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Ascendance of a Bookworm (LN) - Volume 1.1 - Chapter 21




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Intense Battle with Food 

Due to Tuuli having started working, it became my job to prepare meals. But it was impossible for me to make a meal entirely by myself, considering that I couldn’t properly hold a knife nor make fires. In the end, I just made the food with Mom, helping where I could. 

I wanted to take this opportunity and use it to prepare the food in a Japanese style. Unfortunately, despite getting pumped up to use my Urano-era knowledge, nothing came from it. Because I mean, the game was rigged from the start. There was no rice here. No miso. No soy sauce. Naturally, no store sold mirin or sake. There was nothing I could do without ingredients. What could I make out of nothing? 

...And hey, I do know how to make miso and soy sauce, okay? I know what they’re made of and all that. Soybeans, koji, and salt. I even learned how to put them together. Back in elementary school I went on a field trip to a miso factory, and the demonstrations they held were so interesting I ended up researching more on my own in the library. 

I thought back to that field trip. After doing my absolute best to organize the recipes for miso and soy sauce, I wrote a report with my supplementary research included. My teacher was so proud she put it up on display in the classroom. 

...But where are soybeans and malt in this world? Even if it were possible to replace soybeans with another kind of common bean in this world, where could I buy koji? Naturally, I was too afraid to make koji through natural means. After all, koji is mold. One simple mistake and my whole family would have food poisoning. And even if I found some existing koji, I wouldn’t want to ferment it in this bacteria-filled house, not to mention that it would stink so bad my parents would throw it away before it’s done. 

I gave up on making my own seasoning and tried hard to think of Japanese food that didn’t need seasoning. Mmm... What about sashimi? Maybe it’d taste good dipped in salt and fruit juice? But I think this city is really far from the ocean. There are no fresh fish in the market. They don’t even sell wakame or any other kind of seaweed. Forget sashimi, I can’t even make a seaweed salad. 

No ocean meant no kelp, naturally. No dried shrimp, no fish flakes. Without those ingredients, I had no way of making the dashi soup stock that Japanese food needed. That was just a critical problem with no solution. I knew things were different here; I wouldn’t ask for powdered soup stock or anything like that. But at least give me kelp or fish flakes. 

I did try making something similar to pickles with faux-cucumbers and wine, but without soy sauce or sugar, it just didn’t taste right. It ended up painfully sour and unlike any pickled food I knew. Being incapable of making anything was naturally getting frustrating, so I pieced together the most simple recipe for a child like me to make and tried eating the faux-cucumbers with salt rubbed in. The salt drew out some of the water from the faux-cucumber and gave it a nice salty flavor, resulting in something similar to Japanese pickles. I had thought that eating anything similar to Japanese food would satisfy me, but in reality, it just made me yearn for white rice even more. Incidentally, eating the salted faux-cucumbers with multigrain bread felt so wrong that I couldn’t handle it. 

Rice, rice, Japanese food! Someone! Bless me with Japanese food, please! The faux-cucumbers made me want to eat proper Japanese food so much that I got it in my head to fish at the river and do what I could there. Since I couldn’t use fire, my only choice would be to dry the fish beneath the sun. Dried fish might work. Maybe it would work out if I salted the fish before drying them. I really hoped it would work out.

“Hey, Lutz. I want to try fishing. Are there fish in this river?” I asked Lutz by the river the next day we went to the forest. 

“I think that’ll be too hard for you.” 

Lutz’s prediction came true when my attempt at fishing failed spectacularly. Fishing itself was just really hard. I slumped over, depressed, and Lutz brought me a fish. 

“Here, I caught one. Whaddya wanna do with it?” 

“You don’t mind if I have it?” 

“Nah. I don’t need a fish.” 

“Can you start a fire? I want to cook this with salt.” 

Unable to wait for the sun, I took the fish Lutz caught for me and cooked it over a fire with salt, like one would cook a trout. 

...Ugh, it stinks! It tastes so bad! One bite later and I was scrunching my face up. Weird. It tasted and smelled like stinky mud, unlike any fish I had eaten before. Why did this fish smell so bad? I tilted my head, searching through my memories to see if I had cooked it wrong as Lutz furrowed his brows. 

