Returning to Bologna after weeks of endless traveling only made Takumi more aware of how utterly tired he was. It had been more than thrilling to see so much of Italy in such little time, but he ended up spending the day they got back lazing about the room Fuyumi arranged for him, only leaving once to buy himself something at a nearby cafe.
He'd been called to the kitchen of Ristorante F the next day, Fuyumi's impatience outweighing her exhaustion from traveling. She must have been there hours before him; he caught her bringing in a final case of ingredients from her car.
"Go unpack your things," she said, ignoring his offers to help. "Start taking ingredients out. Just enough for each trial, like at Sforzando. I've got some idea of what pairings will be palatable and which will be intriguing, so hold off on making any matches for now."
Takumi nodded, his mouth suddenly dry from anticipation. The past five weeks had been— 'amazing' didn't even cover how incredible they'd felt. Takumi had been treated like a chef in his own right, even been trained to think of himself that way. He'd seen a glimpse of Fuyumi's process during their trip, but he didn't pretend like he knew exactly how the week would go.
Takumi had seen Shun force himself awake for more than fifty hours straight trying to perfect some particular blend of wood chips for an experiment. He had the feeling a Tōtsuki alumna was many degrees more intense than a current student could be.
"Right," Fuyumi snapped, placing a final crate of something-or-another on the counter with a satisfied CLUNK! "We're going to be methodical about this."
Takumi glanced up from where he was sharpening his main knife. "Methodical?" he echoed.
She hummed in assent, walking over to her own station. "For today, you will simply observe," she said. "My practice is specific to myself and you are not expected to utilize it, so there's no need to teach you the intricacies of my workflow. For the rest of the week, you will serve as a secondary pair of hands for me. We will work for forty minutes, and then rest for twenty. During rest periods, you are encouraged to speak up with any observations you made, but while we are working, I ask that you simply follow whatever instructions I give you." Fuyumi tapped her chin with a finger. "That may be the hardest part for you, and I apologize in advance for any shortness of temper I display."
Takumi blinked. "Why would that be the hardest part?" He was more worried about performing at her standards, to be honest.
Fuyumi huffed out a laugh. "You're graduating from Tōtsuki, aren't you?" she asked. "Tōtsuki only produces head chefs, and we're a deceptively prideful bunch. I expect you to lose your patience working under someone in the first two hours of having to do so, let alone the first day."
Takumi still didn't get it. "I've had to work with people before," he said. "I've worked under my father for years, and we had that restaurant exercise at the camp—"
"Your father probably let you cook however you wanted to as long as customers were happy, and I'm sure your student-run restaurant did well enough but not because any of you had a cooperative bone in your bodies." Fuyumi kicked a stool over to him. Takumi sat down with a bit of a sulk. "This is different. In this kitchen, I am both the voice and brain of the creator. Any deviation from what I request will be seen as mutiny, and any attempt to take over what I wish to do will be punished according to the severity of the misdemeanor. Any imperfection will be met with frustration and a push for you to do well. Camp may hold the moniker, but this will be your first glimpse at a real cooking hell."
Takumi wondered just how nervous he looked because the next thing Fuyumi did was pat him on the shoulder consolingly before turning to the counter.
"You've heard my title," she said. "La Regina dell'Acciaio. Queen of Steel. When it first began circulating, my peers teased me for it. Theirs always sounded loftier in comparison. Légumes Magician. Mist Empress. If I had a larger ego, I'm sure I would have felt jealous.
"There's logic and reasoning behind those silly nicknames, though. Inui was always fascinated by old Japanese techniques from generations long past, and Shino had always extolled the wonder and amazement hidden inside of his precious vegetables. As ridiculous as it feels to hear your kōhai referred to as 'the Heian reborn in a prodigious youth', it is important to critics and others of the industry to understand what informs our practices. Sensationalism turns those insights into catchy titles that follow us around for the rest of our careers."
Fuyumi examined the knives at her station, leaving three by a cutting board that she seemed to find satisfactory. "Keeping that in mind, why do you think I'm called La Regina dell'Acciaio now?"
Takumi thought back to everything that Fuyumi had taught him, both directly and indirectly. She conducted her kitchen like an orchestra, barely needing to cook herself to achieve her culinary vision. She was keenly aware of ingredient quality and spent seasons hunting down the precise flavors that she wanted to work with, going so far as sourcing things she might end up never using. She had tested his entire class on their ability to identify imperfections in their tools, but that was a simple test of competency rather than a reflection of a certain practice. It was easy to guess that Fuyumi valued her knifework, but easy in this industry typically meant stupid.
"I have no idea," Takumi admitted.
