Chapter 135: Isn't Putting Beans in Songpyeon a Bit Much? (1) Up until last year, Falstead Castle's autumn festival ran for three days.
Tourists who wanted to enjoy all three days poured in from the first day, and a large crowd also visited Falstead Castle the next day.
However, due to unexpected circumstances, there were also people who couldn't arrive even on the third day and only arrived much later.
"Ugh, of all things, it had to keep pouring like this. What a mess."
A young man riding a four-person carriage with his friends let out heavy sighs as he looked out the window.
His plan to arrive at Falstead Castle leisurely and enjoy the festival began to go off the rails four days ago, when a sudden torrential downpour started.
The rain kept them stuck for three days, and even after it stopped, time was delayed even more as they detoured to avoid the road that had turned into a muddy swamp.
So much so that they arrived only after the three-day festival had already ended.
"I'm disappointed too. I really wanted to watch the soccer final… damn it."
"It can't be helped. Since we're here, let's at least tour Dwarf Town to our heart's content."
"And let's eat bunsik until we're stuffed."
Unlike modern Korea, on the Francia Continent there was practically no way to predict weather changes, so they accepted it as unavoidable.
Even so, the closer Falstead Castle got, the stronger their regret grew.
"Huh? What's this?"
The young man craned his head out the carriage window, bewildered.
Even though the festival should have ended, there was still a large crowd gathered at Falstead Castle's entrance.
"We'll be opening the castle gate soon, so those who want to go to Falstead Castle first, line up on this side! The Dwarf Town entrance is on the opposite side, so go over there!"
At the guard's shout, the people gathered around the gate split left and right and began moving.
"There are… a lot of people."
"This place always has a lot of tourists. Or maybe it's people who arrived late like us."
"Did we get the dates wrong and come early?"
After getting out of the carriage, the young man looked around with a faint hope, then stepped in front of a middle-aged man who was slowly walking toward the Dwarf Town entrance.
"Excuse me! About this autumn festival—wasn't it supposed to be until yesterday?"
"The autumn festival?"
The middle-aged man unfolded the flyer he had received on the first day of the festival.
"It says it's running for ten days this year. Today is day four."
"What?"
"Instead, they say the autumn festival itself already ended, and they're holding another festival right after it. What was it called… ah, I can't remember."
The middle-aged man grew frustrated because the name of the new festival wouldn't come to mind. Unable to watch any longer, the guard answered for him.
"Chuseok! It's called Chuseok! They say it starts today and continues for three days!"
"Chuseok?"
"It's a traditional Korean holiday from the homeland of Lee Jinseo, the creator of bunsik!"
If you had to name Korean holidays, the first that came to mind was Lunar New Year, and the next was Chuseok.
After his parents passed away, Jinseo had to spend Chuseok alone every year.
For years, he would perform a simple ancestral rite early in the morning, then spend a day at his bunsik shop that was far quieter than usual.
Last year, aside from doing business on the Francia Continent, it wasn't much different from before, but this year changed in many ways.
Unintentionally, Jinseo ended up spending Chuseok once again—alone in Korea, and then with many people on the Francia Continent.
But until the autumn festival ended, Jinseo couldn't quite get a feel for how he should spend Chuseok here.
Chuseok felt less like a festival where strangers gathered to play together, and more like a family- or relatives-based gathering.
After much deliberation, Jinseo decided to start with what matched his main line of work—food—and began making and selling Chuseok dishes first.
Ssshhh.
Twenty cooks sat on woven mats around the food truck, and the smell of various jeon frying on pans atop portable gas stoves spread in all directions.
And inside the food truck kitchen as well, Jinseo and the three-person food truck crew were fully focused on frying jeon.
"Chuseok assorted-jeon set is ready!"
"Makgeolli isn't sold here—it's being sold at beer street! Please buy makgeolli there and order food here! Or you can buy food here and take it to beer street to order alcohol there!"
"For rice-free sikhye and sujeonggwa, talk to Nero over there!"
On bunsik street, they sold the usual bunsik as always, but the food truck offered menu items you normally couldn't see.
In particular, once word spread that the assorted-jeon set was a limited item available only during Chuseok, orders poured in.
For tourists who came a long way to enjoy an unusual atmosphere, Dwarf Town's distinct vibe and the richly oily cuisine of a foreign land created a strange harmony.
"Skewered jeon, zucchini jeon, pepper jeon, perilla-leaf jeon, and even donggeurangttaeng… I had no idea there were this many kinds of jeon. There are still mountains of dishes I haven't learned."
Paulo, the royal head chef staying in Dwarf Town for training to learn bunsik, flicked up a well-cooked jeon with his spatula.
After tossing a mung-bean pancake that had soaked up oil and spinning it once in the air, Paulo stacked the jeon neatly into a basket lined with paper.
"Ah, this nutty aroma… just smelling it is enough to make you ecstatic…"
He resisted the urge to keep eating fresh jeon over and over, working alone with four frying pans—one on each stove—flipping jeon with practiced skill.
He was the type who felt satisfied just watching other people eat the food he made, but as he endured the scent growing thicker the more he fried, his patience finally hit its limit.
"Ah, whatever."
In the end, unable to stand it, he took a misshapen jeon he had set aside and bit into it.
That single bite turned into two, then three, and it blew away his reason completely.
"…Gasp!"
Coming to his senses late, Paulo met Jinseo's eyes from across the way, where Jinseo was frying jeon as well.
"H-how many did I eat?"
"About three pieces, I'd say."
"Food cooked with oil is bound to be delicious, but this is truly a bewitching dish. I have to restrain myself."
He hurriedly pulled back his left hand that had been reaching for perfectly made jeon and gripped the spatula instead.
"By the way, isn't there any jeon made with fish?"
Jinseo had taught the cooks many types of jeon.
