Festival Special Menu Selection (2)
I came into the mansion, sank into the sofa, and settled in to wait for Arthur.
A servant showed him to a room. He put his things in order and came back out.
"Sir Arthur, have you eaten?"
"Pardon? Not yet... Are you going to cook?"
"I was only asking to be polite."
Arthur stared.
A national specialty, that. Meet a Korean and the first thing out of their mouth is whether you've eaten. The companion model, for someone you haven't seen in ages, runs, Hey, it's been forever since we had a meal together. Run into someone looking a little rough around the edges and it becomes, You eating properly these days? In every respect, a people in deadly earnest about food.
Arthur regarded this Korean style of greeting with open suspicion. The look in his eyes asked, plain as speech, what was wrong with me.
"I'm joking. I'll make you something. I'm a cook — I ought to at least feed a friend, shouldn't I?"
"Oh. I am moved, Jinwoo. The truth is... I volunteered for the escort duty because I wanted to eat your cooking. Though His Grace the Duke did single me out to send."
"Huh. It's that serious?"
From Duke Kailan's point of view, this was his daughter's road home. I understood the wish to leave nothing to chance, and of course he would have pressed the job on Arthur, a squad leader of the knight order. Even so, a squad leader who ought to be buried in work volunteering for the sake of a meal did sound strange.
The moment I let the doubt show, Arthur fired back.
"Of course it is that serious. His Grace Duke Kailan, my squad — they are full of complaints every single day."
"What complaints? The food comes out just fine."
"They say it was better when the Honorary Provisioner was with us. They want to eat that thick yellow curry stew again. The provisioner who succeeded you walks around with a funeral face every day because of it."
"Ah. I do feel a little bad about that."
Why did the heavens birth me — and then birth that black-haired bastard named Kang Jinwoo? Listen to the troops gripe like that every day, and the thought would come on its own. Sorry, though. The sky that made me isn't the sky of this world.
I ought to drop by at least once. There might be something I could do for them. Honestly, rather than help in little bursts, getting back to my own restaurant sooner would do more good. Run the place on a regular schedule, and the soldiers could come by in the evenings and take the edge off their hunger.
It wasn't that I had no desire to go back. A promise, though, was a promise. The decent thing was to keep operating through the festival, and leave after.
"Then, Sir Arthur. Anything you'd like? Celebration noodles?"
"Ghk—! Please don't. Curry. I want curry!"
"A joke, a joke. Curry... would you mind if it's a little different?"
"Of course not. All I want is that spice that warms my whole body from the smell alone."
Thinking back, Arthur had broken through to Sword Expert on the curry I'd made. That curry had leaned heavily on ingredients the knight order already had. What I'd traded for through the Mana Market hadn't amounted to much. Set beside the whole Milk Peach affair, the conclusion was hard to avoid.
Arthur was already right on the verge of breaking through.
My curry had only been a spotter — the kind of assist you get during strength training — and somehow the timing had locked in perfectly. Maybe that was why. Arthur seemed to love curry more than was reasonable. And as it happened, I had been selling a dish in that same family to roaring praise.
I went into the kitchen, made a single serving of Curry Wurst, and brought it out. Not the version I'd reworked as a drinking snack — the original recipe. Roasted potatoes and bread set properly alongside it, food on the level of an actual meal.
Before the plate even touched the table, the sharp perfume of ketchup and curry stabbed the air. Arthur threw his head up and fought to drag every bit of that scent into his lungs.
"Hnnngh. It is definitely curry. And yet it seems as if something else is mixed in...?"
"Give it a try. I think you'll like it."
"Ooh, thank you!"
The plate landed with a clatter, and Arthur's eyes blew wide. A heartbeat later he had fork and knife in a death grip, and the meal was underway. The living room offered nothing but the strike of silver on porcelain. He really had been hungry. You could tell by the way he packed it away, ravenous and blissful at once.
"This is different again from the curry you made back then..."
"Yes. It's a dish called Curry Wurst. Curry powder stirred into a tangy tomato sauce, and spooned over sausage."
"I never imagined tomatoes could become a sauce like this. The sausage hasn't a trace of smell, and with the potatoes I could die happy. It is far too delicious."
"I'm glad it pleases you."
Barely a few minutes later, Arthur had scraped the Curry Wurst down to the glaze. He had a knight's dignity, thankfully, and stopped short of licking the plate — though if I hadn't been in the room, maybe he wouldn't have. The way his eyes clung to that empty dish gave me a certain premonition.
Arthur wiped his mouth with a napkin, thoroughly satisfied. "Haa. That was excellent. Come to think of it, I heard you were running a stall at the Academy. Only for a little while."
"Yes. I am. Why do you ask?"
It was a strange thing to bring up over Curry Wurst. I had only tossed the question back because I couldn't tell where he was headed.
"I wondered if this dish was on the stall menu. It looks more than fit to sell from a stall."
"As expected. You've got an eye."
"So I was right?"
"No. Not this one. I'm making something else."
And there it was again — Arthur's utterly blank face.
It wasn't a joke, though. His eye really was that good. Curry Wurst had started life as German street food. If I was going to sell it, I should have made it the menu from the start. The reason I deliberately hadn't...
Toast and tteokbokki outside a school are the iron rule.