That pulled a smirk from her. "No worries, I didn't expect you to figure it out," Fuyumi said. She drifted over to the counter where she'd lined up all of the ingredients they acquired along with a few other things from the Ristorante F pantry. After a moment, she selected a single lemon, a bottle of molasses, and a small bottle of extravecchio balsamico.
She spoke as she began preparing the ingredients, knife flashing as she casually reduced the lemon to peeled pulp and zest. "My title didn't come from my recipes or my cooking philosophy or my personality when I cook. Italian cuisine isn't particularly unique, as much as we both take pride in it, and though I'm sure you've considered my utensils you'll find that they aren't particularly impressive outside of being high quality. That's just having standards. That doesn't make a practice.
"But then, what makes a practice?" Fuyumi set out four pans, heating them to the same amount, before carefully measuring out some quantities of molasses in different measuring cups in front of her. "For me, that's precision. It's training yourself to pour out the exact amount that you're envisioning with a single move. It's developing a recipe an increment at a time, reworking your ingredients until you can produce something you're proud of with the smallest margins of error. It's taking something unrefined and slowly working it until it's exactly what you imagine it to be."
Takumi tucked one leg onto the stool, resting his chin on his knee and keeping his eyes on Fuyumi as she seemed to forget about his existence and sink herself into her process.
"That's what food critics saw in me," she said, keeping an eye on her station. "Not an empress. Not a magician. Nothing so fantastical. They compared my practice to blacksmithing, to taking a block of steel and carefully honing it into a sword or a knife or whatever you wanted to craft. They said that I worked recipes the way a smith works metal with hammer and grinder and tong, forcing out the imperfections that got in my way. The first major article on my post-graduate life labeled my recipes 'perfected staples forged by a queen of steel'. By the time I had Ristorante F completely set up, that became La Regina dell'Acciaio."
Fuyumi looked at him then with a spark of ironic humor. "Flowery, wouldn't you say?"
Takumi nodded hesitantly. "It feels like a reach."
"Well, I suppose they couldn't have gone around calling me a blacksmith for being particular about pasta." Fuyumi tossed another handful of cubed lemon into one of the pans, ignoring how it sizzled. "Might sound like they're calling me uncivilized or something, who knows. Whatever their reasoning, I know where the root of it comes from, and being called a meticulous chef is more praise than most get." She took one of her pans off of the heat, leaving it on a counter beside her. "Come over here, give this a taste. Tell me what it feels like."
Takumi paused beside the pan. He'd already coated the back of a spoon with a sample of what she made, just as she'd taught him to. "'What it feels like'?" he repeated. "What does that mean?"
Fuyumi waved a hand dismissively. "You'll see. Go on."
Takumi slowly put the spoon in his mouth.
There were a lot of things that Takumi could say about the recipe. It was unrefined, to be sure, the ingredients not quite fully combined. Lemon peeked between molasses that sank through glimpses of balsamic. The other agrodolce Fuyumi developed was a wonder of harmony, of layers of flavor so diametrically opposed that to force it together was a noteworthy feat. It was a dutiful interpretation of the flavor combination that described agrodolce.
Takumi noticed all of that in the background of his actual observation.
The recipe, as unrefined as it was, still sparked something from the back of his mind, something that felt awfully like sitting in a car that soared across Italy's roads, forgettable pop music filtering through its speakers as he stared at the ever-widening horizon. It wasn't a complete image the way that many dishes tended to be; even Fuyumi's original agrodolce had demanded some form of imagery for him to fully process it. It was something though, something that left Takumi feeling wistful for the eagerness of traveling to discover something new.
"It's like waiting to see something that you're looking forward to," he told her. "Like knowing that you could be on a journey forever and still be satisfied."
Fuyumi had told him not to comment on her actual cooking, hadn't she? She didn't want to hear his opinion on how the ingredients she chose came together or what he might have used instead of her selection. He wouldn't want to offer that, either; it felt a little too presumptuous to assume that Mizuhara Fuyumi, alumna of the school that Takumi had attended for a handful of months, wanted to actually hear his opinions on food. They had cooked together at Sforzando, sure, but she'd done a majority of the actual work blending flavor profiles. His opinion on food, while well-informed, was not something that Fuyumi wanted to hear from him.
What he could offer her, though, was his own experience consuming her food.
It was apparently the right answer, since Fuyumi gave him a thoughtful nod, a satisfied smile slowly unfurling across her face. "A journey, hm?" she murmured to herself, turning back to the pans she was still stirring. "Interesting. Not the main goal, but a good metaphor. This isn't meant to be a standalone dish after all; something so vague could combine with the recipes I plan on building from it." She almost absentmindedly turned the heat off of the three other burners she was using, moving the pans to the side.
