Chapter 75
The next day was a day off too.
Maison Monbel was closed, while One Bowl and the noodle shop were being run by their respective managers.
Elysia said she was going to catch up on her paperwork, while Marie gave me an oddly determined look, as if she intended to leave me alone, and told me to really rest today.
Uncle Bernard also brought me some warm tea after breakfast and told me to rest well.
Regardless, I went down to the kitchen.
It was only natural.
There are times when people need to rest, and times when people who shouldn't be resting need to rest.
I was the latter.
Or, to be more precise, I was the kind of person who could rest, but whose senses grew uneasy when I rested completely.
There was no one in the kitchen.
Morning light streamed through the large windows and illuminated the workbench, while the knives had been cleaned and put away.
Some of the meat brought in from the slaughterhouse the previous day was being kept chilled, and the vegetable crates held root vegetables and herbs that had arrived at dawn.
It was quiet.
I liked this quiet kitchen.
The kitchen was a battlefield when there were guests.
The flames rose, pots boiled, plates went out, someone made a mistake, someone shouted, and someone nearly lost a finger.
I liked that flow too, but the kitchen had an entirely different face when no one was there.
A single knife stroke rang out, and I could slowly feel the grain of the meat splitting beneath my fingertips.
That was when the fact that I was cooking became clearest.
I placed a large chunk of beef on the workbench.
It was a cut Raul had set aside separately.
It looked somewhat rough.
It wasn't shaped elegantly enough to place straight onto a noble's table.
But the grain was good. The fat wasn't unnecessarily thick, and I could see where and how the sinews ran.
I picked up my knife.
I made the first cut slowly.
Meat is ruined when you force your way through it.
You have to read the grain: where to follow it so the meat comes away naturally, where to leave enough so it will hold its shape when cooked, which sinews to remove, and which ones can be melted down through long cooking.
That's not something you can learn from a book.
You have to learn it with your hands.
It had been the same in my previous life.
When I was young, I did it relentlessly.
I went to the early-morning market to collect meat, trimmed it in the corner of the kitchen, and made staff meals with the discarded pieces.
Meat was never cheap, so whenever I failed, I got cursed at by my master or senior cooks, and sometimes I was even hit.
On days when I failed, I burned the taste of that failure into my mind.
After a while, the knife began to know first.
The conditions here were more difficult than they had been back then.
Refrigeration was unreliable, the conditions in which the animals were raised weren't consistent, and the cuts were still divided rather roughly.
So I had to examine them more often. My eyes, nose, and fingertips had to adapt completely to the meat of this world.
I trimmed the surface of the meat and sliced away the fat in thin layers.
I didn't throw the fat away; I collected it separately.
I could use it in sauces or melt it slowly to draw out its aroma.
Some fat was suited to grilling, while some needed to go into broth.
Throwing something away was the last resort.
The chunk of meat gradually changed into the shape I wanted.
Then the kitchen door opened.
“Huh?”
It was Thomas.
He came in with a sleepy face, then stopped when he saw me standing in front of the workbench.
In his hands were a small piece of bread and a few slices of dried meat.
It seemed he'd come to make something quick to eat for himself.
“Chef?”
“You're here.”
“Isn't today a day off?”
“It is.”
Thomas looked back and forth between the knife in my hand and the meat on the workbench.
“Then why are you working?”
“This isn't work.”
I inserted the tip of my knife along a sinew.
“It's training.”
Thomas looked confused.
Understandably so.
It would have been stranger if he had immediately accepted the sight of someone coming down to the kitchen on a day off to trim a huge chunk of meat.
He approached cautiously.
“If it's training… is it like swordsmanship?”
“Something like that. A knife is a chef's sword. You're a chef too, so you should know that.”
Thomas started to smile, but stopped when he realized I was serious.
I lifted one side of the meat to show him the grain.
“Your senses dull even if you fool around for only a few days. Your hands slow down, your eyes grow dull, and your nose becomes lazy. You can't tell at first. The guests might not notice either. But the head chef has to know. I have to know whether I'm worse than I was yesterday, whether I've improved, or whether I've at least maintained my level.”
Thomas listened quietly.
I continued speaking as I trimmed away the fat.
