Chapter 2: A Childish Tyrant
1
“Well then, excuse me...” Chiffon Chel stated as she exited the kitchen, leaving just me and Roy.
“Good grief. If you’d just leave too, that’d spare me a lot of trouble,” Roy grumbled.
However, I was focused on taking in the state of the kitchen at the moment. If it weren’t for the circumstances, I would have been positively overjoyed to find myself in a place like this. Whoever owned this manor, it had to be either a noble or one of their followers. And so, this kitchen was far better equipped than any I had seen at the forest’s edge or the post town.
To start with, each wall had to be around 6-7 meters wide. It was a large enough size that you could definitely fit two ten-square-meter rooms inside. Both the walls and floors were lined with bricks, and there were numerous open windows high up to provide both light and ventilation, which seemed to be doing a solid job.
On the right hand wall, there was all sorts of cookware dangling in a row. Naturally that included a variety of knives, but also ladles and wooden spatulas both big and small, a metallic grater, something like a strainer for sifting and draining, and so on. It looked every bit as well equipped as a kitchen from back home.
Farther in sat a large shelf, and that had all shapes and sizes of pots and bowls. I saw a flat one with a handle that looked like a frying pan, and even something akin to a mortar.
Opposite from that were the stoves. Four of them in total, of various sizes, all precisely constructed out of stone. Beside them was a box stuffed with firewood, and some pitch black little shapes... Charcoal. I ended up face to face with the stuff before I got the chance to ask Mikel more about it.
Continuing down the line, I found a huge metal box. It was half-embedded in the wall, and there was a square door on the front. Could it be...? I thought as I went ahead and pulled it open, to find two flat racks of metal wire spanning the inside. Sure enough, it was an oven.
Then there was the spacious work table installed in the center of the room. Plus, there were plenty of jugs filled with water, too. The other separate large jar must have been a wastebasket. It had been washed clean, but it had just a bit of a rotten meat smell lingering about it.
It was all so perfect. Taking into account that there was no gas or electricity here in this world, it was about as well equipped of a kitchen as I could imagine. Even though things felt so antiquated in this world, it was still possible to make all this.
I had very mixed feelings, both admiration at the setup, but also concern at the gap between how nobles and commoners lived.
“I was told to have you make a single main dish,” Roy said with a faint grin, so I turned to face his way. “And you should use kimyuus meat and karon milk. The pantry’s over here,” he added, gesturing toward the door on the far side of the room, where he had been till we arrived.
And there, I found yet another dazzling paradise awaiting me. There were countless evenly-spaced shelves, all positively packed with vegetables, both familiar and otherwise.
There were dried fruits and herbs on the walls, and the farthest shelf in was full of earthenware and glass jars. The massive one at my feet had a lid covering it, so that naturally must have been where the meat was buried, pickling in salt.
Immediately beside that sat a woven basket with two varieties of eggs, large and small. The smaller ones likely came from the chicken-like kimyuus, while the big ones were probably from totos, which was more like a giant moa from my old world. Eggs didn’t show up too commonly in the stalls, and you generally had to go to a kimyuus or totos dealer directly in order to purchase them, so that made for a pretty rare sight for me, too.
“This sure is something... Everything is on a whole different scale when you’re talking about a noble’s manor, huh?”
“Hmph. Just to clarify, this is only the kitchen meant for the servants, you know.”
“Servants?”
“It’s a small kitchen meant for preparing food for the folks who work here. Fitting for a kid like you, right?”
That certainly was true. If I was granted even more, it would be far too much for someone like me. And so, I really didn’t feel all that angry even when Roy shot me that scornful look.
“Anyway, hurry up and get started. The bell for the third hour has already rung, so if you take your sweet time you won’t finish before dinner.”
“The third hour... I was kidnapped just a bit after the sun hit its peak, so around how much time do I have left?”
“Dinner is when the sun sets, at the sixth hour.”
“Got it. So is it the zero hour when the sun hits its peak? Or the first?”
“That’s just the sun hitting its peak. And when the bell chimes six times after that, it’s sunset.”
Roy looked astounded, like he was thinking, You don’t even know that much?
So if they split the time between the sun hitting its peak and when it sets into six parts, that’d put us right in the middle of the afternoon, huh?