"Did that… help?" Takumi ventured. "It sounds a bit silly, y'know."
Fuyumi just hummed. She took out her phone and stylus and began jotting something down. Her eyes narrowed slightly as she reread her notes before she nodded firmly and put the phone away. "It's as good a start as anything," she said. "Actually, this could benefit from—"
Takumi resigned himself to sitting on the stool for the next however-many hours and watching her work.
It was rapidly made apparent that Fuyumi wasn't just a master at what she did but a veritable genius as well. And perhaps a spot insane, Takumi thought as she threw a pan into a sink without even scraping the contents of it off and immediately grabbed another. That made sense though; Tōtsuki was trying to drive him insane and he'd only been there for a handful of months. He can't imagine the pressure cooker it became after three years of its nonsense.
Pressure cooker. Great. Now he was making cooking puns. He'll find a way to blame this on Tōtsuki, too.
Every once in a while, Fuyumi seemed to come up with something she liked and gestured for him to come over and try whatever she had. For every one hundred attempts she actually made, there were, at best, five that she liked enough to get him to try and a thousand that she'd thought wouldn't be worth it. She didn't linger while Takumi tasted her latest creation, but she did make him tell her exactly how he felt while eating what she'd made. She didn't want to hear about flavor profiles or how ingredients harmonized, visibly ignoring him when he tried to analyze that, so he focused on what she did want to hear.
"It tastes… liminal? Can things taste liminal?"
Fuyumi hummed at that, watching onions caramelize in her pan. "You've been saying similar things with everything that I've given you," she commented, turning to mince the fruit of the lemon she'd already peeled. "As that's the feeling developing, perhaps that's the feeling to pursue. A dish that makes its consumer want to be elsewhere." She paused. "That's unfortunate wording. I'll figure out something better later."
"Sure." Takumi leaned back, discreetly checking his watch. There were still two more hours in this observation-based day, and he wasn't sure if any progress had really been made in the past six. At one point, the sous chef that Takumi shadowed at the start of the summer had poked his head in to 'check in on you, Chef, we've all seen you in your moods' but hastily headed out when it became obvious Fuyumi wasn't in a hosting mood.
Takumi gaped as the knife Fuyumi threw glanced off of the door, the man behind it giving a surprised yelp before hurrying off.
Fuyumi just sniffed. "I hope that didn't chip," she muttered.
"Then why did you throw it?" Takumi sputtered.
"Force of habit. I usually have something softer in my hand." She turned back to her station. "Do you mind getting that?"
The next day, Fuyumi set him up by the seemingly neverending piles of ingredients and set him to work.
"No skins," she instructed, gesturing at the piles of fruit in front of them, "and make sure they're diced. The trials yesterday made it clear that chopping isolates the fruit flavor too much and mincing homogenizes the sauce too early."
Takumi blinked. He hadn't noticed the subtle differences she listed.
"I want at least three servings of each fruit, fifty grams each," she went on, walking to the other side of the counter. "The kitchen scale in front of you is pre-tared with the weight of the dishes you've been given. Don't bother re-taring between; the discrepancies between them are minimal enough that they won't affect the outcomes."
There was a strange manicness to how Fuyumi gestured at the counter. Takumi wisely decided to remain silent.
"After that, make sure to weigh out thirty grams of sweetening agent and twenty grams of the souring agent into bowls together. I want at least five allotments of that of each combination. Let them stay separate; it's a waste of your time to be mixing them together when they'll combine during the cooking process. Keep preparing both fruit and sweet-sour combinations until I ask you to stop with one or the other. If I ask for a different proportion of weights, assume it's only for the single serving unless I state otherwise. When I call break, wrap up whatever you're working on before setting anything aside. We work in silence otherwise. Questions?"
His head was spinning. "No, chef."
"Good." She didn't protest the title. "Get to work. Start with the fresh cherries; it's best to start with a known quantity."
Takumi didn't bother responding to that, practically lunging for the ingredients in front of him, instead. The tasks laid out for him weren't difficult by any means, but the speed at which Fuyumi demanded he worked was far faster than he was used to. He'd just barely managed to move onto peeling lemons when she grabbed two of his prepared servings of cherries and put the bowls back for him to refill. Tantalizing smells wafted through the air, but Takumi didn't even try to look over to see what magic Fuyumi was concocting, far too focused on replenishing whatever she had used up.
"Break in five," Fuyumi barked out suddenly.
Takumi nearly stumbled a knife cut at her words. Had they already been cooking for more than half an hour?