“Cooking doesn't improve like climbing a staircase. You go up a little, drop a little, catch yourself again, and then drop again. The moment you think you're good, you start to fall apart. It's especially dangerous once you have a name. When the guests applaud, the nobles praise you, the imperial palace sends people, and everyone around you gets noisy talking about titles and such, the time you spend holding a knife gets shorter.”
“But Chef, you still…”
“I slip too.”
I said it immediately.
“I get worse too if I fool around for a few days. My sense of taste grows hazy, my trimming speed slows, and my feel for waiting in front of the fire dulls. So even on days off, I have to do a little.”
Thomas couldn't answer.
I arranged the meat to one side and pulled over a crate of vegetables.
The root vegetables that had come in today varied in size.
I deliberately took out a mixture of large and small ones.
I needed to practice cutting them all into the same shape.
At Maison Monbel, sizes had to match, and at One Bowl, everything had to finish cooking at the same time.
The reasons were different, but the result was the same.
The knife began moving again.
I peeled them, trimmed the ends, cut along the grain, and matched their sizes.
If you trimmed them too beautifully, there would be too much waste.
If you were too stingy, the shapes would become uneven.
I had to find the balance between the two.
Thomas stood beside me, staring blankly.
“Should I do that?”
“Not now.”
“Why?”
“Because I'm waking up my hands.”
He made a slightly strange expression at that.
But he didn't leave.
After trimming the vegetables, I set a small pan on the stove.
I rendered a little of the fat I'd removed earlier and added some meat scraps cut into very small pieces.
After searing only the surface over high heat, I added some of the slaughterhouse by-products I'd brought back the day before, along with herbs.
I added very little water and scraped up the flavor stuck to the bottom.
It was the beginning of a sauce.
I wasn't trying to make an impressive dish.
It was simply practice tasting.
I needed to check how the aroma of the fat rose, at what temperature the beef scraps began to develop an off odor, and how much depth the slaughterhouse by-products gave the sauce.
Those were things I had to confirm.
I scooped up some sauce with a small spoon and tasted it.
It was salty.
It had reduced faster than expected.
I lowered the heat and added a little more water.
One of the herbs was too strong, so I removed it.
Instead, I added some root-vegetable trimmings to bolster the sweetness a little.
I brought it back to a boil and tasted it once more.
This time, it wasn't bad.
But the finish was a little heavy.
I considered adding MSG, then stopped.
It would improve the sauce easily, but I hadn't come down here today to take the easy route to making it better.
I had to taste the ingredients themselves.
I simmered the sauce a little longer.
Thomas asked cautiously,
“Chef.”
“What?”
“Why are you going this far when you're not even making something to eat?”
“I am going to eat it.”
“Who is?”
“Me.”
I placed a piece of meat and some vegetables on a small plate, then drizzled over a little sauce.
The meat was a little tough.
‘This cut shouldn't be grilled.’
It needed to be sliced thinly or simmered for a long time.
But it had potential as a sauce.
I quickly jotted that down in my notebook.
The look in Thomas's eyes changed when he saw that.
I knew that look.
Newcomers to the kitchen sometimes looked at me that way.
It was the look of someone who had thought cooking meant making delicious things over a fire, but was seeing for the first time how much stubborn repetition lay behind it.
It was a look that made me a little uncomfortable.
I must have looked that way when I first entered a kitchen too.
I deliberately said it casually.
“Don't look at me like that. I'm just trying not to forget, that's all.”
Thomas shook his head.
“No, Chef. I thought you already knew everything.”
“If I knew everything, why would I practice?”
“Even so, Chef…”
“Thomas.”
When I called his name, he immediately straightened his posture.
“A cook's food starts getting worse the moment that cook believes they know everything. Knowing a lot helps, but thinking you know it all is poison. The ingredients are different every time, the guests are different every time, and my condition is different every time. So I have to keep checking.”
Thomas nodded very slowly.
I handed him a small spoon.
“Taste it.”
He tasted the sauce with a tense expression.
“Uh… it's delicious.”
“And then?”
“Pardon?”
“Don't stop at ‘it's delicious.’ What do you sense?”
Thomas looked flustered.
He tasted a very small amount again. He closed his eyes and thought, then spoke cautiously.
“The meat flavor is strong at first, but it becomes a little heavy afterward. And the herb aroma is nice at first, but it lingers a little at the end.”
I nodded.
