“……You’re deciding before you’ve even heard what I’m going to order?”
The young magician in fur clothes asked, looking somewhat surprised.
“Our restaurant is the kind that caters to the customer’s order anyway.”
“Your life is on the line…… There won’t be a second chance.”
“I take the customer’s order and serve a dish that matches it. I just have to satisfy you, right?”
I couldn’t exactly say that I wasn’t afraid even if she came at me to take my life,
so I wrapped it up as confidence in my cooking.
The girl was visibly flustered.
The force she’d had when she first entered the shop had diminished.
At any other restaurant, if she’d laid down a condition like that, they would have recoiled and given up immediately.
“So, what’s your name? From the look of you, you seem to have come from quite far away.”
“……Frau. I came from the Northern Continent.”
“From the Northern Continent, all the way here?”
The Northern Continent was a region you had to cross a sea full of drifting ice to reach.
Because ships ran a high risk of being wrecked on ice floes, it had little exchange with the continent.
Now that I thought about it, Frau had her entire body bundled up in fur clothing.
She was probably still wearing the clothes she wore back in her homeland.
Since she was cloaked in cold mana and chill was pouring out from her body,
she didn’t seem to feel hot even while wearing fur.
That made me even more curious about the order Frau was going to place with me.
After all, she had crossed the sea and come that far from the Northern Continent just to order a single dish.
“So, what’s your order?”
When I asked, Frau opened the clasp of the travel bag slung at her side.
Then she took something out from inside and showed it to me.
“This is……”
What she took out was a transparent block of ice, clear enough to see right through.
Inside the ice was something that looked like a small piece of seasoned meat.
Judging by the powerful mana I could feel from it, it was not ordinary ice.
“I want you to perfectly recreate the dish inside this.”
“It’s just one piece of meat. That’s not much of a dish, is it?”
“I ate the rest. But I preserved this one piece perfectly.”
I carefully examined the meat inside the transparent block of ice.
It was a diced piece of meat, about the size of two finger joints.
From the color on the outside, it looked like meat that had been seasoned very thoroughly.
If you took a piece of braised short rib from galbijjim, removed the bone, and froze it, it would look exactly like that.
“So you want me to perfectly recreate the original dish based on the meat preserved inside this ice?”
Nod, nod.
Frau nodded.
Since she said she came from the Northern Continent, I had already known a special order would come in.
But I hadn’t expected an order this strange and difficult.
Well, I was still going to take it.
I asked Frau a few things I was curious about regarding the dish.
“It must be something people originally eat in your homeland, right? Then couldn’t you just go find someone who makes the same food?”
“In my hometown, it’s a dish called Topliya. It’s home cooking, so every household uses different ingredients, and every recipe is different.”
“Ah…… so that’s what it is.”
I understood the situation instantly.
Among traditional home dishes, there were often foods like that.
Foods with a standardized basic recipe, but whose flavors changed from household to household as they were passed down as home cooking.
Even if the menu had the same name, one family added this ingredient, another family added that ingredient……
Kimchi jjigae was exactly like that, wasn’t it?
Since every household had a slightly different way of boiling it, the flavor changed too.
Just like the kimchi jjigae your mother made was different from the kimchi jjigae at a restaurant.
“Topliya, huh…… It’s a name I’ve never heard before, at least.”
“Can you really do it? It isn’t too late. If you think you can’t, I don’t mind if you refuse.”
“No, I’ll take the order. I just need a little more information.”
Topliya.
It was a dish name I was hearing for the first time.
If the meat preserved inside the ice was part of Topliya,
then I could at least tell that it was a dish containing seasoned meat.
But even for me, recreating a dish from just that would be difficult.
In the first place, recreating the taste of a dish I had never eaten before was close to impossible.
“First of all, what kind of Topliya is it that you want?”
I asked Frau.
“If I’m going to serve the food you want, I need to know everything connected to that food. I’m not just talking about the ingredients used in the dish or the recipe. What kind of food is this Topliya to you? What meaning does it have, and why did you come this far in search of someone who could recreate it?”
The food Frau wanted was not an ordinary dish.
If a dish was made with a difficult recipe and precious ingredients, I could make it as long as I had the cooking skills.
But in order to draw out the taste of a memory sleeping inside someone’s mind, I needed to know the story tied to the food as well.
For example, say there was a simple piece of bread.
Even if it was truly simple, cheap bread that was easy to make, it could have a special taste to someone.