"Thank you, five," he hurried out. He still ended up being a couple of minutes late in joining her at the head table, wiping the juice from his fingers with a towel he tucked into an apron pocket.
"You're keeping up well," she said.
"It doesn't feel like it," Takumi admitted, slumping over slightly. "I've barely kept up with fruit servings and started falling behind with the sweet-sour allotments near the end there."
"You're learning efficiency," Fuyumi pointed out. "At the beginning of the hour, you were chopping everything with the same knife and taking time to wipe it off between ingredients. Now, you've got stations set up for them all and you don't have to worry about contamination. You've found a rhythm that makes your job much easier, and you'll continue to streamline your process until you don't have to spend more thought on it than it needs." She sipped from a glass of water. "Now that we're breaking, do you have any observations you want to make?"
Takumi paused from where he'd been lifting his own glass. "You've been favoring the lemons, but not at the cost of any of the other fruit," he said slowly. "I'd assume that's because the sour-sweet ratio you asked for favored sweetness, meaning that a tarter fruit provides a more well-rounded flavor overall. You've been testing individual fruits, but I assume you want to start combining fruit combinations soon…?"
Fuyumi nodded along to his points. "Observant. Good. You've found the primary reasoning for all of my decisions thus far." She pushed her sleeves back up her arms absently, though they hadn't fallen from where they were neatly folded above her elbows. "The secondary and tertiary reasonings are all personal, so there's no reason for you to have followed my trains of thought. You're correct on fruit combinations as well, but that will begin tomorrow, after we finish today's experimentation."
She gave her watch a quick glance. "Two minutes, and we begin again. Stop preparing the cherries; I've reached my conclusions about them. Add two more servings of the lemon and fig to make up for that deficit. Everything else remains the same. Clear?"
"Yes, chef."
"Takumi!" Isami cheered when he called that evening. "How's the internship, fratellone?"
Takumi just grunted, more concerned with fighting against his door than responding. "It's not a formal internship," he muttered. "You know that."
"Yeah, yeah," Isami said easily. "C'mon, answer the question!"
"It's fine."
"Takumiiiiiii," Isami groaned. He let out a winded huff, which made Takumi think he'd collapsed onto something. "That doesn't mean anything at all!"
"It means it's fine," Takumi threw back.
"I hate you," his brother said. "You get to spend an entire summer with one of the most well-known chefs in the country, and all you can say about it is 'it's fine'. C'mon, fratellone, details!"
Takumi was too tired for this. "I spent eight hours today helping Mizuhara cook. She took two thirty-minute breaks, during which she asked me to pick up sandwiches for us and immediately started working as soon as she finished eating. I think I've been asked to taste-test close to five hundred versions of four recipe concepts, each of which was barely distinguishable from the other. I have no idea what actually got done today. And I'm tired. So yeah, all I can really say is 'it's fine', Isami."
His brother was quiet for a second. Then, "She lets you call her Mizuhara?"
"Mother Mary, that's not the point, Isami," Takumi groaned.
"Still pretty cool, though!" Takumi wondered if Fuyumi would give him the day off tomorrow to take the train to Florence and wring Isami's neck. Probably not. "Takumi, Chef Mizuhara was ranked in the top fifty chefs in the world recently, and for someone who's barely been in the industry for a decade, that's a huge accomplishment. Do you know how weird it is to hear that my brother can treat her so casually in his daily life?" He barked out a laugh. "Maybe I should have gone to your fancy cooking school with you."
That made Takumi pause. "Did you want to?" he asked quietly. "Go to Tōtsuki, I mean."
"Oh, this got serious, okay, wait—" there was some shuffling on the other end as Isami presumably got up from the couch and went to his room (Takumi could hear his door closing behind him). "Okay, that's probably better. Wouldn't want the parents walking in on this."
Takumi waited impatiently for him.
"To get this out of the way immediately, no, I didn't want to go to Tokyo just to learn how to cook, no matter how prestigious the school was," Isami said. "I would have loved to go to a cooking school with you and learn all of those fancy techniques alongside you, don't get me wrong, but Japan's pretty far to go just to learn all of that. And, from what it sounds like, what they teach you at Tōtsuki is less cooking lessons and more… mindset stuff? It seems like a lot, especially for someone like me. I want to be an amazing chef, but I don't know if I have the personality to survive in a place like that." He laughed lightly. "Knowing me, I'd have dropped out to come back to the trattoria anyways."
