Today was the day Frau would visit to taste her first topliya.
I prepared all the ingredients based on the recipe I had found in the basement.
Ingredients from the northern continent were hard to come by,
but if I went out into the city and visited a fairly large market, I could get them by paying a premium.
Thanks to that, the cost of the ingredients alone had risen to the level of a fairly high-end dish,
so topliya had become a food that told cost-effectiveness to go to hell.
Well, if Frau was going to pay one million lira, that wasn’t something I needed to worry about.
What mattered was whether or not I could recreate the taste of the memories Frau wanted.
To be honest, yesterday I had already made and tried one bowl as a test.
It was my first time making and eating a dish called topliya,
but I had to taste it first and confirm there was nothing wrong with the recipe before I could serve it to a customer.
The taste of the topliya I made according to the recipe was…
a meat stew with an extremely distinctive aroma.
I had Aris taste it too,
and even Aris, who seemed like she would eat anything well, must have found it unfamiliar, because she left this review.
—It has a mysterious flavor I can’t really describe!
The cause of that mysterious flavor was the spices.
Come to think of it, there had been quite a few foods like this in my past life too.
It was that feeling people called an “exotic flavor.”
The vibrating smell of cumin when you went to a lamb skewer restaurant.
The scent of cumin wafting through an Indian curry restaurant.
The intense cilantro aroma you could sense in Southeast Asian food.
Food develops differently from region to region,
so depending on the spices commonly used, the style can change drastically.
The northern continent was the same.
Since it was far from the royal capital, its own food culture had developed,
so the spices they used were different from those of the royal capital, and the meat and vegetables differed little by little as well.
The spices used in topliya had a powerful fragrance that wasn’t often used here.
Just as there were people who recoiled and hated cumin, cumin, or cilantro the first time they experienced them,
the spices used in topliya were also the sort that would sharply divide people’s likes and dislikes upon first taste.
It didn’t seem to suit Aris,
but to me, who had no prejudice against various spices, it was quite addictive.
A thick stew made by simmering beef bones into a rich broth, then adding tomatoes, spices, and salt.
If you ate well-seasoned, tender meat together with a warm broth full of exotic fragrance,
it seemed like even a frozen body would quickly thaw from the inside.
Jingle—jingle—
Around lunchtime, the shop door opened, and Frau arrived as promised.
She was still bundled up tightly in fur clothes that didn’t match the weather.
“W-welcomeeee! I’ll show you to your seat!”
Aris, the wet-seaweed ghost, guided Frau to the seat prepared for her.
It was a counter seat with a clear view of the kitchen.
Once Frau sat down, I immediately began preparing the topliya.
“Wait just a bit. I boiled it in advance, so I only need to warm it up a little before serving it.”
“…I told you before, but Master’s topliya had a special taste.”
“I know. That’s why this test is necessary. No matter how special a recipe your master’s topliya used, it must have been some variation on the basic topliya.”
Dishes loved as representative home cooking tended to have just as many variations.
Even when the same person cooked the same dish in the same house,
home cooking wasn’t usually measured out precisely, so the flavor could change every time.
I also knew it would be impossible to truly and perfectly recreate the topliya of Frau’s master that she wanted.
But it would be fine as long as I could grasp the ingredients used, the method of cooking, and the general direction of the flavor.
If I could pinpoint even that much, Frau would be able to recall her master’s topliya.
“Here, this is the classic topliya passed down in the standard way.”
I neatly served a bowl of thick, warm topliya in a deep bowl.
As steam rose in wisps, the dark red stew looked appetizing.
Frau silently stared at the bowl of topliya.
How different was this topliya from the topliya of her master she remembered?
From here on, I intended to figure that out through the tasting comments she gave me.
“…Ugh.”
Frau lifted her spoon, scooped up some topliya, and brought it toward her mouth,
only to stop right in front of it and frown slightly.
“What’s wrong? Is something very strange?”
“It has an unpleasant smell.”
“Did your master’s topliya not have that smell?”
“No. Master’s topliya smelled completely different.”
This was a hurdle right from the start.
If the smell was different, that meant the type of spices used was different.
“Still, taste it carefully and tell me as many differences from your master’s topliya as you can think of.”
“…Okay.”
Frau took a deep breath for a moment,
then put the topliya into her mouth along with a chunk of meat.
Munch, munch, munch…
She seemed to be savoring the taste with her eyes closed.
