Chapter 307 – Fragrant Dew Rice aka Flower Dew Rice (c)
Translated by Gumihou
Edited by Gumihou
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For those who came here especially to view and appreciate the plum blossoms in the snow, seeing her ripping flowers off the branches was like seeing some barbarian burning a broken qin to roast a crane. In short, it was a disastrously barbaric scene.
Someone stepped forward to reprimand, “What is wrong with you? The flowers are blooming so beautifully here, what are you plucking them for?”
The girl in blue suddenly looked a little embarrassed, “Apologies. I’ve been quite rude. Is this plum blossom forest yours?”
“No,”
“Then, do you know the owner?”
“There’s no owner,”
“Ah…” the girl in blue made an exaggerated [1] ‘Wah, I’m so surprised!’ face. “So they are wild…”
“Of course,” seeing her good attitude, his manner grew warmer and he said, “You had better stop picking the flowers. Plum blossoms are meant to be appreciated. If you pick them off, it would be too inhuman.”
The girl [2] tipped her head to the side, “I’m just a common person. To me, these plum blossoms are no different from wild vegetables. Unlike you, I don’t see them as some noble lofty thing.”
“What is your meaning?”
“My meaning is, I’m still going to pick them,” said the girl in blue. “However, it’s not right to take other people’s things without permission, so, it’s still better to ask for permission first.”
Although they were not quite sure what she was talking about, since she had stopped picking the flowers, they let the matter go.
[3a] The girl did not keep picking the flowers, instead, she walked into the middle of the plum blossom forest and spoke directly to the trees, “Everyone, could you gift me some plum blossom flowers?”
[1] “… …”
Is she an idiot or just stupid? These are just ordinary plum trees, it’s not like they’ll understand anything if you- [3b] [3c]
The plum trees suddenly moved! [1] The branches shook and a pile of bright petals soon filled the girl’s arms-
“Stop! Stop! That’s enough,” cried the girl as she tried to contain the blossoms with her sleeves. Then, she walked forward, deeper into the depth of the plum blossom forest.
“… …”
Was there something wrong with their eyes? Or had those plum trees gained awareness?
Mingyue Mountain had always been there and this stretch of plum blossom forest had existed as long as they remember but they have never seen the trees moved in a sentient manner like this…
Or, could it be that girl was just pretending?
As though drawn by something inexplicable, they all followed the strange girl into the depths of the plum blossom forest.
[4] When they finally encounter the girl again, they saw that she has two companions with her.
All three of them were hanging up rib meat the size of one’s palm [5] on the plum tree branches. Underneath the tree was a pile of pine and cypress tree branches.
The branches had been lit but because they were still green [6], only green smoke curled up with no open flames. The scent of pine and cypress drifted up to the plum tree branches with the smoke.
Just then, they saw the girl in blue scatter the plum blossom petals over the branches.
The three people kept watching as the smoke continued to wrap around the ribs in white smoke. They did this for two hours, after which they put out the fire, packed away the meat and disappeared.
Leaving the other people to stare at each other.
That very same day, news about a special, cutting-edged barbecue technique [7] from the snowy depths of Mingyue Mountain came down to the city.
Plum blossom and meat, one represent elegance while the other indecency. Leave the matter of why the plum blossom petals fly into the girl’s arms on their own but no one in the world had ever done Plum Blossom Barbecue before. [7]
When people heard this story, they asked their personal chefs to try roasting meat using this method.
The result of the experiment was… meat smoked with this method became imbued with the aroma of pine branches and plum blossom petals, giving it a scent of pine and plum aroma. The meat is then steamed over a fire and then served with a bit of dipping sauce. As a dish, it has a very distinctive flavour that goes very well with alcohol [8].
Since plum blossoms could be used to roast meat, surely they could roast meat using other kinds of flower petals [9]?
There was no shortage of people trying to emulate something new.
All of a sudden, the price of flowers soared.
As the instigator of the incident, Shiyu had no idea what was going on outside. After getting off the mountain, she quickly began to process the meat.
The boar meat which had been roasted [10] earlier were hung up high in the branches to be air-dried.
After dealing with the meat, she remembered the frozen wild pears and other fruits collected by Liu Eleven.
This was one of the more unique dishes in the northeast and Shiyu thought they tasted particularly good. Since there were two more months of winter left, she decided to make more.
