When I looked around, everyone was looking at me as if to say, “Go ahead, go ahead.”
I haven’t put up my hand and said “Okay, I’ll eat it,” yet, you know!
…Well, I guess I’ve been making Liscia eat things she’s not used to. It wouldn’t be fair for me to be the only one who runs away! Time to dig in!
Slurp…
“?!”
“W-Well, how is it, Souma?” Liscia asked with a worried look.
“…This is surprisingly good,” I responded.
Yeah. I wonder what it is. This is completely different from what I imagined.
I had been imagining something like ika somen, with a slimy texture and fishy flavor, but these were smooth and chewy, no fishy flavor at all. Rather than udon, it was like kuzu-kiri that you cook in a pot, or Malony noodles. However, when you bit into it, there was a unique squeaky texture. Was that fiber, maybe?
If I were to describe it as a whole, I would say, “It looks like udon, tastes like kuzu-kiri, with the texture of a regional dish from Kyushu.”
Yeah, it’s not bad. Not bad at all.
“You’re right… It’s surprisingly good,” Liscia said.
“It’s delicious the way they’ve absorbed the flavor of the broth,” Juna agreed.
“Is this really gelin? I’m shocked,” Tomoe said.
“SLURRRRRP.”
That was Aisha.
It seemed everyone who ate after me had a good impression of it, as well. Well, of course they did, because it was delicious. If you were to ask which tasted better, this or normal udon, I would say the question was nonsense. It would be like asking which was more delicious, soba or udon: it’s just a matter of personal preference.
“By the way, what sort of nutrients are in this stuff?” I asked.
“Nutrients… I don’t know what those are, but I suspect that its similar to the gelatin you can extract from bones,” Poncho said.
“Collagen, huh.”
So they have the protein you find in animal bones with fiber like you would find in plants, huh. It really is hard to decide whether gelins are plants or animals.
“Anyway, it sounds like it should be fine nutritionally,” I said. “Gelins are everywhere. If people eat them, it should alleviate the food crisis a fair bit, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I suppose so. Raising gelins is easy. If you just give them raw garbage as food, they’ll grow and multiply on their own,” Poncho said.
“…Uh, no, I don’t want to give weird stuff to something I’m going to be eating,” I said. “I don’t want to eat a gelin that’s absorbed toxic chemicals and have it give me food poisoning.”
“I–I suppose not.”
“Anyway, let’s try raising them as an experiment. Hunting them in the wild is fine, too, but I wouldn’t want to reduce their numbers too much and have it impact the local ecosystem…”
“I think that would be for the best,” Poncho agreed.
All of that aside, we greatly enjoyed the rest of the gelin udon.
“Are they really edible?” someone asked.
“Well, the king and the others seemed to be enjoying them,” another person responded.
“I think I’m going to request a gelin capture quest at the adventurers’ guild.”
“Oh, me too, then.”
It seems there were conversations like this in fountain plazas everywhere.
“Elfrieden’s signature dish is gelin.” Who could have predicted that people would be saying that in the not-too-distant future?
“Now then, on to our last ingredient. I have something already cooked and prepared.”
When we saw what was inside the container Poncho opened after saying that…
““““Uwah…””””
…was our universal response.
Because inside it were “insects.” What was more, this sort of dish existed in my world… In Japan even, as well.
“This is inago no tsukudani, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Yes. This is large locust tsukudani.”
“Yeah… They certainly are large.”
With the inago no tsukudani I remembered, each one was about the size of a cricket. With these, on the other hand, each one was the size of a kuruma prawn.
Though the color suggests they have that spicy-sweet flavor boiled into them and have the flavor properly seeped all the way in… Wait? Tsukudani?
“If these are tsukudani,” I said, “that means…”
“Huh? Souma, you’re going to eat them?”
Since I had suddenly stabbed my fork into one of the big locusts, Liscia was now looking at me, shocked. Fair enough; they did look like the sort of thing you’d normally hesitate to eat. If I were more calm, I might have eaten it a bit more timidly. But, right now, there was something I was more interested to find out.
Munch, munch…
“?!”
The texture was like shrimp with the shell on, but there was something more important.
This taste… there’s no mistaking it!
“This tsukudani… is made with soy sauce!”
“Soy sauce?”
Soy sauce.
Yes, soy sauce.
The flavor of the Japanese heart.
You can’t have sashimi or nimono without it. It’s the magic sauce that can turn ramen, hamburg steak, spaghetti, and any other foreign dish into a “Japanese” one. It was the flavor I had probably longed for most since coming to this country. The mystic sauce that, due to its fermentation process, I couldn’t recreate as easily as I had mayonnaise. Now, a dish made with it lay before my very eyes! Locusts or not, they were looking like fine cuisine to me.
“What? No way, Souma, are you crying?” Liscia exclaimed.
“How can I not?! This is… the taste of my homeland.”
“The taste of your homeland…”
“Brother, they have large locust tsukudani in your homeland, too?”
When I looked over, Tomoe was crunching away at the large locust tsukudani and clearly enjoying them. Come to think of it, when everyone else had been recoiling in shock, this kid had been the only one who was unsurprised.
“Could it be, this dish is…” I said.
“Yes. I ate it a lot back in the mystic wolf village.”
“Then do the mystic wolves make soy sauce?!”
“Soy sauce… do you mean hishio water, maybe?”
“Hishio water?”
“Hishio water is a sauce that the mystic wolves are fond of using, yes,” Poncho jumped in to explain. “Originally, the mystic wolves would coat soybeans in salt and allow them to ferment, creating a sauce called ‘bean hishio.’ When they take the clear liquid that is created in that process and let it ferment, that produces hishio water. Both are sauces with a unique flavor not found in this country, yes.”
“I see.”
After that explanation, I was certain of it. I had read in a book somewhere that soy sauce was born from the process of making miso. So, basically, bean hishio was miso and hishio water was soy sauce. (The reason I didn’t hear those words as miso and soy sauce may have been because they were similar to, but distinctly different from, modern soy sauce.) Maybe the mystic wolves had eating habits similar to the Japanese… Wait, hold on. This flavor permeating through the locust is…
“Hey, Tomoe. Alcohol is used in making these, too, right?”
“Ah, yes. It’s an alcohol made from the seeds of a plant.”
“What kind of seeds?”
“Let’s see… It’s a plant that grows in marshy areas, it has ears that look like the end of a broom, and on them, there are lots of little seeds like with wheat.”
No doubt about it! Those are rice plants! My hope for the future!