“Won’t it stink if you cook it wrong like that?” 

“...It does stink.” The fish just smelled bad. I wish he had told me that earlier. 

I got another fish from him and this time I prepared it with my knife. It didn’t work exactly like a Japanese kitchen knife, so the fish got kind of messed up, but that shouldn’t impact the flavor. I took a carved stick and stabbed the fish with it, then tried drying it. Maybe dried fish would taste better. 

I went to gather firewood while the fish dried, and before I knew it the fish had gotten so hard it was inedible. Too much of its water had evaporated. 

“Myne, the heck is this?” 

“...Dried food that got too dry. I don’t think we can eat it anymore.” 

“Yeah, doesn’t look edible to me.” 

“But I might be able to get some soup stock out of it. I’ll try taking it home with me.” Even if I couldn’t eat the fish itself, it could potentially serve as a good ingredient for soup stock. I took the hard fish home with me and tried putting it in water. 

“Myne, what is that?! Disgusting! Please don’t put things like that in our pots!” 

“Um, Mom. I want to make soup out of it.” 

“No! The only thing you can put in our pots is food.” 

But this is food, technically. 

The dried fish looked so gross that Mom gave it a hard no, rejecting my idea to make soup from it. Maybe it looked so gross to her because she didn’t normally eat fish, and a dissected dried one just looked terrible. Kind of hypocritical, since she can look at a split-open pig’s head and think it looks delicious. 

...I’m sorry, Mr. Fish. I couldn’t make Japanese food in the end. For now, I’ll just try and think of how I can use our existing ingredients to make something closer to Japanese food in appearance and taste. That seems like it’ll be more fruitful than this. Uh huh. 

In a stroke of luck, we were given a bird to eat today. One of our neighbors had bagged five birds in the forest, apparently. And since it’d be hard for his family to eat all of them before they went bad, he split them with us, partially as thanks for us splitting some meat with them when Dad similarly hunted too much in the past. 

Mom was cutting up the bird. I didn’t know what species it was. The knife she used for cutting meat was so heavy that neither I nor Tuuli could use it yet. 

“Myne. Come now, pick the feathers.” 

“R-Right...” I grabbed the feathers of the bird and pulled. The sensation of the feathers popping out gave me goosebumps. I kept pulling the feathers while weepily reminding myself that it was necessary if we wanted to eat. It would be a long time before dealing with dead animals didn’t bother me. But if I do say so myself, I think I’ve grown a lot, considering that I didn’t scream or pass out at the sight of Mom gutting the bird. 

“Now, Myne. It’s time to cook.” 

“Okay.” While we were at it, I thought about making broth from the bird’s bones. Bird bone broth would definitely alter the range of the food’s flavors. It would be no replacement for kelp or fish flakes, but it could go well with dried mushrooms. 

However, it was a real struggle to get that bird bone broth. Mom didn’t understand what I was trying to do and thus wouldn’t help me at first. In these parts it was normal to just cook the meat and eat it plain off the bone. I managed to convince her to at least chop the bones, though, by reminding her that today was my turn to cook. Everything else was up to me. 

I threw bird bones, tenderloin, and herbs into our biggest pot. I chose herbs which smelled and tasted similar to what I was used to despite looking different. The ones I used smelled or tasted of onion, ginger, garlic, and bay leaf. Really, I put in anything that seemed like it would help cover the smell of the meat. 

“Myne! Wait! That one's too much for you. It's dangerous!” Mom stopped me before I could cut the leaves off a white radish-looking thing. She took the knife and, as if to stop it from running away, grabbed onto its leaves and held it against the cutting board. The moment she glared at the white radish and sharply and cut in half, I heard a loud scream. From the radish. 

“Bwuh? What?” I blinked in surprise, wondering if I were just imagining things, when Mom let go of the leaves and slammed the flat part of the knife against it. She had crushed it just like you would crush garlic. Mom was faster at chopping up vegetables than me, so I was thankful for her help, but I noticed that the white radish was turning red beneath her knife for some reason. It looked scary, like blood pooling out. 

“That should be enough. Be sure to wash it before you use it.” 