Thus, Liu Eleven found her burying a basket of fresh pears she had gotten from who knows where into the snowdrift among the roots of the trees.
Perhaps it was due to the heavier snowfall and the colder temperature but the number of customers coming to their shop was gradually decreasing.
Then again, it could be because some people in the city were also selling milk tea and Rushan. Those who like these dishes need not leave the comfort of the city to get their fix.
With fewer customers, Liu Eleven and Ling Xiaoxiao also relaxed, leaving the majority of the work to the three kitchen hands while they ran to the city to play.
Celestial Customers Approaches is one of the most famous restaurants in Sacred Universe Kingdom. Not long ago, their chef came up with a new dish called Fresh Flower Grilled Meat, which attracted the attention of a lot of noble customers.
Luo Dongting was also a frequent customer of this restaurant and would come to this place most days.
Today, he brought his younger sister over to try the new dish. While waiting for the food to arrive, his little sister suddenly pointed out the window and said, “Brother, look, it’s them!”
Luo Dongting’s gaze followed where her finger pointed and saw one man and one woman standing together at the street below.
“They are…?” Luo Dongting had never seen them before.
“They are the ones who used plum blossoms to grill meat that day,” Luo Diemeng stroked her chin. “Now that the entire city is filled with the scent of meat, one could say that they have started a trend with everyone just jumping in to follow suit.”
Luo Dongting suddenly frowned, “Enough with your nonsense.”
“How could it be nonsense? Before they did it, no one even thought of it. After they started it, nearly all the restaurants started selling this grilled meat as their new signature dish. If the original flavour had not been out of my reach, would I even bother to come here?”
Luo Diemeng did not feel like she had said anything wrong.
However, while they were speaking, the restaurant’s chef happened to be standing by the door to the elegant room. He had heard everything clearly.
The original taste…
Could it be possible that what he made was not original enough?
The chef shifted the dish to one hand and knocked on the door.
When the door opened, the brother and sister pair were seated as usual.
Miss Luo’s tongue was particularly picky and ordinary craftsmanship would not catch her eye. Over time, chefs of the city considered getting this young miss’s approval as a stamp of creating a great dish.
This was also why he had decided to serve this new dish today.
What a pity that it would not surprise this young miss.
“The meat is that ordinary type with just an additional hint of floral fragrance. It would probably be popular with those literati types since they like pretentious things like elegant plum blossoms and such. Enough, I shouldn’t have had my hopes up.”
After that, Luo Diemeng lowered her chopsticks and did not pick them up the second time.
[Gumihou: …nice, first we have a main character who pretends to know how to cook, now we have one who pretends to know how to eat. Brilliant. Marvellous. Amazing. (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻]
We now have Glossaries for Character, Cultivation Terms, Clan Names, Restaurants & Places
[1] Added Details for Dramatic Purpose: Since it’s supposed to be funny, let’s make it actually funny.
[2] Changed Details for Dramatic Purpose: Show don’t tell. Instead of ‘the girl disagreed’ showed how she disagreed.
[3] Deleted Stuff:
[a] However, her next action left them speechless.
Show don’t tell.
[b] –ask them anything, will they know?
Extra unnecessary information that detracts comedic impact.
[c] Someone started laughing, but stopped halfway because they were dumbfounded.
Extra unnecessary information that detracts comedic impact.
[4] Added Details for Logistic Purpose: Because lack of transition = lack of sense
[5] Gumi has issues with ‘palm size meat rib meat’. Gumi would have less issue with ‘2-finger size rib meat’ because that’s about the size you’ll get. If you want to your stupid meat, you’d do better to split them into 2 long rib bones so that they could catch more smoke and not be too thick.
Also, congrats for killing the tree. Especially if you use some barrier spell to keep the smoke in. You didn’t use anything to keep the smoke in? Congratulations on a futile job of making smoke under a tree smoking ‘palm-size’ meat on bones. Even if you peel the meat off the bones, it’s close to impossible to have ‘palm size rib meat’ unless the ribs are from monsters4 times the size of a pig.
[6] Green branches will also go up in flames. Otherwise, forest fires will never exist. Only forest smoke. Green branches will make white smoke and the occasional pop crackle from sap.
