The lingering jet lag hit Takumi harder than he thought it would, and shortly after he got to room 207, put his bags down, and sat down on the bed, he plopped onto his back and dozed off. When he woke up a few hours later, the sun had completely gone down and something was knocking on his ceiling.
Takumi rewound his thoughts, frowned in confusion, and glanced up.
The smiling face of a strange boy greeted him.
"Hey there, transfer student!" the face sang out.
Takumi just managed to catch the scream in his throat and turn it into a small squeak.
"Come on! We missed you at dinner so we're having your welcome party. It's just a couple of doors down!" With that, the boy vanished, a ceiling tile dragged back in place.
He briefly considered transferring back out of Tōtsuki and moving back to Italy, but after a second Takumi dragged himself out of his door and awkwardly made his way down the hall to a room that had its door flung open.
"I TOLD YOU!" someone shrieked as he approached. Takumi winced at the volume of the words. "I'M BUSY STUDYING FOR THE WRITTEN EXAMS! IF YOU'RE HAVING A PARTY, HAVE IT SOMEWHERE ELSE! WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS PARTYING IN MY ROOM?!" A gangly black-haired boy with round glasses was shouting at the collection of other teens in his room. He tugged at the collar of his shirt with a nervous finger, glancing at his books anxiously.
"Your room's the biggest, Marui-cchi," a girl with bright orange hair tied up in pigtails said as if that explained everything. "And it's always so clean!" She followed up her words by sprawling out on the room's cot, seemingly content.
"GET OFF OF MY BED!"
Takumi eased himself into the room and found himself looking around while standing in the corner. Another girl, one with long dark hair, was in an animated conversation with two other boys around his age who would occasionally break off to posture at each other in increasingly loud threats. A third boy leaned against a bookshelf, seemingly uninterested in anything else happening in the room, and alternated between sipping something from a cup and bouncing it on his lip. The boy who'd invited Takumi to the party wasn't here; he assumed that he was rounding up other people.
He settled as much as he could next to the boy by the bookshelf, who glanced over at him from behind a brown curtain of hair, nodded in acknowledgement, and went back to messing around with the cup.
"Oh? Hey, the transfer student!" one of the girls said, cutting off the boys' argument. "You passed Fumio-san's test, then?"
"Ah… yes?" Takumi said.
"Congratulations, man!" The other students converged on Takumi, surrounding him to shout into his face. The boy he sat by smirked slightly as he casually shifted out of the way.
"It wasn't too difficult," Takumi said, backing away slightly from the mass of enthusiastic students. "I had an idea of what I wanted to do before looking through everything; I knew that there would be rice, at the very least, since this is Japan rather than Italy—"
"Don't talk yourself down, bro!" One of the boys who had been arguing hooked an arm around Takumi's neck, jerking him to one side. "Fumio-san's hard to impress; sometimes it takes weeks for people to get into the dorm! She makes them camp outside instead."
"R-really?" Takumi hadn't actually considered that he'd be rejected. "Isn't it cold at night in April?"
"Not her problem," the other boy said with a shrug.
"Wow, such excitement in the air!" The boy that had been in Takumi's ceiling was suddenly in the doorway, his arms spread wide. "Friends, all united under one roof, cooking for each other, working for each other's excellence— this! This is youth! This is what dorm life should be about! Camaraderie! Family!"
"That's Isshiki-senpai," the boy with the cup muttered to Takumi. "Isshiki Satoshi. Only second year in the dorm. One day, he'll stop organizing parties through the loft."
"What are you whispering over there, Ibusaki-cchi?" the girl with the orange hair asked. "You always sound so creepy like that!"
"Nothing for you to worry about, Yoshino-san," the boy replied.
"Can we be this loud? Won't the noise annoy Fumio-san?"
The girl waved off his concerns. "Eh, it's fine. We're surrounded by a forest. And Fumio—"
A flap on one of the pipes flew open. "HEY, YOU NOISY BRATS! I'VE GOT SOME SNACKS, COME AND GET IT! AND SATOSHI-KUN, YOU'VE GOT SOME GUESTS!"
"THANK YOU, FUMIO-SAN!" some of the dorm members shouted back, bustling out of the room. After a while, only Satoshi, Takumi, and the boy with the cup were left in the room.
Satoshi blinked. "I don't remember inviting anyone from outside of the dorm," he said into the pipe.
"WHO SAYS YOU INVITED THEM?" Fumio said. "DON'T PLAY DUMB. YOU KNOW WHO I'M TALKING ABOUT. WE'RE IN THE KITCHEN; DON'T BE RUDE."
