Read Tongue Online

Authors: Kyung-Ran Jo

Tongue (5 page)

BOOK: Tongue
2.3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

During my stint at Won’s Kitchen, I made food for photographic purposes, to accompany interviews with newspapers and magazines. I was often asked which ingredient I most cherished, and every time I would open the wine cooler next to my oversized refrigerator and show them. When we built this kitchen, we’d poured our hearts and souls into the U-shaped marble counter with a hole cut in the middle, through which I could sweep in garbage—but the items I chose with the most deliberation were the fridge and the wine cooler. They were also the most expensive. I kept my salt in that wine cooler.

Grandmother used to say that the taste that came from the hands was the most important element in cooking, that this flowed from the sincerity of the cook, but in my case the most important thing was seasoning the food adequately with salt. Even when salt is only slightly dried out, the important minerals vanish and its taste and scent change. Like wine, it’s important to keep it in a place that maintains the perfect level of humidity and temperature. If I had to choose only one seasoning, it would obviously be salt.

But like Chef said, the trend of cooking everything with “a slight sprinkling of salt,” in vogue when he started cooking, has passed. If I were to divide the cooks these days into two categories, it would be cooks who don’t use salt and cooks who do. Chef is in the latter category. On Nove’s special menu, there’s sea urchin topped with caviar, and when that dish is served, Chef spreads a thick layer of coarse sea salt on the bottom of a big, half-transparent blue salad bowl, on top of which he places the sea urchin in its shell and a teaspoon. Chef pours the salt into the bowl not purely for decoration but for the diners to dab the sea urchin in—but none of the customers, who now believe that salt is bad for their health, dip the sea urchin in salt. Without that saltiness, eating sea urchin is the same as eating a saltless anchovy. People are attracted to salty foods because of a fundamental biological shield against salt deprivation. The day before the launch party for my cooking school, Chef brought over a jar of transparently bright salt and three loaves of bread baked with only olives, yeast, and salt—maybe Chef wanted to convey to me the significance of this mineral.

I walk into the hospital. In the spring and fall, the place is blanketed with Japanese cornelian cherry, dicentra, maple—more like a resort than a hospital. In reality, Uncle may just need somewhere to rest, not to be cured. Now that I’m alone, Uncle could run with me. Then one of us would be able to walk Paulie,
who’s the kind of dog that must be walked every day, and I wouldn’t have to boil a single egg for breakfast. But I know I’m not ready yet. I still can’t forget the terrifying scene I witnessed, of Uncle downing my alcohol-based facial toner. Uncle said his illness was caused by love, but in my eyes it just showed how a woman could ruin a man. Now I know I have to be prepared for a scenario that is the other way around.

I’ll wait a little longer. Everyone makes mistakes, and it’s not too late to fix things when you realize you’ve made one. I’ll wait until spring, when I’m a little more energized. It’s impossible to imagine a world without salt. Everyone needs salt. I’m hurting right now not because we’ve split up, but because I can’t say “I love you” as I did before. If I can’t start over with him and go back to the beginning, then I’ll make sure I end it exactly as we started it. Holding a thermos of Uncle’s favorite spicy seafood soup brimming with tomatoes and basil, I march toward the reception desk.

CHAPTER 8

THE QUESTION OF why I became a cook is almost unanswerable. It’s the same as asking, Why did you fall in love with that man instead of all these other men? Of course you can’t give a clear reason. This is unexplainable even to the person you’ve fallen in love with. I can give an example. Let’s say you’re the sun. The sun takes the purest and lightest particles of seawater and lifts them into the air. Salt is left behind because of its weight and heft, a product of these solar movements. If this is to be an adequate example, I have to talk about the sun’s passion and motive in making salt. Creating salt is sort of the ultimate fate for the sun. The importance of salt naturally elevates the sun’s value in the world of gourmandism. Every human act is only a dream at first. That dream comes to you sometimes like fate, other times like coincidence, and it can be achieved in unbelievable ways. In my case, it all began with a pheasant.

