Chương 164: The First Round's Theme

The bell went, and the three-hour clock began turning over their heads without mercy, like a sword hung by a thread. On the giant screen, HOMAGE TO THE CLASSICS glowed in enormous letters. Then the detail came up: each team would choose one acknowledged legendary dish from the history of cooking and both replicate and reinvent it. That wasn't just a technical contest. It was a game of tactics and judgment. Which dish you chose would decide the shape of the whole round. England didn't hesitate at all.

Arthur exchanged one brief look with his teammates and typed a name into the touchscreen in front of him. The screen published England's choice: Pêche Melba. The critics' section erupted immediately.

"Pêche Melba, of course."

"One of the signature works of Auguste Escoffier, the father of the modern dessert. Looks simple. In fact the control it demands over temperature, sweetness and texture is absolute."

"That dish is the art of precision. It was made to Arthur Campbell's measurements. He's using his best weapon to put the Americans on the floor early." In the American kitchen, Ethan's face went dark.

"Pêche Melba… of course he took it." There was a thread of tension under his voice.

"Every step of that dish has a gold standard. Poaching time for the peaches. The acid-to-sugar ratio in the raspberry. The butterfat in the vanilla ice cream. All of it is data. That's his territory. We walk in there and we're dead." Kira agreed.

"The structure of it is too clean. Soft peach, cold ice cream, sweet sauce, crisp almond. There's almost no room left for us to invent, and any change at all risks breaking its balance." The pressure came across the floor and landed on the Americans. They had to choose a dish that showed what they were and worked tactically against the other side. Chris's eyes went between the two of them while his brain ran.

"They chose a rational dish. A dish you can calculate with a formula." He got there fast.

"So we can't play to their tempo. We need an emotional dish. One that cares about spirit instead of shape."

"An emotional dish?" Ethan frowned.

"Meaning?" Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

"Meaning a soup." Something lit in Chris's eyes. He was thinking of the legend of French gastronomy, the man they called the chef of the century — Paul Bocuse. And of the dish he created for a French president, the one that stunned the Élysée Palace.

"Paul Bocuse's black truffle soup under a pastry dome. The V. G. E." Ethan and Kira both went still. That dish carried too much weight. It wasn't a dish, it was the emblem of a period — the milestone where French cooking crossed from the traditional into the modern. A plain domed bowl with a lid of gold puff pastry over it, and beneath that a clarified broth built from the best chicken, foie gras and black truffle.

"That dish is… too hard." Ethan's first reaction was fear.

"The center of it is the consommé. It has to be clear enough to read through and at the same time carry flavor at the absolute limit, and those two things contradict each other. Plus the lift on the pastry, the temperature of the soup — one link fails and the whole thing is gone."

"Correct. It's very hard," Chris said.

"But the difficulty isn't in the data. It's in the flavor. Arthur can replicate every parameter of a Pêche Melba precisely. Can he replicate the pride and the love for French food that Bocuse poured into that soup?"

"There's no absolute correct answer to that dish." Kira's eyes lit.

"Its soul is the aroma that hits you the second the pastry breaks. It's the swallow that warms your whole body. None of that can be quantified." Chris nodded and turned to Ethan.

"I know it's hard. But your consommé work is the thing we ground hardest at Le Château. Your precision belongs here — in heat control, in extraction. Not in competing with Arthur over geometry." Ethan went quiet. He was thinking about that hellish back kitchen, and how many failed pots he'd poured down the drain trying to produce one perfect consommé, and how many times Vincent had torn strips off him for it. The memory hurt. It had also left him with absolute confidence in exactly this.

"Fine." He forced the word out, and the certainty came back into his eyes.

"We do it. I'll show him what technique actually means."

"Kira, the pastry's yours. Your hands are the best of the three of us."

"Yes."

"I'll take the final flavor integration and whatever we invent on top." They had it inside a minute. Chris typed Soupe aux Truffes Noires V. G. E. into the touchscreen with real deliberation. When the American choice went up on the big screen, the hall broke open again.

"My God — they've taken Bocuse's truffle soup!"

"That's insane. That dish is at least as hard as the Melba. Probably harder."

"It's a gamble on everything. If they land it, it's the best possible answer to England. If they miss, they get flattened in round one." In the French team's area, Raphaël looked at the two names on the screen and smiled slightly.

"Interesting," he said to the teammate beside him.

"One of them has chosen pure reason. The other has chosen pure feeling. You haven't disappointed me, Chris." In the English kitchen, Arthur saw the American choice, and nothing at all moved on his face. He said one sentence to Imogen, his pastry chef: "Begin. Protocol No. 7, strictly." What the other side chose was of no importance to him. His job was to execute the program and collect the score. With both choices locked, the doors to the ingredient store swung slowly open.

The freshest French white peaches, Madagascar vanilla beans, Périgord black truffle, free-range Bresse chicken — everything at the top of the range, ready and waiting. The first battle of the war went white-hot the moment the ground was chosen. And the clock, saying nothing, kept pushing them all forward.