"I'll be there in a moment." Satoshi closed the pipe opening. "Do you know why they might be here, Shun-san?"
The other boy's expression shifted into incredulity before he silently pointed at Takumi.
"Ah, fair point." Satoshi broke into a soft smile once more. Something like uncertain recognition whispered through Takumi. "Well, Aldini-san, let's head down as well."
"You know my name?" Takumi said, walking towards the stairs.
"Everyone in this school knows your name at this point," Shun said from behind him. "Your speech was… unorthodox."
He winced. "Ah. Fair."
When they got to the ground floor, there was a commotion around where the kitchen was. Takumi glanced at the two other boys, but they seemed completely unsurprised at the noise, pushing him along.
One of the girls was holding a glass bottle of cloudy liquid close to her chest. She turned to stare, wide-eyed, at Satoshi. "I-Isshiki-senpai, Fumio-san's not cooking right now," she said dumbfoundedly.
"I had a notion," Satoshi said casually. "Excuse me, friends; if we could get through?"
Shun grabbed Takumi by the wrist as they walked through, forcing him along. He exchanged a confused look with everyone else as he was brought into the kitchen.
The kitchen had turned into a warzone of sorts, or perhaps a performance art piece. Sōma and Megumi were at two separate stations, each preparing something while handing something else off to the other. Sōma whisked what looked like two dozen eggs in a bowl, split it in half, and slid one half towards Megumi, who picked the bowl up as if she'd put it there herself and added a can of something thick and white along with whatever had been boiling in a pot. She opened a pot at Sōma's station and threw in what looked like a handful of herbs and fruit, gave it a stir, and put the lid back on, returning to her side. At the same time, Sōma was pulling a bowl out of the freezer, poking at it before he dumped it out on Megumi's side, revealing a rather plain looking dough. It was like watching a perpetual motion machine at work.
Takumi started for a different reason. "Tadokoro-senpai, Yukihira-senpai, have you been here this whole time?"
Megumi spared a second from rolling out her dough to smile at him, and Takumi finally realized where he'd recognized Satoshi's smile from. "Ah, no, not at all," she said. "We had to return to central campus to finish some work, but we decided to come back out once it was all wrapped up." She was cutting the dough into squares at the same time, settling it into a greased muffin tin.
"Didn't it take more than an hour to walk here?"
She shrugged. "It's just a fifteen minute walk to the road. We called someone to drive us to and from here."
"...and why didn't you call a car when I was with you?"
Sōma grinned as he looked up from stirring. "Walking builds character," he said cheerfully.
"Aldini-kun, you've met them before?" The other members of Polar Star hesitantly walked forward, wide-eyed as they settled at the dining table.
"Oh, yeah, Tadokoro-senpai was there for my transfer exam and Yukihira-senpai introduced himself while we were backstage for the start-of-year ceremony," he said.
"The Fourth Seat oversaw your transfer exam?" one of the girls squeaked.
Takumi blinked. "Who?"
Megumi just laughed, putting a spoon and bowl down and sprinkling cinnamon. "Sōma-kun, you were right; it doesn't fit well."
Sōma gave her a toothy smile. "So you're gonna challenge Rindō-san, right?"
"I just might have to." She slid the muffin tin into an oven and double-checked the temperature it was been set to. "Maybe sometime this week, if she's willing."
Takumi felt himself freeze in realization. It was one thing to know that, logically, all of the third-years at Tōtsuki were on the Elite Ten, and Megumi had introduced herself as a third-year to him. It was another to realize that she was labeled the fourth-best student in the entire Academy.
"Did you need help finishing up?" Megumi asked, putting her bowls in the sink.
Sōma cocked his head to the side. "Eh, I guess if you want to see if the rice is ready? I'm basically done."
Megumi shrugged. "Alright then." She glanced over at everyone else. "Satoshi-kun, did you want to make anything for this evening?"
Takumi hadn't known Satoshi for very long, but he had the feeling that the second-year didn't normally stand so stiffly or at attention. "My desire to cook has been settled from making dinner today," he said, "but if you wanted to see my cooking, Tadokoro-senpai, I'd be happy to make something."
Megumi gave him a small smile that held patience and kindness but no amusement. "I'm always eager to see where your cooking is at," she said. "After all, your skill reflects on me, no?"
"What does she mean by that?" Takumi asked Shun.
