Authors: Kyung-Ran Jo
Tongue (17 page)
My workstation has stainless-steel containers holding salt and whole pepper and pasta sauce and olive oil and various herbs and chopped parsley and red and white wines and diced tomato and butter and brandy, along with long chopsticks and ladles and tongs and large spoons and pans and pots. Typical items for a workstation. But the knife is indispensable. If you have to get one thing as a cook, it must be a good chef’s knife. A good knife is more important than your passion for cooking. If you have a good knife in your hand, you have an automatic desire to cook. Every cook has at least one knife that is his own. For a Western cook, a knife is his third arm, as is a ladle for a Chinese chef. In truth, knife skills get the cook noticed.
I have three knives. A thin, long, Japanese sushi knife for fish and a short and flexible knife for chicken or duck. And a plain German Henkel that I use for all other purposes. But usually the Henkel is good enough. When I’m trimming vegetables I use the tip of the knife, and when I’m handling something bigger or firmer I use its end. It’s very old and chipped but I haven’t parted with it. When I started at Nove, I took up this knife, which had been collecting dust in its case in Grandmother’s kitchen. Grandmother had several knives, including a serrated one for slicing bread or fruit. It was my favorite when I
was younger, but after I started to cook I couldn’t find it. Chef’s knife is a Japanese Global—it has a slightly pointy tip but is still a plain kitchen knife. The knife stand is crowded with all of our knives, sticking out at 45-degree angles. Each cook can find his knife in an instant, even if the handles are virtually identical. It’s important to have a knife that feels right.
I sense Manager Park and the new saucier exchanging looks of
What’s going on with her?
I stand at my station, gripping the knife as if someone might snatch it out of my hand, blood still seeping from my finger. I catch him placing a gentle hand on her waist when they pass by. People say it’s impossible to hide poverty and illness and love, but the gaze of staff members when they fall in love is the hardest to hide in the crowded narrow kitchen. Everyone finds out even if it’s only been for a day—they’re in a clear glass fishbowl. There’s no place as easy to fall in love as a kitchen. But if they break up, one person always ends up quitting, usually the woman. Separation is common, but it’s not altogether rare to hear of couples who marry or open a restaurant together.
What was love to me? I put my knife down on the chopping block. To me, love was like music—I could feel it and both my head and heart reacted to it even though it wasn’t taught to me. Love was like food—I salivated, it whetted my appetite. Love was music and food. Every pore felt a pure elation, I lamented but was uplifted, I was confused but desirous. It began as a simple thing but it was beautiful and sensual and affected my whole being. I used to think this described love.
More than three pages of Se-yeon and Seok-ju’s pictures were featured in the magazine. In one picture they faced each other playfully in her soon-to-be-opened cooking-class kitchen, hands dripping with honey. Licking honey from each other’s palms to signify that they would share food and loving words was a Germanic tradition of promising love. This would have been
Mun-ju’s idea. Although she didn’t want to, once she decided to interview them the editor in her would have done her best to get a good picture, an original one. Most don’t know the legend of honey. Mun-ju is the one who told me this story. Thankfully there wasn’t a picture of them licking each other’s palms. Mystics slicked honey on their hands and tongues to fight evil and realize good. I should be the one with honeyed palms now, not them.
Be careful. Love is like a mushroom—when you harvest mushrooms you shouldn’t pull them out of the ground but carefully cut them with a small knife. So they will keep growing
. I want to say this to Manager Park and the saucier. But for me, love is no longer music or food or honey or mushrooms. Everything has changed now.
I hear something. Blood coursing, bones breaking, blood stopping. Cooks are knife-wielding artists. We express ourselves with our hands. The kitchen could easily become a scene of carnage. With my knife, I fearlessly pin the plump cock’s comb to the cutting board, the cock’s comb that glistens proud and red, like the arrogant tongue of a liar.