Takumi tried to imagine Isami interacting with Takumi's school friends. The rest of Polar Star would love him, partially for how nice he naturally was but mostly for the amount of baby photos that his traitorous brother kept on his phone as blackmail. Shun would probably be nice enough, though he'd force them to try his new experimental smoked fruit jerky or whatever else he concocted. Ikumi would shove a knife in his face out of enthusiasm. Somei would roll his eyes and ignore him until he 'proved himself' or passed whatever other unspoken test he'd set for him. He didn't think Isami would thrive in Tōtsuki, but he was kind enough to attract friends and smart enough to adapt to whatever the school threw at its students. Takumi could see a world in which Isami went to Tōtsuki and was scouted by one of its notable alumni, just as he had been.
"That's not what we're talking about, though," Isami said, blissfully unaware of the thoughts running through Takumi's head. "We're talking about you working in Chef Mizuhara's kitchen! It might seem like nothing, but it's super cool— do you think she'd let me work there if I told her I was your brother?"
"I can ask her," he said a bit faintly. "Isn't that nepotism, though?"
"Best way to succeed in this world," Isami said airily. "Everyone knows someone in this industry. Tell her I'm a great busboy!"
Takumi snorted. "You're literally the worst busboy in the world. You get distracted by guests and chat with them while you're supposed to be cleaning."
"That's in the trattoria! I wouldn't know anyone at Ristorante F!" Isami wheedled. "C'mon, Takumi, do something nice for your favorite brother."
"You're my only brother."
"That just means I don't have any competition," he crowed.
—
Two days before Takumi was scheduled to fly back to Japan, Fuyumi called their cooking session to a stop an hour early.
"Is something wrong, Chef Mizuhara?" he asked as he began packing everything up to her standards.
She waved him over. "Come try this."
He took the spoon she offered to him, blew off the steam rising from it, and carefully put it in his mouth.
It was a sliver of flavor, barely more than he'd been used to taste-testing for her, but it exploded into something more. Where the tastes before had left Takumi feeling strangely nostalgic as he recalled the flavors he'd experienced traveling around Italy that summer, this one was something more than just the lemon, balsamic, and honey that made up its base. Sour and sweet came together in a harmony more than the challenging combat that characterized Ristorante F's agrodolce recipe, as if he was experiencing the horizon between a soaring sky and a grounding earth. The feeling of strange uncertainty, of knowing that he wasn't where he would always be, was swept away and replaced with exhilaration at the thought, at acknowledgment at how simple this combination of flavors was and an imbued patience urging its audience to wait, to enjoy the moment that it exists even as it was a transit from one place to another. It wasn't meant to be a standalone dish, but a small part of what would be numerous experiences, and somehow succeeded in feeling both universal and utterly special.
"This is…" he trailed off.
"Incomplete," Fuyumi said casually, setting the pan to the side. "Understandably so. A week's not enough time to develop much of anything." She chuckled quietly at the blatant shock he's sure was plastered across his face. "Remember, Aldini, that I've been a professional chef for longer than you've been in school. What you regard as completion is merely my first draft in an ever-shifting set of standards. In two years, I will revise this recipe again and hold it to what I see as acceptable then. Cooking is regarded as equal parts artistry and precision for a reason."
"Y-yes, of course," Takumi said. Another question dawned on him, but he paused with it on his tongue.
Fuyumi quirked an eyebrow. "What is it?"
"Ah, well, it's just—" He stumbled over himself. "I don't leave for Japan until the day after tomorrow."
"Yes, and?"
"I— am I missing something? Did you have something planned?"
A small smirk slowly made its way across Fuyumi's face. "I thought I'd give you a gift, of sorts. Think of it as a 'thank you for spending your summer following me around' present."
Takumi stared at her, baffled. "Chef Mizuhara, it was a complete honor to follow you around for the summer. I've learned more about recipe development and the importance of ingredients than I would have otherwise."
She waved his words off. "It's still not the fun summer break you could have had, were it not for me, and I benefited from having you around just as much as you did. I'm sure my success in experimentation will slow without your constant stream of feedback guiding it. As a result, I'd like to give you a whole day of recipe development."
Takumi's breath caught in his throat.
Fuyumi gestured at the counter of ingredients he'd been facing for the past few days. "Lemons from Amalfi. Balsamico from Modena. Honey from Lunigiana. Figs from Cilento. I'm sure you've been picking up ingredients to appease your own curiosity, as well. Bring them all. Tomorrow, I want to watch you develop a recipe all of your own with ingredients we sourced throughout the season. I will serve as you have served me: providing feedback and insights as you request them and proposing new combinations for you to use to achieve your vision."
The smirk on her face softened into a smile. "I look forward to seeing what you come up with."
Back to Japan next chapter, which should just about wrap up this arc! Let Takumi have his secrets for a little bit ;)
No food notes this time; thanks again for your patience!