Chapter 4:
Entertaining Guests (2)
“Over there, could you please close the lid on that pot?”
“Oh, come on, can’t you see I’ve got my own work to do?”
“Bring me a few small bowls over here.”
“But these don’t look like small bowls—they seem more like larger dishes…”
“Then are these ones serving bowls…?”
Right now, the kitchen of the Gyeonggi Provincial Office was utter chaos, pandemonium incarnate.
The prisoners gathered inside were milling about in confusion, chattering aimlessly as they bumped into each other left and right.
—Clang, crash!
In the midst of it all, as if things weren’t bad enough, someone had apparently dropped a dish.
They claimed to have come selling illicit liquor and food, but in essence, they were fraudsters who’d been peddling dog meat as something else.
There was no way they could properly cook in a real kitchen.
“Wait, just a moment!”
The one who let out a sharp yell amid the massive disorder unfolding in the kitchen was Ji-yeong.
At this rate, they wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything.
In a kitchen, if one person didn’t take charge and direct the whole operation, you couldn’t even fry an egg.
Hadn’t she experienced that countless times over the years while cooking in restaurants?
“I know a bit about preparing food. Back home, I was a che… no, a head cook.”
At Ji-yeong’s single utterance, the chaotic kitchen fell silent in an instant.
Soon, one of the prisoners asked back with a face full of disbelief.
“What’s that supposed to mean? Your accent sounds strange—I don’t know where you’re from, but in your hometown, do women work as head cooks?”
“Probably just stirred up some noodle soup at a roadside tavern.”
In this era, being a head cook was a job reserved solely for men.
Snide laughter erupted here and there, but Ji-yeong bit her tongue and raised her voice clearly and steadily.
“Whether you believe me or not is up to you, but if you follow my instructions, we can finish preparing the food. Then everyone can receive a pardon. Otherwise, we can all just go back to that shed—or prison, whatever it was.”
At those words, the burly man who’d been arguing with Ji-yeong since they were in the cell glared and approached her.
“Oh, so we’re supposed to listen to the likes of you now? I don’t know where you rolled in from, you wench, but even after getting a beating, that mouth of yours sure runs well.”
Just as the burly man growled threats and raised his hand to strike her.
“Is that true?”
The one who suddenly interjected was Bong Seon-dal, the leader of the fraudster gang.
“Are you willing to take responsibility for what you just said?”
As Bong Seon-dal cut in with a serious expression, the prisoners who’d been chattering noisily all shut their mouths.
Ji-yeong nodded boldly.
“…If you just follow my lead, we can wrap up a banquet table like this in no time. But promise me this: no matter what, you’ll obey my instructions.”
Bong Seon-dal gazed steadily into Ji-yeong’s eyes, then abruptly tossed out to the people gathered in the kitchen.
“What are you all doing? Didn’t you hear? If we follow this woman’s words, we can survive.”
For some unknown reason, the prisoners seemed to hold a peculiar trust in this small-statured Bong Seon-dal.
With just his one remark, an atmosphere of gradual acceptance began to form among the prisoners.
“Well, following Seon-dal’s lead has never done us wrong before.”
“Anyway, we’re dead either way at this point.”
“Might as well trust her once.”
The prisoners rolled up their sleeves and looked toward Ji-yeong’s face.
Confirming that sight, Bong Seon-dal curled his lips—framed by his mouse-like mustache—into a grin.
“I’ve laid out the mat for you, so go ahead and give it your best shot without worry.”
Seeing how he turned the prisoners’ minds in an instant, he clearly wasn’t just some boastful charlatan.
Now, all that remained was to properly demonstrate her skills.
Ji-yeong closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
The situation seemed to be unfolding a bit strangely, but this was a golden opportunity to personally try making Joseon-era dishes that she’d only encountered in ancient cookbooks until now.
Moreover, to escape from here, there was no other choice.
“You over there, sir, keep an eye on the cauldron. You two here, please trim the vegetables. And the big guy, slice the meat…”
As Ji-yeong assigned roles, the kitchen soon began to bustle with activity.
…
“What are your intentions, sir? Entrusting such an important meal preparation to these rootless nobodies who rolled in from who knows where.”
“…”
“Shouldn’t we mobilize our own government slaves even now?”
Deok-chul, who had sidled up close to Hong Eon-guk, wore a face etched with unrelenting worry.
However, Hong Eon-guk slowly shook his head.
“The government slaves are, after all, affiliated with the provincial office. If we mobilize them, the responsibility will fall squarely on the officials of the office, won’t it?”
“That may be so, but…”
“But those people are different. They’re a band of fraudsters wandering the eight provinces, with no connection to us whatsoever.”
“Ah, then…”
“Even if the Im father and son find fault with the food, we can just shift the blame to them. In the worst case, we drag them out and punish them in front of the Im father and son—then, no matter how harsh those bastards are, they won’t be able to pursue it further.”
“…!”
Deok-chul looked at Hong Eon-guk’s face with a shocked expression.
Hong Eon-guk had already anticipated that the guest reception would fail.
He was merely trying to divert the responsibility away from themselves and onto the prisoners.
“S-Sir…”
“Say no more.”
Deok-chul could no longer open his mouth in the face of that desperate stratagem—born of bitter necessity to protect his family, accepting sacrifice as the price.
…
The kitchen of the Gyeonggi Provincial Office.
Preparations for the banquet table to be served at the guest reception were in full swing.
“Oh man, why won’t the knife cut into this damn meat?”
The burly man grumbled incessantly as he sliced the meat.