LOVE AND HUNGER ARE ONE just like the seed and germ of fruit. Physical symptoms that propel your life. Love and hunger, the most instinctive reflexes, are regulated by the same part of the brain. If neither is satisfied, you are overwhelmed with rage. There aren’t very many things you can do to get beyond rage other than to continue eating. Me yelling, me sobbing, me holding a bag of chips all day. A simple montage of me six months ago. When I chewed on thin, crispy chips, shrieks and bone-breaking crunches and sounds of strangling rang loudly in my ears, pounding against my eardrums. A chip is designed so that it’s impossible to put the entire thing in your mouth. The wider you open your mouth to stuff in the chip, the more it affects your eardrums, delivering the irritating chewing sound directly into your ear. I became addicted to chips because of the sheer joy of it—like a kid tasting the fizz of his first carbonated drink. As I lay on the couch for days and the chewing noise grew louder and louder, my inner instinct of attack grew stronger and stronger. I felt unease that I wouldn’t be able to control myself.
I wasn’t going to retrieve this love with rage. I put down the bag of chips and pressed my lips together. I couldn’t hear a thing. I got off the sofa slowly, in resignation. It was just an illusion that I’d never expressed anger. I’d revealed all of my emotions to him as he moved like a shadow through the house. I wish it hadn’t reached a point where he couldn’t bear it anymore. Now I regret it. I think that was when I developed a fear of opening my mouth. It’s hard to eat with someone I’m not close to. When I taste food in the kitchen I turn around, dip my finger in it, stick it into my mouth, and close my lips around it. But when I see round objects that look hard on the outside but are soft inside, like button mushrooms or an eggplant, I have the urge to chew and lick them. Is it a symptom of my unfulfilled sexuality? Or a gourmet’s curiosity? Once I had to clap my hand over my mouth when I was making an Asian-inspired salad dressing of mayonnaise, soy sauce, minced garlic, and sesame oil. Neither white nor yellow, half transparent, fairly thick. I recalled the man who’d stood upright and aimed directly into my mouth. It was like swallowing a mouthful of stew without thinking. Hot and sour and slightly bitter. I wonder what it would be like if I were to try it again—a common feeling after a first experience. When it was aimed at my mouth, I was surprised that I was able to open my mouth that wide, that I could be that instantly and quickly elated, that it was such a familiar taste. Who was making lip-smacking noises? Was it he who was holding on to my head, or me, lying on the bottom of the box as if in supplication? I tossed away the now-empty tube of mayonnaise. If I had an organ that I could pull out whenever I wanted and aim at someone, I think I would stand straight and stick it resolutely into someone’s mouth.
If he comes back it might be a while until we have sex, like when we first met. But I don’t think he will come back. Because
he’s finally built a new house, the house he’s wanted to build, the house he dreamed of and designed with me.
Four years ago when we looked at spaces for Won’s Kitchen, he was disappointed that he couldn’t design and build the building. He would draw, erase, and redraw a squat, small building in red brick, the cooking class on the first floor, his office on the second, and our bedroom occupying the third. Pointing at the blueprint, I playfully said the third floor was too far from the first, where I would be spending all of my days.
Then we can put in a long pole
. He drew a long line down the middle of the drawing. I laughed, saying, I thought those things were only in fire stations where every second counts.
If you use this it’ll only take a few seconds. I always wanted something like this for my own house
. He smiled brightly, earnestly, as if he would really install a fire pole if he were to build a house. I imagined him sliding down the pole from the third floor. Food would never get cold and I would never be waiting for him. I nodded shyly and pushed my hot palms into his hair. We whispered to each other, Will that day really come? Of course it will.
I still feel his hot breath near my ear, but he’s already built the house. He really did put in a pole, and under the picture of him sliding down, all smiles, a caption reads, “Every second we’re apart is unbearable.” And a close-up of Se-yeon sitting on the sofa, her long legs crossed, gazing at him proudly. He looks different in the picture. He looks like a small brown baby monkey falling from a tree, I mumble unemotionally. And now in that house lives another woman. Not me. She’s opening a cooking class. The woman who couldn’t differentiate between parsley and mugwort last fall. The U-shaped open kitchen is identical to mine, and even the counters look as though they’re made of the five-meter-wide marble that we chose after serious discussion. It would have been difficult to build a better kitchen. So it
would have made sense to make it exactly the same. I nod slowly. The former model’s cooking class in a kitchen designed by her architect boyfriend would be the talk of the town for a while. If Mun-ju’s right, they’re also starring in S Company’s new refrigerator print-ad campaign featuring various celebrities. It’s not the most fabulous comeback for a top model who had to leave the industry because of a damaged tendon near her ankle, but people will talk about it. Se-yeon looks vivacious and beautiful.