Is it just me, or does Mom look a lot more dangerous than the radish? It’s probably just me. Let’s leave it at that. In this world, a lot of vegetables that looked familiar to me were actually bizarre and incomprehensible. Each time I encountered one of these weird vegetables I was reminded that I really was in a world different from my own. 

A lot had happened, but once the seasoning herbs were inside the pot, all I had to worry about was getting out the scum that would build up. I had heard it was best to just dump all the water once you got it boiling, then refill it with water, but the scum didn’t actually impact the soup’s flavor and doing all that would be tedious, so I didn’t bother. Once it was boiling, I kept an eye on just the tenderloin and took it out once it was ready. I dipped it into water, shredded it, and that was that. It was ready to be put on the side of some salad. 

I prepared the other parts of the meat while the soup was cooking. I chopped the heart, gizzard, and other easily spoiled parts into small chunks and sprinkled them with salt and alcohol. These parts were fine to just cook with salt before eating. That was, as expected, the method of preparation my family was fastest to accept. The word “char-grilling” ran through my head briefly, but I had other work to do, so I forgot about it. 

Today we were eating the organs and thigh meat. Mom would be putting her all into making something like roast chicken with the thigh meat, so I was forbidden from interfering. I salted and rubbed alcohol into the breast meat, then put it in the winter storage room. We would be using that for tomorrow’s meal. If we had an airtight bag and a fridge, I would have made bird ham, but oh well. Life is full of regrets. 

“...That certainly smells good.” 

“It’s not ready yet.” 

Once the smell of the soup started drifting through the air, Mom, who had been keeping her distance, started inching her way to the pot. You had to cook bird bone broth for a decently long time, so I started chopping vegetables bit by bit while keeping an eye on the scum. Doing anything took a long time in this body, so I wanted to save time anywhere I could. 

The first step of my plan for making Japanese-like food revolved around the concept of a hot pot, where I would cook all the ingredients in a single pot. I had figured that once I had good broth, I would be able to make a decent hot pot. I wouldn’t be able to make the kind I was used to, but now I had bird bone broth. Since I lacked any ponzu sauce, I was taking pomes — the yellow paprika-esque fruits that tasted like tomatoes — and boiling them with herbs for flavor in the hot pot. In this pome soup I would be using the tips of the bird wings, which were too bony for regular eating, and some seasonal vegetable that I didn’t know the name of. The fact that most anything tastes good when boiled together is why I respect hot pots so much. 

“Oh, I think it’s about ready. Mom, could you help me?” I put a strainer on top of the second-biggest pot and called for Mom. 

“What do you need me to do?” 

“I want you to pour the soup out of this pot. It’ll get rid of the stuff inside of it that we don’t want.” 

“...So we won’t be eating all that, then,” said Mom, sounding relieved for some reason as she strained the chicken bone soup. 

I cleaned the biggest pot and had her put the strained soup into it. We used the second biggest pot the most, so it would be a pain to put the soup stock into it. My plan was to use the second biggest pot for the pome soup, after all. 

I put dried mushrooms into the prepared soup and got to work starting the pome soup. As the wing tips boiled, I loosened the edible meat from the bones and added it all to the pot. The bones were sharp, so I had to grab the meat bit by bit, making sure not to leave any within. Mom’s roast chicken was starting to smell nice, so considering time constraints, I started putting vegetables into my pot too. 

“Myne! What do you think you’re doing?!” 


“...Putting in vegetables?” 

“Don’t you know you have to parboil them first?!” 

...That seemed to be normal here, but if you boil vegetables in another pot and drain the water before using the vegetables, they’ll taste half as good. A lot of the nutrients will melt away, too. I had no complaints with my Mom’s cooking, but I didn’t want her to restrain my own cooking with her rules. 

“This is fine for what I’m making.” 

“But you’re just going to ruin your nice meal.” 

“It’ll be okay.” 

The pome soup was done once I took the scum out. A quick taste test confirmed that it tasted pretty good. You didn’t have to parboil vegetables before using them.

“I’m home. Aaah, I guess it was our place, huh?” 

“Hi, Tuuli. What do you mean?” 