Yet strangely, there wasn't a single kind made with fish.
Only after he noticed it belatedly—once he was no longer making jeon in a frenzy—Paulo asked Jinseo.
"It's because I personally don't prefer it. The taste isn't bad. It's just…"
Recalling a bad childhood memory, Jinseo rubbed his throat with his left hand.
"It wasn't the taste. When I was a kid, I suffered badly after a fish bone got stuck in my throat while eating fish jeon. So after that, I never even looked at fish jeon."
"Oh no…"
"But my mother stubbornly insisted on always including fish jeon in holiday food."
Most Koreans ate their mother's cooking without complaint, but it wasn't rare for some people to refuse to touch certain dishes.
For Jinseo, that was fish jeon, and after being hurt once by a bone, he never ate it again.
But now that he could never eat his mother's cooking again, Jinseo missed her fish jeon.
"Then we'll head out again!"
"Us too!"
Once the bunsik wagon loaded with assorted-jeon sets left Dwarf Town, the beer wagon followed behind carrying makgeolli, sikhye, and sujeonggwa.
They had already returned three times after selling out the assorted-jeon set, but it was still not enough to meet the demand from the tourists gathered at Falstead Castle.
And there was one more popular item besides the assorted-jeon set.
"Jinseo, about these apples you brought. I thought they only looked good, but they taste excellent too."
Crunch.
Geshtain looked satisfied as he picked up an apple from the assorted fruit set on the plate and ate it.
On Korean holidays, fruit was an absolute necessity.
But for that very reason, fruit prices usually spiked sharply when the holiday approached, so Jinseo bought seasonal fruit little by little in advance and stored it in the subspace storage.
Then he brought out the fruit he had gathered in time for Chuseok.
The apples and grapes were larger and sweeter than those grown on the Francia Continent, so the reaction was extremely good.
As for bananas, pears, tangerines, sweet persimmons, and the like—fruits not seen in the Doren Kingdom—once they were put out for tasting, they vanished in the blink of an eye.
"So this is the liquor the lord drank back then."
This time, Jinseo gifted Geshtain the high-end whiskey he had once given only to Wigenburg.
Geshtain poured it into a hip flask and took a sip.
"Hm…"
At first, Geshtain found the taste unfamiliar—clearly different from beer or makgeolli.
But after repeating the cycle of sipping whiskey and eating fruit as snacks, he quickly adapted to whiskey's distinctive flavor and began to enjoy the buzz with ease.
"Just as you said. Fruit goes well with whiskey."
Even as he said that, whenever misshapen jeon came out among the ones Jinseo fried, Geshtain would pick them out and eat them one by one.
"I like this fruit called gotgam more."
Beside Geshtain, Oswald Hamilton picked up a gotgam, licked the white powder on its surface, then bit into it.
Jinseo personally didn't like gotgam's distinctive texture, so he had brought it as a gift rather than for himself, but it received unexpectedly high praise.
"And it's not just tasty. I heard it even has the effect of driving off ferocious beasts?"
"Is that true? Korean fruit is truly peculiar."
A folktale Jinseo mentioned casually about gotgam spread from mouth to mouth and, before long, turned into "truth."
On holidays, nothing beats jeon and fruit. And for Chuseok, it's songpyeon.
The rice cake mainly eaten on Chuseok: songpyeon.
To make it pretty required experience, but as long as the ingredients were prepared, shaping them was simple, so even people clueless about cooking could easily try making songpyeon.
Maybe because of that, far more people were shaping songpyeon by hand than those frying jeon.
"Where is the pumpkin dough? Ah, is it in this container?"
"Kids! You mustn't eat the sugar filling plain!"
"We're out of red-bean filling! Give us more here!"
Clergy from Kaysus Cathedral and mages from the Doren Mage Tower gathered together on woven mats, shaping songpyeon and experiencing Chuseok.
The orphanage children also swarmed over, diligently shaping songpyeon with their tiny hands, and among them was Prince Charles.
"All done! Try one."
Charles picked up songpyeon freshly taken out of the steamer and put them into the escort knights' mouths one by one.
"T-this is songpyeon His Highness shaped himself…"
The escort knights were deeply moved that a prince of a nation had personally made food for them.
"How is it?"
"I-it's delicious!"
"That's a relief! I made a lot, so you can eat more."
"Your Highness! Thank you!"
After eating songpyeon filled with sesame and sugar, the escort knights couldn't be satisfied with just one and began wolfing down the additional songpyeon that came out.
On top of that, the dough made with various natural ingredients boasted a range of colors, adding the pleasure of looking as well.
But not every kind of songpyeon was well received.
"Ugh, what is this?"
Taking a break and eating songpyeon, Jason frowned hard between his brows, his expression disappointed.
If he ate songpyeon and reacted like that… it's obvious.
Jinseo knew what filling it had without even needing to look inside.
"That's probably the songpyeon with beans in it… Is it really not good?"
While teaching how to shape songpyeon, Jinseo also brought songpyeon he had bought from a rice-cake shop for tasting as reference.
Because of that, a disaster occurred in which some songpyeon ended up with beans as the filling.
"Well, it's not that it tastes bad, but I don't think there's any need to put beans in it."
The moment Jason forced down the bean-filled songpyeon, he cleansed his palate with a sesame-and-sugar songpyeon.
Either way, with songpyeon added in, people didn't just watch the festival—they got to feel like they were participating directly, and the atmosphere grew even more festive.
But to heat things up further, you needed a more stimulating game.
On beer street run by the dwarves, a "new game" suitable for the holiday was making its debut before a crowd.
"Yes! Triple gwang!"
"Hayward, are you going 'go'?"
"Of course! Even if I lose everything, go!"
One game you couldn't leave out of Korean holidays.
It was go-stop.
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