“I’ve never seen meat like this in all my life. Is this lean meat or whale tendon or what…”
“Let me check it for you.”
Ji-yeong quickly inspected the state of the meat.
The tough texture of the dark red flesh, almost devoid of fat.
Not a trace of white marbling was visible.
‘It looks like they’ve slaughtered an ox used for farm work. Well, in this era, dreaming of Hanwoo beef raised on grain feed would be impossible…’
It wasn’t unreasonable to think so.
The marbled, fat-rich 1++ grade Hanwoo that modern people favour depends on the breeding method.
The key is feeding them a high-carbohydrate grain diet to their fill while severely restricting movement to minimize muscle and maximize fat in the meat.
But that’s a breeding technique only possible in the modern era, where grain production overflows.
In this time, when even people go hungry during the barley hump and peasants starve to death, there’s no way they’d have grain feed to spare for cattle.
Moreover, there’s no chance that such a luxurious breeding method—fattening up valuable oxen without making them work, just for the sake of it—would have been developed in this era.
So, most beef would come from slaughtering old oxen that had been fed grass, worked in the fields, and could labor no more.
‘But even so, something feels off about this.’
Even accounting for the era’s limitations, it shouldn’t be impossible to procure better meat than this.
With important guests arriving, they could at least have slaughtered a young heifer, yet what was in the kitchen now was meat from an old bull.
Could it be that the previous kitchen staff had deliberately left behind such ingredients?
Their sudden disappearance from this morning, along with the half-hearted preparation of materials.
There were more than a few suspicious points.
As her thoughts reached that far, Ji-yeong began meticulously examining the other ingredients as well.
First, she chewed and tasted the greens that had been sliced in front of her.
‘They’re quite different from the ingredients I used in the modern world. Since variety improvements haven’t happened yet, the vegetables are overall smaller, tougher in texture, and less sweet.’
These were vegetables grown in the office’s attached garden plot and pulled fresh that morning, so their condition wasn’t particularly bad.
It was just that they were far removed from the modern ingredients Ji-yeong had handled.
And no wonder—the vegetables we commonly encounter are the result of centuries of selective breeding, transformed into far more marketable forms than their native varieties.
‘But the inherent aromas in these vegetables are much richer here, aren’t they?’
Thanks to an environment free of chemical fertilizers or herbicides, these vegetables had grown almost like wild plants amid the weeds.
They might be tougher, more bitter, and smaller, but their flavours were undeniably stronger than those of modern produce.
The real problem lay elsewhere.
It was only now that she realized most of the vegetables she was accustomed to using in her everyday cooking didn’t even exist in this era.
Not just tomatoes, potatoes, sweet potatoes, or corn, but even carrots, onions, peppers, and pumpkins—most ingredients familiar to us only entered this land in the late Joseon period or during the Korean Empire.
Even cabbage was different from what we know in this time.
It wasn’t the tightly wrapped head cabbage, but a native variety with leaves spreading wide and flat, so even kimchi couldn’t help but differ from the form we’re familiar with.
On top of that, another issue was the absence of refrigerators in this era.
Beyond freshly picked vegetables from the fields, basic ingredients were mostly dried radish greens or pickled vegetables preserved in soybean paste or soy sauce.
‘But the soybean paste and soy sauce here are all made through natural fermentation, so in that regard, they might have even better flavour than the mediocre modern versions.’
The soy products commonly available in the modern world are mass-produced using artificially cultured microbes necessary for fermentation.
It’s quick and safe for large-scale production, but it can’t replicate the complex flavours that come from natural fermentation.
Even today, traditionally made, naturally fermented soy products sell for higher prices than factory ones because of the unique flavours created by the involvement of numerous microorganisms in the process.
From that perspective, the ingredients here were essentially rare, authentic native fermented foods made in the true traditional way—something hard to find in the modern world.
Ji-yeong dipped her finger into the soybean paste and soy sauce brought from the jars and tasted them.
‘The soy products of this era prioritize preservation, so the saltiness is a bit strong, but they definitely have that deep fermented flavour.’
The soy sauce crammed into the jars wasn’t just one type.
From the clear, light soy sauce skimmed from the top, to medium soy, and thick, dark soy—divided variously by consistency.
Because sauces weren’t diverse, soy sauce was instead stocked in multiple versions.
If she diluted and combined them appropriately depending on the dish, it seemed there’d be no shortage for flavouring.
So, the immediate problem was just this tough beef.
How should she cook this meat?
In this era, without ovens or gas ranges.
All that was visible were the stove hearth and cauldrons.
How could she make it tender?
At that moment, a chill suddenly ran through Ji-yeong’s entire body.
‘This situation—it’s exactly like the one described in that book, Mangunrok!’
A method for cooking tough meat to make it tender was recorded in the ancient cookbook Mangunrok.
If she followed that method, she might be able to overcome this predicament.
“By any chance, if there’s hanji—er, paper—could you bring me just one sheet?”
When she asked the government slave girl who was helping with errands in the kitchen, the girl soon returned with a sheet of hanji that bore traces of brush calligraphy practice.
In this era, paper wasn’t the cheap commodity it is now, so scavenging used paper was the best she could do.
But this would suffice.
Ji-yeong spread out the hanji wide, then dipped a brush in sesame oil and began coating the paper with it.
‘…Since it’s come to this, I’ll just give it a try.’
It was a cooking method she’d never attempted before, but there was no other option anyway.
Before she knew it, Ji-yeong’s eyes were sparkling with a fervent gleam.
