Chapter 2209: Gotham Music Festival (11)_1

"Of course, the dishes aren't all served yet, we've only had one so far." Wanda, who squeezed over later, looked at Bruce with some confusion, wondering why Batman seemed not very bright.

"No, I mean this dish isn't completely served yet," Bruce turned to look back and said, "Are you planning to just eat it like this?"

"What's wrong with that?" Wanda had already shucked a crab leg, Jarvis by her side looked like he wanted to stop her but didn't, as Wanda cracked open the shell of the crab leg. The moment the crab meat entered her mouth, she coughed violently twice and then started gasping frantically, her face nearly turning as red as her hair.

"Shit, why the hell is this so spicy??!! Did you stuff an entire chili plantation in here??!!"

Magneto's face immediately fell, but he then remembered Professor X couldn't eat spicy food. If he had eaten it first, he'd definitely be coughing from the spiciness, so let the cursing go on; it's good for young people to be willing to try new things, and their hot temper is understandable.

Professor X quickly passed water to Wanda, Jarvis patted her back, and after a long bout of coughing, Wanda frowned and pointed at the crab leg to Natasha, meaning for her to give it a try.

Natasha didn't believe in superstitions; she was quite good at eating spicy foods. Moreover, since she almost had no sense of pain, her perception of spiciness wasn't high, and it had to be extremely hot for her to feel a bit of spiciness.

She, too, cracked open the crab leg with a snap, and took a sharp breath of cool air. Although it wasn't extremely spicy to her, she knew if she could feel a burning pain on her tongue, this thing was definitely not for normal human consumption.

She looked at Bruce with a puzzled face, her expression of disbelief as if to say, making the crab this spicy, do you Gothamites have something on your mind?

"The crab leg is not the main dish, it's a condiment," Bruce said helplessly, "I told you, the dish isn't served complete yet."

No sooner had he spoken than waiters began bringing in dish after dish of side ingredients, one for each person. In the center was a piece of sliced puff pastry with butter, a dollop of yogurt cheese, a green sauce, and two small basil leaves.

Jason started to bustle about skillfully, evenly spreading the yogurt cheese into the middle of the opened puff pastry, applying two or three swipes of the sauce, adding the basil leaves, taking a light bite from the crab leg, squeezing out the meat into the center, then picking a large chunk of crab meat from the main body, wrapping it in curry sauce, scooping some crab roe with a spoon, piling it all into the pastry, opening his mouth as wide as possible, and taking a big chew with his eyes squinted in enjoyment.

Professor X had a sudden realization, his eyes landing on the yogurt cheese. Bruce explained, "For some reason, Gotham's chilies grow with more vigor than other plants, which makes their spiciness incredibly intense, almost inedible."

"But Gothamites really love spicy food, so they choose to marinate their food with some chili peppers, which eases the overly pungent spiciness. At the same time, they pair it with a generous amount of dairy to soften the heat, along with curry, parsley sauce, and basil leaves among other spices, to create fragrant and rich delicacies."

"Of course, this is a more high-end way to eat. For home-cooked dishes, people usually just spread cheese on bread, dip spicy crab legs in curry and eat them together. It's just that adding some extra spices makes the crab meat and crab roe taste even better."

Shiller, while learning from Jason how to proceed, asked, "The core of this dish must be the spicy crab legs, right? Is it a recipe from the fishermen?"

"Yes and no. The crabs in Gotham are quite big and relatively easy to catch, so they remain the main dish for fishermen to this day. They're not short on crab meat, so no one usually bothers with the crab legs."

"Despite this, there's still plenty of meat in the crab legs. When the boats dock, there are specialized vendors who collect the crab legs, take them back to marinate in various flavors, and sell to residents because they're cheap and ubiquitous, leading to the development of various ways to eat them."

Jason, while spreading the next piece of bread, said, "You can almost see a stall with a crab drawn on it on every street in the East District. Often, they hang colorful crab legs on the poles above, indicating they're selling marinated crab legs. Besides this method, I also really enjoy eating raw onion crab leg salad."

Shiller finally got his first piece of bread ready, and Natasha finished at about the same time. The female agent looked left and right, realized no one was paying attention to her, and simply gulped it down like Jason did, and Shiller did the same.

Then they all discovered, just as Bruce said, that this was a very unique and rich flavor. The various tastes seemed like a concert in the mouth, making it almost impossible to discern what exactly was fragrant at first, just that it was very fragrant, the aroma rushing straight to the brain through the nostrils.

After chewing, you would find that the main aroma was, of course, from the dairy fat. The yogurt cheese was very rich, almost like cheese powder, and the milky taste is one of the easiest scents for the human race to identify, capable of perfectly satisfying their appetite since primitive times.

Then came the mixed aromas of all kinds of spices. Aside from the fragrance of curry, the spread parsley sauce also had a rich indescribable aroma, like condensing a forest into a spoonful of sauce. The flavor of the basil leaves was almost undetectable.

Next came the fresh and rich taste of the crab meat and crab roe. The body of the crab wasn't overly processed and clearly wasn't cooked with curry but steamed first then topped with curry, thus retaining the natural sweet taste of the ingredients perfectly. The crab roe, in particular, was fresh and rich, utterly delightful.