If they had eaten that cheap bread when they were at their limit after starving for several days,
then to that person, that cheap bread would be etched into their memory more powerfully than any other food.
Even if their circumstances improved later and they ate food far more delicious,
nothing would be engraved as strongly in their memory as the bread they had eaten back then.
That was why I needed to know.
In order to figure out what was necessary to recreate the flavor of the food Frau had eaten.
“This Topliya…… was something my master often made for me.”
Frau gazed deeply at the piece of meat inside the ice and continued speaking.
“My master was a person known as the ‘Ice Witch.’ In our homeland, she was respected and feared at the same time. I was her only adopted daughter, and her one and only disciple.”
“Then the master who used to make Topliya for you is now……?”
“She passed away. From mana disease.”
Frau’s expression darkened noticeably as she answered.
Mana disease…… It was a fatal illness that high-ranking magicians sometimes contracted and died from.
The basis of magic was to operate and conceptualize the mana flowing through one’s body.
However, some magicians dabbled in forbidden arts and damaged the flow of mana inside their bodies.
When someone contracted mana disease, at first their body became unable to use magic.
Then they lost their sight, their hearing, and even the ability to speak, before finally reaching death.
I didn’t know what forbidden art Frau’s master had been researching to end up that way,
but if she had died of mana disease, then it likely had not been a pleasant end.
“Then what’s inside this ice is……”
“Yes. It’s the last Topliya my master made for me before she died.”
“So you didn’t eat it all, and saved one piece of meat inside the ice?”
“……Yes. When the last piece was left, I thought that if I ate it, I would never be able to eat my master’s Topliya again.”
Frau lightly stroked the transparent ice containing the piece of meat with the tip of her finger.
Ice frozen by magic would not melt at all as long as mana was supplied to it,
so there was no moisture on its surface, and it looked like a hard, transparent crystal.
I understood what Frau wanted.
Even if she was an adopted daughter, what was inside that ice was, in effect, her mother’s final cooking.
It seemed like it would be an extremely difficult order,
but I found myself wanting to challenge the taste of the memory Frau longed for.
“All right. There’s one thing I’d like to confirm, if that’s okay.”
“……What is it?”
“The reason you place your order with a chef’s life as collateral is because the meat inside that ice is the only Topliya made by your master that exists in the world, right? If we melt it and use it to recreate the dish, it can never be restored to its original state.”
Even for me, perfectly recreating a dish I had never seen before with only one chance was impossible.
That was why I needed to make certain why Frau insisted there was only one chance.
If it simply meant I only had one chance to serve the dish, then this was an impossible task.
“……That’s right.”
“Conversely, if I don’t melt and use that, then no matter how many times I serve you food, the chance won’t be spent…… Is it all right for me to think of it that way?”
“My master’s Topliya is special. And there’s no recipe left behind. Even if you make ordinary Topliya and serve it to me, it won’t be the flavor I want.”
“That’s fine. Even without using the piece of meat inside that ice, there’s a way to get close to your master’s Topliya. As long as you cooperate enough.”
“……How?”
Frau lifted her head, her eyes widening slightly at my words.
“You clearly remember the taste of your master’s Topliya, don’t you? That’s why you couldn’t forget that taste, crossed the sea, and went searching for an exceptional chef who could recreate your master’s Topliya.”
“……”
“First, I’ll use your memory to adjust the flavor of the Topliya until it gets reasonably close. Then, when I think the time has come, I’ll use the meat inside that ice. You can cooperate with me, right?”
“Wh-what do I have to do? If we do that, can you really recreate my master’s cooking?”
“You just have to eat the Topliya I make for you and tell me what’s different from your master’s Topliya.”
Frau’s eyes trembled slightly.
From her perspective, it must have been an offer she had no reason to refuse.
In any case, Frau’s goal was to be able to eat the Topliya her master had made for her again.
The reason she was protecting the piece of meat inside the ice to the point of making threats was ultimately because of that.
Moreover, though it was a special order from a customer, I, too, had grown interested in this matter.
This was, in effect, no different from restoring a lost recipe.
Some cooking recipes were passed down over the years,
but many others were lost, their lineages cut off.
Reviving such a recipe with my own hands was meaningful to me as a chef as well.
Frau stared at me silently.
I didn’t know what she was thinking, but I waited for her answer.
A moment later, Frau opened her lips.
“……All right. If something like that will really help recreate my master’s Topliya, then I’ll help as much as you need.”
* * *