The other first-year had long since stopped playing with his cup, holding it in a hand as he crossed his arms. "It's a somewhat recent development," he said. "There are two different methods of mentorship within Tōtsuki. The first is the Faction divide among the best of the students here. The second is the Elite Ten trainee system, which was introduced with the 75th generation. When they're declared members, the Elite Ten are expected to choose an underclassman to focus on training as if they were a head chef met with a new apprentice. It's part of their education; the best chefs have to be good at training those who work under them to achieve the same caliber of performance that they expect from themself, after all. It's an incredibly hard position to be in, as typically the Elite Ten's standards are much, much higher than even Tōtsuki's, and if you ever underperform, the Elite Ten are allowed to choose a different trainee that might show more promise under whatever personal metric they have. Part of the draw of being a trainee is that usually, the trainees of the Elite Ten inherit their mentor's position on the council after they graduate."
"And Isshiki-senpai is Tadokoro-senpai's trainee?"
Shun smiled grimly. "Yeah. And I'm his."
Takumi gave him a startled glance. Did I know that Isshiki-senpai was on the Elite Ten…?
"Ibusaki-kun, if you could help me with this?" Satoshi asked. Shun nodded before shuffling beside him. They began muttering to each other, gesturing around the kitchen at a variety of implements.
"While they discuss what they want to do, why don't you all enjoy yourselves a bit, hm?" Megumi pulled out whatever she'd prepared in the muffin tin and delicately placed what Takumi recognized as tarts onto a cooling rack. Sōma had begun scooping out bowls of rice and set them out on the dining table for people to take.
Takumi picked up one of Megumi's tarts and studied it. It was an egg tart, from what he could tell; he'd eaten them before, from a bakery down the street from the trattoria, but the crust of this tart wasn't as flaky as he'd expected it to be. Cinnamon dusted the top of the tart and sang up in its sweet scent. He carefully took a bite out of the still-warm pastry.
Some other warmth besides the oven-heat swept through him. Cinnamon and vanilla wove an interplay that enveloped him like a blanket, muffling the world around him. A scene unfurled before him unbidden: the memory of a New Year's celebration long past, or perhaps one in the future. Isami's laughter echoed in his ears, his father's hand on his shoulder, his mother's gentle words as she settled on a couch in front of the fireplace. It was a moment that felt eternal, something that lived in his memory and one that would be in his future, one that millions of people around the world had felt and would feel for years to come. The warmth he had felt settled into his bones, and he breathed out a quiet sigh at how full his heart felt.
"Oh my," Takumi heard someone behind him whisper. He wasn't surprised; he couldn't put any words to the sensation himself.
Fumio nodded as she finished her own tart. "You've combined Hong Kong and Portuguese traditions for this, haven't you?" she asked. "Typical dan tat doesn't use cinnamon and pastéis de nata use puff pastry rather than this more delicate dough. What you've made is something with Portuguese flavors and Hong Kong's textures."
"Exactly right, Fumio-san," Megumi says, clasping her hands together. "Both recipes have similar enough proportions of the other ingredients that it makes combining them into a single treat simple, and they don't need much more work than this. I've been mulling over how to work with the egg custard for a bit, but I haven't found a combination I like quite yet. It's not the most transformative dish I've ever made, but I think it's good enough as a light nighttime snack."
Takumi glanced over to where Satoshi and Shun had begun furiously cooking. Shun was tending to a large pot, dropping in strips of something brown that sent fragrant scents across the kitchen, while Satoshi's hands flew across a cutting board, sweeping ingredients Takumi could barely recognize to the side. At one point, Shun leaned over to whisper something to Satoshi, whose brow set before he nodded and pointed at something else.
"Aldini-san, why don't you try my dish?" Sōma asked him, passing over a bowl of white rice and a small container of what looked like scrambled eggs.
"What is it?"
He scratched the back of his head. "Furikake," he said cheerfully.
Judging by how still his classmates got, Takumi had the feeling this was a surprise. "Sorry, I don't know what that is," he said.
"Aldini-cchi, furikake is a seasoning that you can put on your rice to make it taste nicer," he was told. "Usually something with nori. It's for things like onigiri and kids' rice."
"The most important thing about furikake is that it reaches its potential when on rice," Sōma said. He gestured to the dishes he'd presented to Takumi. "Go ahead. Pour it on top."