What were students supposed to live on if those two weren't waiting at the gates? It was a quota system of sorts. My own private quota, so that a student's happy snacking life would be dealt out fairly no matter the school district.
Even so, making Curry Wurst a menu item at this late hour felt wrong. Add it to the stall now, and it would become a full-blown festival special. During the Academy festival, merchants poured in thicker than usual, which meant pub owners could set up too. If I stood there selling Curry Wurst on top of that... no. I had only closed the recipe deal this very morning. It would be a knife between the shoulder blades.
So I had been turning over yet another dish. Toast, tteokbokki, drinks — someone might well ask why I was piling on another item. I was leaving soon regardless. Trying everything I could, and banking the data, was the profit in it. I had wandered plenty of places, but I still wasn't born to this world. Market research was something I had to work harder at than the locals.
And if I was doing market research, I wanted it centered on grilled meat. Grilling suited the palate of the people here better than boiling in water. Unless the meat was truly fresh, boiling could wake the gaminess, and that held even for the fine meat of the modern world, where breeding and the livestock trade had been refined to a science. Even for something as simple as boiled pork belly or pork neck, there were people who threw in doenjang, black coffee, a medicinal herbal broth, whatever roots they had on hand. The modern world was lucky to have so many spices for killing that smell. A medieval fantasy world was not so blessed.
So boiling, as a method, had naturally fallen out of favor, unless you were stewing jerky or cooking the meat until it collapsed entirely. Which raised the next question. Was grilling easy, then?
Grilling... not easy.
The act of grilling itself was ancient, born the moment humankind learned to keep a fire. Grilling something just right was a different tale entirely. Anyone who had ever lit charcoal and put meat over it knew the taste: fat dripped, soot bloomed, and what you called charcoal aroma was nothing but burn, meat gone the color of ash. Pan-searing a steak was no kinder. Miss the moment by a hair, and the meat turned to leather as a matter of course. Even in an age when technique was easy to learn, the grill was difficult ground. The Middle Ages could only be worse. People grilled because boiling stank. Grilling it so that it tasted good was far harder.
Which was exactly why I wanted a grilled dish all the more. The gustatory catharsis of a true grill — the kind you couldn't unlock unless a skilled charcoal cook put real care into the fire. Let people who had never in their lives eaten proper charcoal-grilled meat meet that catharsis, and it would be rapture, juices bursting across the tongue. It suited a grand, glittering Academy festival down to the ground. And I wanted to watch people fall over backward because it tasted too good.
"Come to think of it, this must be your first Academy festival, Jinwoo."
"Yes. How many times have you been, Sir Arthur?"
"Not often. I have come twice. But I remember it being rather hard each time."
"Huh? Why?"
I had sunk into the menu problem without noticing. Arthur was the one who brought the festival up. Festivals are fun, and still, play long enough and the tiredness comes. What he meant didn't sound like that pleasant kind of worn-out.
"Most of the Academy grounds, aside from the students' residential quarter, become the festival site, and it is simply too large."
"Aha."
"Keep walking and you grow tired and want to sit, but the stalls are nearly all the stand-and-eat sort. A bench is not easy to claim, either."
"If the grounds are that big, quite a lot of stalls come in, don't they?"
"Yes. But once you are there, the crowds gather only at certain stalls."
"Because those taste better?"
"Less that, and more... people end up gathering at the stalls with intense smells. The grounds are so vast that ordinary food does not even register. They are drawn to distinctive scents."
Arthur took a small sip of water as he laid out what he had seen. The grounds were vast, and the stalls matched them in number. Shops selling ordinary food were everywhere, and people walked right past them to pack into a few particular ones — the shops whose food could seize a nose even across that enormous field, special and fierce.
And the heart of a festival was, of course, the events. People walked to chase them, and merchants sold food you could eat while you walked. But was that really the whole of it? Just as Arthur had said, there had to be people who were simply tired and wanted a seat. There was also the sort who never joined the festival directly, and only drank in the air of it. That mood. One step back, a beer in hand, watching everyone else have their fun.
I listened without a word, and I thought.
What if I just built the whole thing like a pojangmacha street?
Not a little food-truck stall. Haul in a small kitchen. Line simple tables and chairs out in front of it in a row. Off to the side, heap up a charcoal fire, and drown the festival grounds in the smell of grilling meat — the smell that grabs a human by the instinct.
"Okay. Analysis complete."
"Eh— pardon? Complete of what?"
"You were a great help, Sir Arthur. Thank you."
I caught the hand of a thoroughly lost Arthur and shook it. He returned the handshake without much resistance, watching me with a deeply suspicious eye.
This was a guaranteed smash. What I had done at the Academy so far hadn't been a bust, but this was an opportunity past that. Arthur, you lucky bastard — your life just bloomed. I would settle up for the inspiration.
Arcadia Academy, beautiful with its mysterious magic and its grand brick halls. That Academy's front court would soon bustle the way the tented food-stall alleys of Jongno and Euljiro did back home. Legally, of course. A proper permit. Nothing under the table.
I shot up off the sofa and made ready to go.
"J-Jinwoo? Where are you going so suddenly?"
"To see the headmaster."
"Pardon?"
Ermia, come through for me.
First stop, the Academy's headmaster. It was time to get Ermia's permission.