In other words, it was around when our stalls wrapped up business for the day back in the post town.
What was everyone doing now that I had been snatched away? Such thoughts were pressing in on me even now.
Did Ludo Ruu and the other hunters get hurt?
Was Nail released like they said?
Did Reina Ruu and the other women keep running the stalls all the way till the end of the day?
I guess I ended up completely failing to show up for my business with the inns, too. What did Nail, Naudis, and Milano Mas think when they heard how I was abducted?
And Ai Fa... Had Ai Fa already been told what had happened?
I’m definitely coming home, safe and sound.
With that, I resolutely turned and faced Roy.
“Which one is the karon milk?”
Roy silently walked over toward the innermost shelf. Then, he grabbed an earthenware jar around the size of a container of fruit wine.
“These blue jars are all karon milk. There are five left for today.”
I popped off the cork-like lid and gave the contents a whiff. A thick, milky aroma came flooding into my nose.
“What a wonderful scent. Can I just drink it as is?”
“Of course. If there’s any left over for tomorrow, it’ll just get made into milk fat or dried milk.”
“Milk fat?”
I was just as unfamiliar with the term as I had been “dried milk.”
However, a certain premonition came to mind.
“I take it that just means it’s made from the fats in the milk? In that case, could it be...”
I started, only for Roy to cut me off with an annoyed shake of his hand. He picked up a small jar from the shelf, and underneath its lid awaited a gleaming, cream-colored, fragrant substance... Yes, this was undoubtedly some sort of butter.
“Ooh, this is amazing! What’s in these other jars and containers?”
“This one has reten oil, and this is karon fat. That next shelf down has mamaria fruit wine, sparkling wine from Jagar, gyama dried milk from Sym, and vinegar made from mamaria.”
“Vinegar! There’s vinegar, too?!” I shouted without thinking, only for Roy to furrow his brow in annoyance.
“Mamaria vinegar isn’t especially rare, is it? It’s nothing to go being so ridiculously loud over, at least.”
“I’ve never seen vinegar in the post town before. As for that reten oil, is it derived from a vegetable?”
Roy’s face said, “Of course it is.”
I only knew of the state of the post town, while he seemed to solely be aware of how things were in the castle town. And so, he obviously couldn’t understand my surprise at this milk fat, vegetable oil, and vinegar. Between my unease at being wrenched away from my comrades at the forest’s edge and excitement at encountering these new ingredients, I was practically in a drunken frenzy of sorts.
“This row here is ingredients from Jagar. Tau oil, sugar, and panam honey.”
The Jagar-produced sugar was a light brown color and looked just a bit coarse.
As for the panam honey, it was a slick golden liquid that reminded me of maple syrup.
There was also the familiar rock salt, as well as various herbs and spices like pico and lilo. And there were plenty of crisp, dried red chitt seeds stored there too.
As for dried milk, there were two varieties: gyama and karon. Based on my experience, the gyama dried milk was rich like Camembert cheese, while the karon stuff was milkier and had a soft, springy texture. When adding in the pure white color like snow, it seemed to be something akin to high-grade mozzarella cheese.
The last ingredient to make an appearance was a light yellow mysterious powder.
“That powder’s a stock made from kimyuus bone, karon shoulder meat, and a variety of vegetables all boiled together.”
With Roy’s permission, I took a pinch and gave it a lick.
Instantly, a delicious saltiness exploded forth atop my tongue. It was a condensed flavor that reminded me of bouillon.
“Wow. How do you solidify the boiled stock like this?”
I had thought this sort of trick wasn’t possible without freeze drying, but Roy plainly responded, “Once the stock is separated, we add coarsely ground fuwano powder and salt, then dry it out.”
In that case, this was powdered fuwano that had absorbed the stock, huh?
From what I knew, fuwano was an ingredient like wheat flour that was also eaten in the post town. But since the people of the forest’s edge ate poitan as a staple instead, I had only had a chance to taste it a handful of times.
“Those are the seasonings we’ve got here in this kitchen. Do you find that somehow unsatisfactory, Mr. Post Town Chef?”
“Of course not.”
Milk and milk fat, vegetable oil, animal oil, vinegar, sugar, honey, bouillon... It was an absolute cavalcade of the seasonings I had been so craving. So much so that it was upending how I looked at everything I’ve struggled with all this time.