Takumi cautiously took the container of eggs and poured it onto the rice. To his surprise, the egg wasn't alone; it was quickly followed by shimmering golden cubes that melted the second they touched the steaming white rice. The eggs gained a shine that smelled of a heady chicken broth as they mingled with the rice, and Takumi felt a sudden, insatiable temptation to eat everything in the bowl in front of him.
There was no reason for him to deny it. He began eating.
Takumi thought he was a pretty good cook, especially for his age; there was a reason he agreed to come to this school, even after learning he'd be separated from his brother. He'd learned how to use a knife by the time he was three, and his parents were training him on discerning the entire spice and herb cabinet blindfolded by the time he started elementary school. He knew the trattoria kitchen better than his classrooms, and if pushed he could navigate it with his eyes closed and deafened. Half of the time, he cooked via intuition rather than instruction, and his free time had been spent experimenting with whatever whimsical idea came to his and Isami's heads.
Sōma's food was like nothing he'd ever tried before.
There was something beyond just the depth of flavor present, because it was undeniably there and Takumi had no way to deny it. He could taste bonito, soy sauce, and the curl of sake at the very end of the flavor profile, combined with perfectly scrambled egg and rice left plain to accentuate everything else. Takumi was sure that if he ate enough of it, he could replicate it to a similar degree of polish.
What he couldn't replicate was the feeling that washed through him upon the first taste of broth touching his tongue. It was a similar feeling to eating Megumi's food, with a warmth that began to build up in his chest and wash over his body. The egg tart had an advantage over the furikake rice though; he'd eaten them before, and he had a preexisting fondness for them associated with something like the holidays.
Takumi had never eaten anything like this before, and yet it dug deep into his memory and brought up an old memory that he'd nearly forgotten.
He was six. So was Isami. Such is the nature of twins.
They were six, and they were at their nonno's farm-turned-country home, and they were tasked with bringing in eggs for the day. The chickens were plump, laidback birds, and they were easygoing enough for two boys to rifle without biting them. Takumi remembered two small baskets woven by his nonna, and he remembered filling one of them with a satisfying eight eggs from one side of the coop.
"Bet I can get them back to the house faster than you," Isami had said, taking off before Takumi could even agree.
He'd hurried after his brother, struggling to balance the eggs on his arm, when he heard Isami yelp and the unmistakable sound of him falling over.
"Isami!"
Takumi'd put his basket down to run over to Isami and make sure he was okay. He'd found his twin staring at the carnage of eggs splattered across the ground, basket empty beside him where it had fallen from his grip.
"I tripped," he'd said rather unnecessarily.
Takumi hadn't replied. Instead, he'd walked over to make sure all of the eggs were smashed and silently begun kicking dirt over them.
"Fratellone…?"
Takumi had ignored Isami, finishing his grim work before dragging his brother back to where he'd left his basket. He stoically walked back to where he'd left his basket of eggs and carefully put half of them in Isami's now empty basket.
The two of them took a moment to acknowledge each other silently.
"Let's get back before Nonna starts looking for us," Takumi advised, shoving Isami slightly to get him moving.
Takumi blinked out of the memory with the same suddenness that he was thrown into it. The bowl of food in front of him was still half-full; he wondered when he'd eaten even that much, as absorbed as he'd been. The almost-forgotten memory lingered in his mind with every nuanced flavor stirred into the food, and he took another absent-minded bite. When he looked over to its maker, Sōma was watching him with the interest of a cat who'd spotted a rather interesting bird in a tree, and he awkwardly redirected his gaze back to the bowl of furikake rice.
"What kind of furikake is that?" another student asked. Takumi thought that he'd heard someone call her Yūki.
"We call it 'Transforming Furikake Rice'," Megumi explained. "It's one of Sōma's staple recipes. I don't think I've seen him alter it for as long as I've known him. I'm told it's a secret menu item at the diner he was raised in."
"Item number eight, Megumi-san; you've heard me say it enough times," Sōma said. "And the recipe's already perfect; what more is there to do to it?"
Takumi felt his brow furrow slightly as he rolled the question in his head. He took another small, hesitant bite of the furikake in thought. What would I do to change this recipe?
"Oh? It looks like Aldini-san has some notes," Megumi said with a hint of amused interest.
"Well? Lay it on me."
"I think you could do something texturally," he said carefully, eyes closed to focus on the food itself. "Rice and scrambled eggs, on their own, are pretty soft foods, so something with a crunch or a snap might make it a more interesting sensory experience. And I'm used to pairing fresh flavors with chicken, so I think I'd put a vegetable of some sort in the recipe. The preexisting flavors are rich enough that I can't think of how I'd enhance them, myself."