Twenty years old, I was sitting in my college history class, chin cradled in hand, daydreaming. I didn’t know what I should do with myself. Twenty years of age is like a pineapple—a crown
tops your body, but instead of being able to merely shave away the peel, a knife is needed to strip off the leaves to get to the inner fruit. You’re filled with juice, but the part that can be consumed is wrapped tightly in short, pointy leaves, and you don’t yet have seeds or a firm core. My biggest problem was that I couldn’t find something I could engage with passionately. While spring was the season in which some people regained their energy, for others it was the season into which they dragged themselves, reeling from the aftershock of winter. All I could get myself to do was look out the window during lectures, bored, facing the clouds slowly drifting in the wind or being embraced by the gentle, light spring breeze.

That day in April, I sat by the window in the lecture hall, the sun just starting to set, captured by a faint hope that maybe being twenty years old wasn’t like being a pineapple but more akin to tasting something delicate and fresh and light and textured, like the spring breeze. And I sat there watching as a brightly colored chicken flew into the lecture hall, flapping abruptly into my daydream. It took me a while to realize that it wasn’t a chicken but a bird with shorter legs and a longer tail—a pheasant. The lecture hall erupted into chaos.

Still in my seat, clasping my trembling hands tightly, I stared at the strong, slippery-looking pheasant, its bright black eyes shining from near its white beak and red feathers, its dark navy neck speckled with purple, its gold chest, its length of over eighty centimeters. Eventually the professor and a couple of boys managed to capture the bird by the wings, which flapped desperately, and tossed it out the window. The commotion died down, but the professor wasn’t able to regain anyone’s attention, everyone whispering about the sudden entrance of the pheasant, suggesting that we should have captured it and presented it to the security guard instead of tossing it out the window, or discussing the possibility that it hadn’t actually been a male but a
female with plain brown feathers, or that it had been a white pheasant that was supposed to be so rare, or that it hadn’t been a pheasant at all but a chicken. All these conjectures fluttered lightly around the room along with the bird’s feathers, the only proof that a pheasant actually did fly in through the window.

One day when I was little, Grandmother held out something red and round and told me it was an apple. Apple. I remembered the word
apple
. And Grandmother told me to touch it, and asked, What does it feel like? I understood that this thing called an apple was firm and cold and very smooth to the touch. Then Grandmother had me sniff it and take a bite out of it. Each time I had to report what I sensed—it smells nice, it’s sour and sweet. I grew up following Grandmother around the orchard, watching pears and apples ripen and fall to the ground, their white, cloudlike blossoms blooming and fading. My sensitivity to and knowledge about flavors is completely a product of Grandmother’s unique educational philosophy, taught in the orchard and kitchen. But I don’t think I’m as rational as others who are sensitive to taste. I was introduced to the vast, infinite world of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell by a single apple. Afterward, as I neared puberty, Grandmother taught me how to taste the melding of ingredients and seasonings and evaluate them, introducing me to various tastes and awakening the different parts of my tongue.

After the pheasant’s exit, I went back to staring out the window, unconcerned about my classmates’ theories. That’s when I realized it. I couldn’t stop myself from leaping out of my seat. What I needed now wasn’t to learn about boring historical events, but the kind of work I could do using my senses of smell, taste, touch, sight, hearing. My eyes had sliced through the pheasant’s body as I murmured to myself, You’re beautiful, but your firm flesh, if handled by knife and fire, will slide smoothly down my throat. It was the first time I’d talked to a pheasant
and the first moment I understood that gourmandism wasn’t a simple sense-driven thing, but a clear and rational act. This newfound knowledge of mine whispered to me that I should choose to do something I enjoyed, to live the kind of life I’d be happy in. This awakened in me the impulse to gulp down things I’m strongly attracted to, things I like.

The next day, I dropped out of college and applied to the first Italian cooking school that opened in Korea. I was still twenty years old, but I was a twenty-year-old who had attained something I hadn’t had the day before. The light, the kind that only eyes accustomed to the dark could discern—this light captured me.

The crucial question isn’t why I became a cook. Going back to the example of the sun: To get to the point where a lot of salt is created, the solar rays have to penetrate deeper, to the core. You can’t lose your passionate curiosity toward the man you love, and you have to go to him with your entire being, recklessly and passionately. Right now, what I must question and doubt is: Is this true love? And does he love me? And this is the only question that will never be answered.

CHAPTER 9

FEBRUARY, THE SHORTEST MONTH of the year as well as one bereft of holidays, is generally slow for the restaurant industry. But you can’t go home early or work less just because there are fewer customers. At Nove, February is when we develop a new menu, so it’s the month most fraught with emotion and tension. This is when we devise the new summer menu that we’ll introduce in July.