[7] ლ(｡-﹏-｡ ლ)
[8] No one has done it because it’s stupid and impossible you twit. If you had used dried flower petals, maybe, because people have burned dragon eye fruit skins to imbue the flavour into roast meat but the flavour mainly comes from the burned wood. Not flowers.
The closest thing to ‘Plum Blossom Barbecue Meat’ you’ll get is a sirloin cut of meat from special pigs as per the picture in the link below:
https://www.hug.com.tw/product/detail/ctgg8rx82j4j
USD30 for 300g of pork.
[8] Aside from the fact that you don’t ‘steam’ meat over fire, your meat is boned in. Meaning, the inside is raw. If it isn’t raw and you’re smoking dinosaur meat scraped off palm wide rib bones, whatever ‘plum blossom’ aroma is gone the moment you enjoy it with a ‘dipping sauce’.
[9] God in heaven, it’s the ‘sticky lump of boiled dough’ incident again, isn’t it? Because you don’t understand the basics of cooking.
[10] If she hung the meat up to dry after smoking it for 2 hours, the recipe is still somewhat valid. If it had not been boar meat. Boar meat has a very strong gamey smell. If she had used regular or high-end pork, this method would have had a chance of succeeding. However, since it’s boar meat…
Boo…
[Gumihou: … anyway, for everyone’s information if Shiyu had used 熏instead of 烤 to describe the process, Gumi might have taken down 30% of the notes. However, since everything was ‘grilled’ and not ‘smoked’ it’s even wrong-er. Anyway, original or not, this dish cannot exist because the technique is ultimately flawed in several different ways.]
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The author’s method to get various flower smells as a meat flavoring agent is wrong. The author uses the flowers as fuel in a smoker. The method of creating rosewater flavoring should be used, so the author surely doesn’t remember essential cooking ingredient history. This is a problem when the author creates a character that is far beyond the author’s ability to support since Shiyu is a sous chef from a three star restaurant. The author should have claimed Shiyu is a support chef from a szechuan street stall after all that mala this mala that saucing of everything. There was that one chapter where the author indirectly admitted the mala overuse error when Shiya commented about using too much mala in previous recipes. But then suddenly, the recipes lost their mala as if a fad ingredient had fallen out of favor. Does a real chef whipsaw like that.
Anyways, rose essence is used as a flavoring agent in drinks and foods or to give scent to certain foods. Depending on the methods, amounts of water and/or steam are used to extract the essential oil and any other nose ingredients from the flowers. And not all kinds of roses are used because not all roses make the best food grade type of rose water. As plum flavoring goes, chinese chefs use the plum fruit and not the flowers.
As the food industry goes, you can buy thru the magic of the internet many flavoring oils for various fruits. So there is no need to smoke with apple wood or plum wood for that flavor. In my opinion, that’s a difficult way to get minimal effect. Ingredient lists on food products require disclosure of ingredients added as flavoring agents, but processing aids don’t need to be listed even if those aids affect the flavor. Thus, plum skin essential oil could be mixed with food grade oil and this is sprayed as lubrication on a conveyor belt (not necessary, but it can be claimed as a processing aid to reduce sticking to the conveyor belt). The food on the conveyor belt touches that dilute plum oil and picks up the flavor. But it doesn’t need to be listed as a flavoring agent because the oil was used as a processing aid. This isn’t a great example, but it gets the point across of how and what can be listed on a food ingredient label and how food preparation companies can create a red herring to protect their trade secret in how they actually get that flavor into the food product.
Not all essential oils can be used as food additives:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C48&q=food+product+essential+oils
You’re right, the author created a character she has little to no ability to support. I’m just a home cook on a limited budget who loves to eat and I shouldn’t know more than a starred restaurant apprentice.
As you said, Shiyu’s knowledge is akin to stall cook. A stall cook who had never travelled beyond her town and whose expertise only covers stir-fries and some basic flavours. Her knowledge of foreign food (including foreign Chinese food beyond 50km of her stall) is limited to random brochures and word of mouth. We might also have to assume that she lives in a time before the internet and was too lazy to study cookbooks beyond reading the content page.
Woodsmoke, brining (dry and wet) is how flavour is infused into meats. Steaming with the intended flavour profile should work too but rather than whole plums, maybe plum zest would work better if working with fresh plums. Dried plums would have higher flavour concentration. Of course, cooking or brining with plum wine would be good too.