But her slightly narrowed brow told me this wasn’t the flavor she wanted.
“…How is it?”
“I don’t know how to explain it. But this is definitely a different food.”
“Hmm…”
Since she wasn’t an expert on food, there were limits to how she could express the taste.
After thinking for a moment, I changed my question to draw out the answer I wanted from her.
“What about the size of the meat, the ingredients inside, and how tender the meat is?”
“It looks almost the same. The tenderness of the meat is… I think it’s softer than I remember.”
“What did the topliya in your memory smell like? A sour smell? A sharp smell? Or a sweet smell?”
Frau rolled her eyes upward as if searching her memory, then answered right away.
“…A spicy smell.”
“It smelled spicy?”
“Yes, and it was actually very spicy too.”
It was a completely unexpected answer.
That was only natural, because the topliya recipe I found didn’t include a single ingredient that made it spicy.
It was a little absurd that they called it the same “topliya” when the ingredients and flavor were that different.
The topliya the book taught was a home dish characterized by the taste of its distinctive spices.
If the only thing that was the same was that it contained meat and vegetables, while everything else was completely different, then…
was that really topliya?
Somehow, I understood why Frau hadn’t been able to find anything that tasted like her master’s topliya.
“Why was the food you ate called topliya?”
“Because Master called it topliya.”
“Original topliya isn’t spicy.”
“That’s why I said Master’s topliya was special. For reference, this topliya has nothing in common with the taste in my memory.”
Frau set down her spoon as she spoke.
Not only was the topliya I had served different from the taste she wanted, it seemed it didn’t suit her palate at all.
To get even a few more clues, I asked again.
“Still, you said the ingredients and appearance were similar, right? Did the topliya you ate have a tomato flavor?”
“Mm… did it? I don’t know. I don’t think it had tomatoes in it. Maybe it had a little.”
“Original topliya is a dish that uses tomatoes to give the stew its color. There’s no way it didn’t taste like tomatoes.”
“But I’m telling you what I remember.”
Perhaps she was getting a little tired of answering questions, because Frau glared at me as she spoke.
“Can you really recreate my master’s topliya? Like I said before, once the ice containing Master’s topliya meat melts, there won’t be a second chance after that.”
“Hmm…”
Unconcerned by Frau’s threat, I fell deep into thought.
The only thing my topliya had in common with the topliya made by Frau’s master was the visual appearance…
The taste and aroma were both far removed from it.
If the visuals were the same, then in any case the stew was red.
And yet she said there was no tomato flavor.
On top of that, instead of remembering the intense fragrance of spices, Frau only remembered a spicy smell.
…There was only one possibility I could think of.
“Frau, you said it was spicy when you ate your master’s topliya, right? What kind of spiciness was it?”
“What do you mean, what kind of spiciness? Spicy is just spicy.”
“I’ll ask again. Was it the kind of spiciness where your insides grew hot and it got spicier the more you ate? Or was it a short, intense spiciness that hit you right from the start? Or was it the kind that made your tongue tingle and go numb?”
“Is that important?”
“It is.”
“My insides grew hot… and it got spicier the more I ate.”
So it was a capsaicin-type spiciness.
I felt like I had roughly caught the clue as to why the topliya Frau ate had been red even though it didn’t taste like tomatoes.
That kind of spiciness was something I knew and was used to better than anyone.
After all, in my past life, I had lived in a country where people dipped Cheongyang chili peppers in gochujang and chewed them raw.
The only problem was that this place was a different world from my past life.
I had identified the type of spiciness, but I would need to look into what ingredient that flavor came from.
“All right. You can go back for today. Please stand by until I send the next carrier pigeon.”
“…I’d like you to make Master’s topliya as quickly as possible, if you can.”
“You coming here and tasting it today was really a big help. Just endure a little longer.”
Frau looked at me with a half-doubtful expression, then quietly nodded.
“Um… are you not going to eat any more?”
As Frau prepared to leave, Aris asked.
“…It doesn’t suit my taste.”
“Then may I eat what’s left?”
“Do whatever you want.”
Frau answered bluntly, then left the shop just like that.
“You… didn’t you say this was kind of weird?”
I asked Aris, who had sat down to eat the remaining topliya.
“It did smell strange, so I wasn’t sure about it… but I kept thinking about it.”
“…”
Aris sat in the seat Frau had occupied
and began diligently scooping up the remaining topliya with her spoon.
* * *