Like all other things about Nove that have remained constant in my four years of absence, Chef’s practice of coming up with a new menu twice a year is still the same. Chef sends two cooks to Italy twice a year, in January and July. It’s up to them whether they want to travel together in one region to visit restaurants or choose different regions and travel separately. You’re supposed to travel around Italy for fifteen days, eating and drinking and eating and drinking some more. Nove picks up the tab, and your sole responsibility is to report on the most memorable dish you encountered, the dish you want to recommend for the new menu. Nove creates the new menu based on those reports. It depends on
the person, but once in a while someone brings back the recipe itself, or maybe has learned how to make the dish in the kitchen of that particular restaurant. Most cooks rely on their taste buds to guess which ingredients were used, especially because famous restaurants rarely reveal their recipes. Sure, writing the report was difficult, but it wasn’t every day that you got the chance to choose a region to travel through and focus only on eating and drinking and sleeping, for fifteen straight days. Maybe because of opportunities like that, Nove boasts a high retention rate among the staff.

In the six years I worked at Nove, I got to go to Italy five times. I learned how to pair foie gras with baked apple in Tuscany, how to make gelato in Bologna, and assembled pizza margherita in Napoli, working ten days for no pay in the kitchen of the most famous of pizzerias in a city renowned for its pizza—the establishment sold four thousand sheets of pizza margherita a day. There’s no better place than Italy to think only of food and to eat three meals a day and drink and sleep. In Italy, if something isn’t in my mouth, I’m hungry. And I brought back something else from Italy, not just food.

After all the guests go home, the staff that had gone on the food trip and those who contributed ideas stay behind with Chef, making, eating, judging food late into the night. Anyone who’s worked in a kitchen for eleven hours a day would know that food, no matter how delectable, can’t always be delicious. But February is a special month. Every day, I get to work by ten in the morning and stay until after midnight, cooking, eating, drinking. If I were to categorize it, the food I eat now isn’t the food of solidarity, isn’t a peace offering—it’s closer to the food of discord that causes my mouth to shut down. Even if Mun-ju didn’t voice her concerns about my being too skinny, I do need to gain weight and I don’t ever want to be the kind of cook who doesn’t eat. As the restaurant gears up to create dishes for the
new menu, I start concentrating on eating. Even when the others just taste the new dishes, I finish an entire plate of it, whatever it may be. No matter how sensitive your tongue is, sampling one bite and judging it is akin to seeing someone once and talking about him as if you know everything about him.

Rejection of food: This was the first hurdle I encountered after parting with him. Refusing food is basically a refusal of relationships, and if it gets worse it can turn into a frightening illness, leading to a complete destruction of all human contact. I eat all day until it exhausts me, like Mun-ju used to ten years ago. But the thing that drains me most is not the act of eating but the smells. It isn’t the stern and picky Chef that reigns over the small kitchen, but the pervasive smell of food. One is taken prisoner by it.

My problems with Paulie start with smell, too.

When I moved out of Grandmother’s house, I didn’t realize that I would one day have a dog. The first time I went to his house, I saw a large, flat, shiny brown mound in the middle of the yard, bathed in sunlight. His name is Paulie, he said to me, as if introducing himself. It was the first time I’d met someone who uttered a dog’s name so lovingly, making me think that if I were asked why I fell in love with him, I’d say it was because of the way he called, Paulie! Blood rushed to my head, just as it does when you take a sip of sweet, hot liquor, as I wondered how he would call my name if he called his dog like that. I joked that the dog was so big that I thought he was a bear, even though he was hunched on the ground. He let out a loud laugh and said, Hey, Paulie, say hello. Surprisingly, the big dog got up, ambled over, stopped in front of me, and silently and gently pushed his smooth square nose into my knee. Paulie’s nudge later became “Are you okay?” in our secret language.

BOOK: Tongue
2.3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Savvy Girl, A Guide to Etiquette by Brittany Deal, Bren Underwood
A Brain by Robin Cook
When Twilight Burns by Colleen Gleason
The Element by Ken Robinson
The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Brooks Atkinson, Mary Oliver
Her Perfect Gift by Taylor, Theodora
Immortal Becoming by Wendy S. Hales