“I smelled something nice on the road and got hungry while walking. Everyone started looking for where the smell was coming from. I didn’t think it’d be coming from my place.” It was like getting hungry for noodles after walking by a ramen stand. Bird bone broth had a pretty strong smell, after all. 

“I’m home. Oh, huh, now I know where that smell was coming from.” Dad, who had a morning shift, came home at about the same time. The bird bone broth smell had apparently traveled pretty far. Dad sat at the table with excitement on his face; our family had gathered just in time for dinner. 

“Al gave us a bird for today. He said it was thanks for the meat you gave him earlier, Gunther. I made it with Myne.” 

“You’re saying Myne made this stuff I don’t recognize?” 

“That’s right.” 

Mom’s roast was placed in the center of the table, and beside it was salad with tenderloin placed on top. The salted organs were placed next to Dad as finger food, and pome hot pot was in everyone’s bowls. The hot pot soup now looked like regular soup. 

“What’s this? It smells really nice. Can I eat some?” 

“It’s pome soup. I worked hard to get broth from the bird bone soup stock, so it should be really good. Try some.” 

Tuuli, her face up close to the pome soup, gave a sparkling smile and grabbed her spoon. “Wooow, it’s so good! How? This is amazing.” 

“Goodness, it is. I was surprised to see her boiling bird bones and putting in vegetables after just washing them, but this really does taste delicious,” said Mom earnestly after taking a bite herself. Given how experienced she was with this world’s cooking, she must have been worried despite the good smell. 

“Incredible, Myne. You’ve got a talent for cooking.” Dad, overjoyed, shoved the food into his face at an immense speed. 

I tried eating some of the pome soup myself. The bird bone broth had a really nice flavor and the vegetables added a lot. It tasted good, it really did. But. It wasn’t Japanese food.

The next day, I finished gathering firewood in the forest and went home as soon as possible. Small kids had to stick together in a tight group at all times, but kids like Tuuli who had finished their baptism could leave the group and do whatever they wanted, with some prior notice. Thus, I went home early with Tuuli. 

I wanted to use the rest of the bird meat today, so Tuuli and I were sharing cooking duties. The second step of my plan to make Japanese-type food was to try and sake-steam the meat. I figured that any alcohol would work, not just Japanese sake. 

“So I’m guessing you already know what you want to make, Myne?” 

“I’m planning on (sake-steaming) the meat and making (gnocchi) with a salad. What do you think?” 

“Mmm, I don’t really know what you’re talking about, but okay. I’ll leave it you.” 

First came the gnocchi. I boiled potatoes, crushed them, and mixed in a bit of salt and multigrain flour. Commoners couldn’t afford to just casually use wheat flour, so we were left with multigrain flour. It was mostly made from rye, barley, and oats. Once the dough was about the consistency of an earlobe, I stretched it into round sticks and chopped them into centimeter-long chunks. 

“Could you stretch out the chunks I cut so they look like this?” 

“Uh huh.” Tuuli nodded enthusiastically after seeing me somewhat struggle to stretch out the dough while rubbing ridges in with the back of a fork and my thumb. The ridges would allow sauce to catch and stay on top of the gnocchi more easily. 

Tuuli stretched out the chunks of dough I cut one by one. She was stronger than me, so she prepared them faster and more neatly than I could have. 

“You’re better than me at this, Tuuli.” 

“You think so...? Myne, don’t watch me, keep cutting. I’ll run out.” 

I had Tuuli boil some water and begin cooking the gnocchi. Once it started really bubbling and the gnocchi floated to the top, they were ready. I added more pomes to yesterday's leftover soup and boiled it down into pome sauce. I would be mixing the gnocchi in before we ate, so that was all I could do right now. 

“I think that’s enough for now. We can finish the salads really fast, so...” 

“Mom’s coming home soon, so I think making the salad now would be smart.” 

Tuuli got to work making the salad and Mom came home before long. Once I saw her, I asked her to get the breast meat I prepared yesterday so I could start the sake-steaming. Despite having been stored within a cold room on cold stone, it wasn’t winter anymore and I felt compelled to sniff test the meat. Nmm... Okay, it’s not rotting. All good. 

“Myne, is this the skillet you want?” 

