The original recipe used skim milk—milk with the fat removed. The only reason to use skim milk was to improve how widely the drink could be served, and how well it kept. Anyone who could drink dairy like an ordinary person could use regular milk, or powdered milk, without any real problem.
First I mixed water and lemon juice into the peach purée I had made with such care. What I had made for Kariel had been high in milk, a ratio you could fairly have called a yogurt smoothie. To recreate the signature texture of that famous canned peach milk—soft, full of flavor, and never sticky—only a small amount of milk was right. That earlier batch had veered onto the smoothie path because there had been no purée. Today I was following the original recipe. The milk went in only with the sense that its fat and softness were bridging the purée and the water. Truly just a splash. Making one two-hundred-milliliter glass, a little under twenty milliliters?
Trickle—
White milk spread softly through water gone golden with peach purée. Then I stirred until the ingredients were well mixed, and it was done.
"There. Milk Peach, complete. Please try it."
"Milk Peach? That's a different name from what you made before. All right... I'll try it!"
I had named it Milk Peach, more or less. I couldn't call it milk-and-peach drink every single time, and lifting the product name straight off the can would have pricked my conscience. A drink whose heart was the softness of milk and the sweetness of peach—the name seemed good enough.
Gulp, gulp—!
Eilenna took the Milk Peach, sipped, and then tipped her head all the way back and inhaled the drink. Watching her ears quiver along with the sound of her swallowing was a different kind of fun.
"Pwah—haah! This... this is too good! I never knew sweet peach and the flavor of milk would suit each other like this..."
"Well? Eat it with tteokbokki and you'd die happy, wouldn't you?"
"Yes! I feel like I could eat it forever!"
Watching Eilenna's adorable reaction, I moved to register the peach purée in the Mana Market.
This ingredient's mana density is high.
Do you really wish to register it?
What. I've never seen one of these.
A warning I had never once seen since gaining the status window had appeared. Purée could be thought of as compressing the flavor of a great quantity of ingredient into high density. Both the method and the peaches I had used as ingredients came from the Mana Market, so the mana density of this peach purée seemed to have risen as well. Among everything I had registered there so far, this purée was the first item made entirely from Mana Market ingredients. But then... wasn't that a good thing? I didn't know what effect would appear, but in the end it had to be a positive one.
It probably doesn't matter.
I pressed the register button without much concern.
Whoosh—
Along with that familiar sensation, the peach purée was registered in the Mana Market. The big problems were all solved now. An otherworld snack bar. Official business at the Academy was about to begin in earnest.