The strong spiciness, which should have been very prominent, only came through in the last step but immediately dominated the rest, stimulating the taste buds to secrete a large amount of saliva. In the end, it was fragrant, fresh, and spicy, and it was hard to say why it was tasty, but it was just purely delicious.

For a while, no one spoke; everyone was stuffing their mouths with one piece of bread after another. The two plates of curry crab were quickly finished, and what followed was the marinated crab leg salad that Jason mentioned, but with green mango and shredded white radish. The crab legs weren't spicy but marinated into a sweet and sour flavor, mixed with chili and salt powder, perfectly offsetting the greasiness of the butter.

Next to be served was a large pot of porridge. Shiller found it somewhat familiar; it resembled the seafood casserole porridge from the Chaozhou region, with a layer of rice oil floating on top. However, the porridge itself didn't contain various types of seafood, which were served separately.

Shiller saw Bruce ladle out a bowl of white porridge, scoop a spoonful of fried anchovies, two spoonfuls of green peas, and a spoonful each of fried fish skin, crushed peanuts, and green pepper rings.

He then took the heads off two large shrimp from another dish, squeezed the contents on top of the porridge, instantly creating a layer of red oil floating on the white porridge. After peeling the shrimp, he threw the meat in, mixed it all together, and capped it off with two drops of sesame oil.

The more Shiller watched, the hungrier he got. He could tell just by watching how delicious it was, and it seemed the others felt the same way; they immediately served themselves a bowl of porridge and added in everything they could.

Of course, these were the actions of out-of-towners; Gothamites were still picking and choosing. Pamela wouldn't eat peanuts, removing the small dish of peanuts from her plate, Jason used his spoon to crush the dried fish and fish skins even further, and Tim, who obviously didn't like green peppers and absolutely couldn't stand cilantro, dumped both dishes into Jason's bowl.

Jason wasn't one to refuse anything; having grown up in the lower echelons, he had a heavy taste preference. He even snatched Tim's shrimp heads, directly letting them soak in the porridge. Spooning the thick shrimp paste and oil mixed with the white porridge, he took a big mouthful and let out a satisfied sigh.

Shiller took a spoonful too, and couldn't help but reflect that Gothamites really knew how to eat. Although it was obvious from the blue and white porcelain pattern on the large ceramic basin that this was the masterpiece of a Chinese chef, Gotham's seafood lived up to its reputation.

Perhaps due to the harsh living environment, the seafood had to strive to grow and accumulate nutrients to survive, resulting in a stronger flavor.

Normally, with such a large bowl of porridge, throwing in a few spoonfuls of ingredients would make little difference to the taste. However, the oil squeezed from the shrimp heads, once in the mouth, filled it with a rich, sweet flavor, followed by the salty taste of the dried fish and the slight fishiness of the fish skin, almost blending perfectly with the aroma of the rice.

"How's the taste?" Bruce asked Shiller.

"Far beyond expectations," Shiller replied, gently blowing on the porridge in his spoon, "Arrogant to think you've been eating this well behind my back."

Bruce smiled and said, "The Professor doesn't eat these things."

"Indeed, he usually can't accept these steps," Shiller shook his head, "Prefers to maintain status quo, without change."

"And he can't handle spicy," Victor said while peeling shrimp for his wife, "Always the same old three: steak, salmon, braised vegetables, paired with a glass of ice wine. Every restaurant he goes to doesn't need him to order anymore."

"For me, anything that can stimulate the senses, I'll bravely try and accept," Shiller stirred the porridge in his bowl and added, "But dopamine rushes can impair judgment; the majority of Shillers don't like that feeling, so eating for us is more like a task than enjoyment."

Natasha, having drunk her bowl of porridge dry, put down the bowl and exhaled deeply, then belched and said, "In Russia, there's a saying that life without hot food is an asceticism. 'Hot' not only includes temperature but also the heat from calories, fats, spices, salt, and sugar, the more the better. If you don't indulge in this simple joy, elsewhere you'd struggle ten times harder to find as much."

"So I really can't understand people who avoid such pleasures," Shiller's gaze lingered on Bruce's face for two seconds, then turned to look behind him at Batman, and said, "Denying joy and indulgence isn't a testament to willpower. To naturally accept them, let the brain revel in them, and then regain rationality when needed most, that is truly living."

"Well said, here's to you," a glass came his way, and Shiller followed the arm up to see Constantine's face.

Bruce glanced at Victor, Victor glanced at Pamela, Pamela glanced at Lex.

In an instant, several glasses were extended towards Shiller, "To your open-mindedness, here's to you."

Constantine's glass was completely pushed aside; Shiller didn't take it to heart, clinked glasses with them, but only sipped a little wine, his attention turned to the other dishes on the table.

Constantine gave everyone a dissatisfied look, and others responded with stern warnings; Natasha was somewhat confused. She had some impression of Constantine but didn't know well.

Pamela started typing frantically on her phone and soon Natasha's phone pinged. She picked it up to see a long, dizzying message.

But then an even longer string of text came through, and Natasha saw it was from Bruce. She didn't have time to ponder how he got her number, totally taken aback by the unspeakable things Bruce described in the text.

She glanced at Bruce, her eyes seeming to say are you serious, then looked at Constantine as if to say do you really do this.

Finally, the Agent looked up at the ceiling in despair. If there was anything harder than stopping fish from biting into morbid hooks, it might be preventing greed from biting into the hook of a madman.