“That's right. So it's too heavy to use as a main sauce. But it might work if you mix a little into broth or use it as a dip for bread.”
Thomas's face brightened.
He seemed happy that he'd gotten it right.
“Good. That's how you do it.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Keep tasting things that way. Don't stop at ‘it's delicious’ or ‘it's not delicious.’ Think about why.”
“Yes.”
He looked much more serious than he had a moment ago.
I touched the meat again.
I sorted some pieces for grilling, divided some for broth, and set aside the scraps as candidates for staff meals.
I cut the vegetables into uniform pieces, blanching some, grilling some, and tasting some raw.
The root vegetables of this season had enough sweetness, but a strong earthy flavor.
I had to check whether I needed to peel them more deeply or whether I could counter it with spices.
Thomas seemed to have forgotten that he'd come to make something to eat for himself.
He kept watching from beside me.
There was nothing wrong with simply watching in a situation like this, but giving him small tasks would help him improve faster.
At least, that was what I had learned.
My master had done the same for me.
I deliberately gave him a small task.
“Cut those vegetables to the same size.”
“Yes.”
“Don't use too much force. If your wrist stiffens, the shape will be ruined first.”
“Yes.”
“Don't raise the tip of the knife too high. Don't think of it as pressing down on the ingredient; think of it as passing through.”
Thomas's knife work was still clumsy by my standards.
But it was better than before.
Well, by ordinary cooks' standards, it might have been fine. That was only by my standards, of course.
He needed to practice every day too.
A kitchen couldn't keep running for long just because one person was good.
If I were the only one who knew how to handle a knife, Maison Monbel would eventually collapse along with me the moment my body gave out.
I'd experienced that in my previous life.
A kitchen I had held on to too tightly.
A shop that wavered whenever I was gone.
I mustn't let that happen again.
Thomas cut vegetables for a long while, then spoke quietly.
“I suppose this is what makes you a chef, Chef. You do things like this even on your days off.”
“No.”
I answered immediately.
“You have to do things like this just to be called a chef.”
Thomas wore an expression that showed he was turning those words over for a while.
A little later, he bowed deeply, with a very serious expression.
“I'll do more too.”
“What?”
“Practice. I'm not sure about practicing even on my days off yet, but I don't think I can end up as someone who only does whatever he's told.”
I watched him, then gave a quiet chuckle.
“Don't get too fired up on your own. If you overdo it from the start, you'll injure your wrist.”
“Yes. I'll do it anyway.”
It was a good answer.
The most dangerous thing in a kitchen isn't someone without talent.
It's someone without the desire to learn.
Thomas wasn't that kind of person, at least.
I placed the meat and vegetables I'd just prepared, along with some sauce, on a small plate and handed it to him.
“You said you came to eat breakfast. Eat before you go.”
Thomas received the plate with both hands.
“Thank you.”
He took a bite and his eyes widened.
“Wasn't this for testing?”
“Food made for testing is still food.”
“It's really delicious.”
“I told you before. Don't stop at ‘it's delicious.’ Evaluate specifically what you like and what could be improved.”
Thomas looked flustered, then chewed again.
“The meat is a little tough, but the more I chew, the more flavor comes out. The sweetness of the vegetables makes the sauce's heaviness a little less noticeable. It would be even better with bread.”
“Good. Then bring some bread and eat it.”
Thomas bowed and left with an expression that was almost moved.
A few other employees would probably come over after a while, drawn by the smell.
Whenever I made something in the kitchen on a day off, it eventually became a staff meal. That wasn't a bad thing either.
I picked up my knife again in the now-empty kitchen.
My shoulder was still a little stiff.
Thanks to Marie working it loose, it was much better than the day before.
But thinking of her touch complicated things again in a different way, so I deliberately focused on the grain of the meat.
As the knife sank in, the grain split, and sensation returned to my fingertips.
Good.
This was a language I knew.
I still didn't understand people's hearts, but at least I knew meat a little.
I slowly trimmed the meat and muttered,
“You get rusty if you take a few days off, I'm telling you.”
It was something that would make me sound like a madman if anyone heard it.
But a head chef had to be a little crazy.
You had to be crazy enough to keep moving your knife in places the guests couldn't see, even on days off, in a kitchen with no applause.
That was how the next dish became even a little better than yesterday's.
That was why I was still standing in the kitchen.