His pronouncement was met with silence. When Takumi opened them, curious as to why no one was talking, he found the entire kitchen staring at him openly. All of his classmates were wide-eyed, Megumi and Fumio seemed only mildly surprised that he'd said anything at all, and Sōma…
Sōma looked fired up, a flare of something ignited.
"Interesting," he said, his voice trailing off. He examined Takumi. "Aldini-san, if I wrote out this recipe and gave it to you, would you make it with your adjustments for me tomorrow?"
Takumi was taken aback. "I could try," he said slowly. "I have a few ideas in mind, and I'm not sure if I'd have time to go shopping after classes, but—"
Sōma waved off his concerns. "I'll get the base ingredients I usually use and have them delivered for you," he said. "Anything extra, you'll have to seek out yourself, but I'm sure your classmates would be more than happy to help out."
Before Takumi could respond, Satoshi swept over with a bamboo steamer full of something that looked like lumps of dough. "We're finished! Thank you for waiting." Shun followed him with a stack of small dishes that he distributed to everyone silently.
Megumi eyed the offerings on the plate. "Could you please explain what you've made for us?"
"Of course, Tadokoro-senpai!" Satoshi said. "They're dumplings."
Takumi could have told her that himself. He stared at the pale, quivering blob of dough he'd carefully put on his plate.
"Do we eat it all at once or in small bites?" Megumi asked.
"Whichever you wish, Tadokoro-senpai," Shun said quietly. "They're quite hot; I'd take a small bite and judge from there."
Takumi took his advice and bit into the dumpling carefully. His eyes widened as a wave of salty broth washed over his tongue, cut with the sharp taste of cilantro as a final aftertaste. It washed through him, cleansing and refreshing in comparison to the heartier foods that Megumi and Sōma had offered.
"There's soup in the dumplings!" one of the other boys exclaimed.
"Xiao long bao," Fumio identified. "Not something I expected from you, Isshiki-kun."
"It's a bit out of my wheelhouse for sure, but I've been wanting to experiment with them conceptually for a specialty dish I'm developing for my promotion exam this year," Satoshi explained.
"This isn't the traditional pork broth either," Megumi commented, sipping the soup out of the dumpling skin. "The base of your aspic is miso instead."
"We used some of Ibusaki-kun's offerings as well," Satoshi said, gesturing to Shun. "That's what that final fragrant aftertaste should be; we left the dumpling dough well alone, since the main flavor component of xiao long bao is its broth."
"How do you put soup in a dumpling?" Yūki asked, poking at her serving. "We don't have a blast chiller or anything, so it's not like you could have frozen it."
"It's aspic, just like Saiba-senpai's furikake," Shun said, glancing over at Sōma. "It melts at a high enough temperature; for the furikake, that's reliant on coming in contact with warm rice, but for xiao long bao that's dependent on steaming the dumplings. There's a reason why you can't pan-fry a soup dumpling."
Takumi had paused after his first bite. There was something about the dumplings that Takumi couldn't put a finger on. Maybe it was because Satoshi didn't expect to cook. Maybe it was a weird mismatch of technique between the two cooks as they haphazardly threw something together. What Takumi did know was that it was a better quality dumpling than any he could pull off, and it was delicious, and it worked perfectly flavor-wise, but it didn't evoke the same force of recollection that both Megumi and Sōma were able to persuade from the depths of his memory. As amazing as it was, it was food, not an experience leaping to the forefront of his imagination.
And Takumi wanted that. He wanted his food to be so personal to the consumer that they were overcome in memory and emotion and longing for those simple times the way he had been. He absentmindedly finished the dumpling, relishing the combination of smoked beef and sharp miso that lingered on his palate but nothing more, and felt a determination settle in his bones to crack the code of what it was that Sōma and Megumi knew about cooking that he didn't.
Unbeknownst to him, Sōma was watching how his expression shifted. He observed how it went from deep thought to a subtle epiphany before thickening into desire and dissatisfaction. He hid a grin behind a cup of Ryōko's homemade sake.
Some fun cooking notes:
- Egg tarts are European by origin, though Portuguese and British colonizers brought them to Macau and Hong Kong respectively which means that the type of bake on either are quite different in the way explained in the writing.
- I don't think anything in miso soup would want to gel into an aspic the way a typical pork broth would for soup dumplings; I think you'd have to add some sort of fat element into the recipe to make it do that. I really couldn't tell you, though; I'm not trying out these recipes before writing about them.