“Uh huh. Thanks, Tuuli. I salted and rubbed alcohol into it yesterday, so it should be ready soon.” Not having any pepper hurt, but there was nothing I could do about that. 

Sake-steaming the meat would be simple. I browned the skin side of the seasoned breast meat before flipping it, adding more alcohol, and covering the skillet. Since I had the opportunity, I wanted to add in the mushrooms I had gathered in the forest. I cleaned the mushrooms and got ready to cut them, when all of a sudden Tuuli shouted with her eyes open wide. 

“Don’t, Myne! Those mushrooms will dance if you don’t burn them first!” Tuuli immediately skewered the mushrooms with a stone stick and, after salting them, heated them on the hearth’s fire. 

Um... Mushrooms? Dance? Does she mean like how seaweed can wiggle around from the heat? I really don’t get it. I tilted my head, confused, and Tuuli offered me the now slightly burnt mushrooms. 

“Now they’re okay.” 

“Th-Thanks...” I was really thrown off, but if that’s all it took to make them edible, okay. The mushrooms were probably just another member of the bizarre food group. I needed to be careful before judging things by their appearance. 

Taking care not to get burned by the heated up mushrooms, I got to cutting. “Mom, which alcohol would be best for cooking? Just a little won’t make it taste that much better, so I want about half a cup.” 

“Good question... This is what you want.” Mom filled about half a cup with alcohol, which I took and poured into the pot by standing on something and stretching as much as I could. I put the cover back on the pot, and once the sizzling got loud enough, I took it off the fire and let it sit. Now we just had to wait for the lingering heat to do its work. 

“You’re already taking the pot off?” 

“It’s already hot enough to cook properly on its own. If you cook breast meat too much, it’ll get dry and hard to eat.” 

I warmed up the gnocchi and pome sauce made from the leftover soup, mixing them together as I did so, while Tuuli finished making the salad. Just like last time, the salad was topped with tenderloin. It seemed that everyone really loved it yesterday. 

“Today’s dinner is looking really fancy again, huh? Two days in a row!” 

“We really gotta thank Mr. Al.” 

Considering our financial situation, it was fairly rare for us to have this much food on the table. That bird really helped out. 

“I’m home. Things’re smelling good again.” Dad came home with a broad smile. He had been looking forward to today’s dinner ever since yesterday. He puffed out his chest and told us about how he’d bragged about our cooking at work. I got the feeling that in reality, he had annoyed everyone by being extremely proud and not shutting up about it. If that were the case, I’d feel kinda awkward going to the gate. 

“Time to eat.” 

“Wow, amazing! This tastes so good, Myne!” Tuuli’s eyes shot open with joy after she bit into the sliced, sake-steamed bird meat. 

Mom also smiled after taking a bite. “It’s a simple meal, but the breast meat is soft and nice. The mushrooms add a lot too; this truly does taste delicious. Was it because of the nice alcohol, I wonder?” 

“Maybe. The sweetness of the honeyed alcohol is really seeping into the meat.” The moment I said that, Dad paled, shot up out of his chair, and ran to the shelf with his liquor bottle. He hung his head looking close to tears upon seeing that the already small jar was now half-empty. 

“...M-My secret stash...” 

Sorry, sorry. But Dad, when I asked for some, Mom gave me a meaningful smile and told me that you had stealthily bought that without telling her, and that it’d be a waste if everyone didn’t get to enjoy it. For once, I actually managed to read between the lines. 

The honeyed alcohol made the food taste great, but it was sweet in a way that Japanese sake wasn’t, so the meal didn’t really taste like Japanese food. It was something entirely different. Aaah, I miss Japanese food. 

Being told all about the food here that supposedly “danced” and was “dangerous” surprised me a lot, but in the end, I could cook with similar recipes as I did back in Japan. On future days, I made potato gratin, quiche out of hardened multigrain bread dough, and so on. My family loved it all, but I personally wasn’t satisfied with any of it. I lacked the seasoning and spices to even make proper western food, so everything ended up tasting more or less the same. 

...At least give me pepper! And I’d be extra happy if you gave me some curry powder! My struggle to improve my diet was far from over. 



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