Chapter 4
- Welcoming Guests (2)
"Could someone close the lid on that pot over there?"
"Hey, can't you see I'm busy too?"
"Please bring a few small dishes here."
"But I think this isn't a small dish, it's a bowl..."
"Then is this a rice bowl...?"
Right now, the kitchen of the Gyeonggi Provincial Office was chaos, commotion, and pandemonium itself.
The prisoners gathered in the kitchen were bustling about, shouting, and bumping into each other as they moved back and forth without direction.
- Clang, crash!
In the midst of all that, to make matters worse, someone seemed to have dropped a dish.
They had been selling illegal liquor and food, but at their core, they were swindlers who passed off dog meat as something else.
There was no way they could cook a proper dish in a real kitchen.
"Okay, everyone, just a moment!"
It was Ji-young who shouted amidst the chaos in the kitchen.
At this rate, nothing could be done.
In a kitchen, one person had to be in charge to even make a fried egg.
Hadn't she experienced that countless times while cooking in restaurants for years?
"I know a little bit about cooking. I was a chef... no, a cook in my hometown."
At Ji-young's words, the chaotic kitchen fell silent in an instant.
Soon, one of the prisoners asked back with an incredulous look.
"What are you talking about? I don't know where you're from with that strange accent, but in your hometown, women are cooks?"
"She probably just ladled some soup at a tavern."
In this era, only men could be cooks.
Scoffing laughter erupted from here and there, but Ji-young endured it and raised her voice clearly.
"You're free to believe it or not, but if you do as I say, we can finish preparing the food. Then we can all be pardoned. Or we can all go back to that shed or prison from before."
At those words, the burly man who had been picking fights with Ji-young since they were in jail glared and approached.
"Hey, are you saying we should listen to the likes of you? I don't know where you crawled out from, but even after getting beat up, you still run your mouth so well."
Just as the burly man threatened and tried to lay a hand on her.
"Is that really true?"
It was Bong Seondal, the leader of the swindler gang, who suddenly cut in.
"Can you take responsibility for what you just said?"
When Bong Seondal intervened with a serious face, the prisoners who had been chattering all shut their mouths.
Ji-young nodded confidently.
"...If you just follow my instructions, we can finish this feast in no time. But promise me. Promise me you'll follow my instructions no matter what."
Bong Seondal stared at Ji-young's eyes for a moment, then spat out to the people gathered in the kitchen.
"What are you all doing? Didn't you hear? She says we can live if we follow this woman's words."
For some reason, the prisoners seemed to have a strange sense of trust in this small-framed Bong Seondal.
At his words, an atmosphere of agreement was gradually forming among the prisoners.
"Well, we haven't lost anything by doing as Seondal said so far."
"We're going to die anyway, one way or another."
"Let's trust her for once."
The prisoners rolled up their sleeves and looked at Ji-young's face.
Seeing that, Bong Seondal curled up his rat-mustached lips and grinned.
"I've roughly laid the groundwork for you, so go ahead and do as you please."
Judging by how he turned the prisoners' minds in an instant, he was not just a simple braggart.
Now, all that was left was to properly demonstrate her skills.
Ji-young closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
The situation seemed to be turning slightly strange, but it was a golden opportunity to directly make Joseon-era dishes that she had only encountered in ancient documents.
Besides, she had no other choice if she wanted to get out of here.
"The man over there, please watch the cauldron, and you two, please trim the vegetables. And the big man, please slice the meat..."
As Ji-young assigned roles, the kitchen soon began to move busily.
"What are you plotting, sir? Entrusting such an important meal preparation to those of unknown origin, who knows where they crawled out from."
"......"
"Shouldn't we mobilize our government slaves even now?"
Deok-chul, who had come close to Hong Eon-guk, had a worried look on his face.
However, Hong Eon-guk slowly shook his head.
"Government slaves are, after all, affiliated with the government office. If we mobilize them, the responsibility will fall entirely on the officials of the provincial office, won't it?"
"That is true, but..."
"But not those people. They are a group of swindlers wandering the eight provinces, so they are people who have nothing to do with us."
"Ah, I see..."
"Even if the Im family finds fault with the food, we can just shift the blame to them. In the worst case, if we drag them out and punish them in front of the Im family, no matter how harsh they are, they won't be able to find fault any further."
"......!"
Deok-chul looked at Hong Eon-guk's face with a surprised expression.
Hong Eon-guk had already anticipated that the welcoming feast would fail.
He was just trying to shift the responsibility to the prisoners, not themselves.
"Sir..."
"Don't say anything more."
Deok-chul could no longer open his mouth at the desperate measure he had devised to protect his family.
The kitchen of the Gyeonggi Provincial Office.
Preparations for the welcoming feast were in full swing.
"Hey, why is this meat so hard to cut?"
The burly man grumbled constantly as he sliced the meat.
"I've never seen meat like this in my life. I don't know if this is lean meat or whale tendon..."
"Let me check it out."
Ji-young quickly checked the condition of the meat.