This is what people in love look like
. I feel saliva gathering in my mouth, like when I see an unfamiliar dish that tempts the eyes and the nose.
I thought love was like an olive tree, standing strong against winds and bearing green fruit as soon as the roots took hold. I’m sad, not because I can’t tell him I love him but because love is no longer an olive tree or music or delicious food. But there are things that do not change. There is the kind of love that can’t be redirected. Yeah, I mumble, though it’s more like a moan. It’s unbelievable that all of this has happened in half a year. I think it’s time for me to do what I need to do. As I slowly walk into an underpass, I wonder if the skillet I gave her is in her kitchen. The skillet was one of my cherished items, with its thick bottom of three-ply stainless steel that delivers heat quickly and evenly, ideal for searing or pan-frying a thick piece of fish. Se-yeon said she wanted one, so I gave her that Italian Lagostina skillet last fall. No, she probably doesn’t have it anymore. It’s the skillet she used to hit Paulie. I think it’s time to fetch the ball.
Isn’t that right, Paulie?
I go into a bookstore and buy a book about dissection.
A true gourmand is as insensible to suffering as is a conqueror
.
—Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin,
The Physiology of Taste
SUMMER BEGINS as we devein shrimp. Some cookbooks instruct you to take out the bitter, black, stringy intestine that stretches down the shrimp’s back before cooking, but that’s not always right. You taste bitterness first, which is stronger when hot. It is better to take out the intestine, but cooks who understand shrimp take it out only in warmer months. We’re getting a lot of orders for the green pasta with shrimp and scallops—I came up with that recipe in February. At one end of the kitchen, Kwon, the prep cook, is humming, deveining shrimp with a toothpick. Meanwhile, sous chef Kim sifts flour to bake herb bread. In the morning the kitchen bristles with energy and life. Like cogs in a machine, we move about fluidly in the small space of rules and order.
Every cook is attracted to a particular ingredient. Some enjoy working with duck and turkey and others prefer beef and pork, while there are cooks who like scallops and clams or asparagus and cauliflower or potato and radish. Chef likes root vegetables and flat fish—turbot, flounder, croaker. These days
he’s fascinated by tea. Tea grown in the shade of tall trees in high altitude has the best flavor. During Chinese empires, virgins fourteen years and younger picked damp, soft tea leaves, wearing brand-new clothes and gloves. It’s never occurred to me to use tea as an ingredient and I never thought it possible, but if Chef takes an interest in something there’s no telling what will emerge. But I’m doubtful about the idea of cooking with tea. I’m not sure if it’s about tea as an ingredient or because I wonder if Chef is trying to suppress his desires as he reaches a certain age.
I wish I could top Chef with my innovations. I want him to tell me, You can’t make a complete dish with tea. At times I’m not sure what I want. But I know for certain that there is one thing I want. That’s enough.
At one time I liked cooking with fish and roots and asparagus, like Chef, and enjoyed making dough and hand-cut pasta and bread, like sous chef Kim. I liked feeling the tips of my fingers grow gentle, not unlike playing with dark, lustrous soil. When I make dough I take a bit off and push and stretch and pull with my fingertips and make consonants like
b, c, d
, or vowels like
a
,
e
,
o
,
u
, and spread them across my board to make words. The way Grandmother taught Uncle and me how to read. The letters went into boiling broth at the end. Mushy vowels and consonants floated in Grandmother’s bowls of noodles, and Uncle and I ate those first, vying to be the one to find more. Even after I learned to read I thought all words could be eaten.
These days I am drawn to meat. I pushed aside poultry. I need something bigger and alive and juicy and firm and animalistic, something I can’t handle with one hand. Sometimes cooking is a physical battle. At times blood overflows in a banquet. To be as close to pork and beef, I take on practically all the tasks of the grill station, the way I used to when I first learned how to butcher and handle meat. On days when that’s
not enough, I stay in the test kitchen until dawn, roasting and frying and sauteeing and steaming and boiling and broiling. I can feel the volume and heft of the meat by sniffing the smoke filling the small kitchen. Every cook prefers a different ingredient but everyone agrees: Everything must be fresh.