A tough texture with dark red flesh and almost no fat.
No white fat was visible at all.
'It looks like they slaughtered an ox used for farming. Well, in this era, they couldn't dream of Korean beef fed with grain feed...'
It was not unreasonable to think so.
The 1++ grade Korean beef with densely packed marbling and abundant fat that modern people love depends on how it is raised.
The key is to feed them plenty of grain feed with a high proportion of carbohydrates while severely restricting their movement to prevent exercise, creating a meat quality with low muscle mass and high fat content.
But that was only possible in modern times, where grain production was overflowing.
In this era, where even the grain for people to eat was scarce and the people starved every spring, there was no way there would be grain feed to feed the cows.
Moreover, there was no way that a luxurious breeding method of feeding valuable cows used for farming without making them do any work would have been developed in this era.
So, most of the beef would be obtained by slaughtering old cows that could no longer work after feeding them grass and making them do farm work.
'But even so, something is a bit strange.'
Even considering the limitations of the era, they could have obtained better meat than this.
If valuable guests were coming, they would have at least caught a young female calf, but what was in the kitchen now was the meat of an old bull.
Could it be that the people who were in the kitchen before deliberately left these ingredients behind?
The fact that they disappeared suddenly this morning, and the half-hearted preparation of ingredients.
There were more than one or two suspicious points.
When she thought that far, Ji-young began to carefully examine the other ingredients as well.
First, she chewed and tasted the vegetables that had been sliced in front of her.
'It's very different from the ingredients I used in modern times. Before variety improvement, the vegetables are generally smaller in size, have a tough texture, and are less sweet.'
Since the vegetables grown in the garden attached to the government office were picked that morning, they would not be in particularly bad condition.
However, they were different from the modern ingredients that Ji-young had handled.
That was because the vegetables we commonly encounter were already the result of hundreds of years of variety improvement, and they had been transformed into much more marketable products than the traditional varieties.
'But the unique aroma of the vegetables is much richer here?'
Thanks to the environment without chemical fertilizers or herbicides, the vegetables grew almost like wild plants among the weeds.
They were tougher, more bitter, and smaller in size, but their flavor was stronger than modern ingredients.
The real problem was something else.
She only then realized that most of the vegetables she was used to using when cooking did not even exist in this era.
Not only tomatoes, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and corn, but also most of the ingredients we are familiar with, such as carrots, onions, peppers, and pumpkins, would only enter this land in the late Joseon Dynasty or the late Korean Empire.
Even cabbage was different from what we know in this era.
It was not the tightly wrapped head cabbage, but the native cabbage with wide, flat leaves, so even kimchi would have to be different from what we know.
Moreover, another problem was that there was no refrigerator in this era.
The basic ingredients other than the vegetables freshly picked from the field were mostly dried radish greens or pickles pickled in soybean paste or soy sauce.
'But since the soybean paste and soy sauce here are all made through natural fermentation, that alone might have a better flavor than the clumsy modern soy sauce.'
The soy sauce commonly available in modern times is a ready-made product made by artificially culturing the fungi needed for fermentation for mass production.
Mass production is possible quickly and safely, but it cannot create the complex flavor that natural fermentation provides.
The reason why soy sauce that is naturally fermented in the traditional way is sold more expensively than factory-made products even in modern times is because of the unique flavor created by the numerous microorganisms involved in fermentation.
From that point of view, the ingredients here are natural fermented foods made in a truly traditional way that is hard to find in modern times.
Ji-young took out the soybean paste and soy sauce from the crock and tasted them on her finger.
'The soy sauce in this era prioritizes preservation, so it has a strong salty taste, but it certainly has the deep flavor of fermentation.'
The soy sauce tightly packed in each crock was not of one kind.
From clear Clear Soy Sauce floating on the surface to Medium Soy Sauce, and thick Dark Soy Sauce, it was variously subdivided according to concentration.
Thanks to the lack of various sauces, soy sauce was prepared in various versions.
If these are properly diluted and mixed according to the dish, there seems to be no shortage of flavor.
So, the only problem right now is this tough beef.
How should I cook this meat?
In this era without ovens or gas stoves.
All that can be seen are the stove and the cauldron.
How can I cook it softly?
At that moment, goosebumps suddenly ran all over Ji-young's body.
'This situation is clearly the same as the situation written in that book, Record of Yearning for the Clouds!'
A method to cook tough meat softly was written in the ancient cookbook Record of Yearning for the Clouds.
If she followed that method, she might be able to overcome this situation.
"Could you bring me a sheet of hanji, that is, paper?"
When she asked the government slave who was helping with errands in the kitchen, the government slave soon returned with a sheet of hanji that had traces of brush writing practice.
In this era, paper was not as cheap as it is now, so it seems that all they could get was used paper.
But this is enough.
Ji-young spread the hanji wide and began to spread sesame oil on the paper with a brush.
'......Since it has come to this, I'll try it once.'
It was a cooking method she had never tried before, but there was no other way.
Before she knew it, Ji-young's eyes were shining with brilliance.