However, this wasn’t my normal work. No, my true task was to see how many dishes I could conjure up with the limited ingredients and seasonings available in the post town. As my bewilderment abated, I felt myself getting more and more angry in turn.
Is there seriously such a gap between how things are inside and outside of the stone walls? The people of the forest’s edge protect the fields from giba, the plantation owners grow crops in their fields, and the folks from the post town do business with travelers... But what exactly do the people in the castle town do to earn such luxury?
To start with, I had been born in the nation of Japan. I didn’t know anything more about feudal societies ruled by nobles and royals than what I had learned in school. From my perspective, having such a massive gap between how nobles and commoners lived wasn’t something I could just shrug off and accept.
“So, you said to use karon milk and kimyuus meat, right? What sort of dish would you normally make with those?” I asked Roy, suppressing the irritation I was feeling inside.
“Generally you would use karon milk in a boiled dish or stew, or pair it with grilled meat. At any rate, you need to combine it with other seasonings to make it into a proper meal.”
“Yeah, that makes sense. Hmm... Guess I should go with cream stew here...”
“Cream stew?”
“It’s a dish from my home country. Hopefully it’ll meet your noble employer’s tastes.”
Whether it did or not, though, I had no choice but to pull from the repertoire of dishes that I knew.
And so, I started by giving the karon milk and milk fat a taste test.
“Hey, if you’re checking out the taste of the milk, give the container a shake.”
“Huh? Why’s that?”
“If you don’t, the water and oil won’t mix.”
Ah, right. When raw, unprocessed milk was left to sit, the liquid and fat would end up separating.
And so, I followed Roy’s advice and gave the container a good shake before giving the karon milk a taste. It was more viscous than the milk I knew, and had a real rich flavor to it.
It didn’t have a questionable odor about it like I had been expecting, either. Did that mean that it had been pasteurized? At any rate, with that richness it definitely must have had a higher fat content than cow’s milk.
And extracting all that was how they got what they called milk fat. They didn’t seem to have fermented it or anything like that, and the sweetness and flavor was pretty close to the butter I knew.
However, they had added rock salt, presumably to preserve it. I could detect that pretty easily, and thanks to the high air temperature, it was in a half-melted state. In all likelihood, it wouldn’t have all that long of a shelf life.
Still, if these ingredients could act as substitutes for milk and butter, it wouldn’t be hard at all to make a sort of cream stew. And so, though I had a lot of different emotions swirling around inside me about all this, I went ahead and picked out my vegetables as calmly as I could manage.
“By the way, how many people should I prepare for?”
“Four... No wait, three.”
Three, huh?
And just who would those people be, exactly?
Now that I thought about it, Diel and her father were supposed to be staying at one of Cyclaeus’s manors, but was this the place? I found it hard to imagine you would bring guests to the same place as someone you kidnapped, but I couldn’t claim to understand how nobles thought.
“If we’re talking a single plate for three people, that’s not all that much. I don’t think I should need any help from you for the actual cooking in that case.”
“Yeah, yeah, just do as you please,” Roy replied, actually grinning rather than looking annoyed. Maybe his “help” was just an excuse, and his actual task was to keep an eye on me.
Well, at any rate, there were already two armed guards outside the door. And so, as I headed over to the vegetable shelf, I figured that if they wanted to observe me they could do so, as much as they pleased.
I found the aria and chatchi right away. And I also secured one more vegetable sold in the post town, nenon.
Nenon was an orange, turnip-shaped vegetable. It had a mild sweetness to it, and got very soft when you boiled it. It was the source of the vegetable paste used in the kimyuus manju I had eaten as my first ever snack in the post town.
By boiling it to a suitable degree, I could get a texture akin to carrots. They didn’t have quite as much presence as those more familiar vegetables, but I had been occasionally using them to add a touch of color to our giba soup at the Fa house.
It would be perfect if I could find something like broccoli too, but there’s not exactly time to test out unfamiliar vegetables right now.
And so, I ended up choosing tino to provide some green in the dish. It was a lot like cabbage, and had a rather strong color to it. I figured in a cream stew it wouldn’t be half bad.
That was plenty in terms of vegetables.
However, I was still missing a crucial ingredient: the poitan to give the stew its thickness.
When I asked, I got back a sneer of, “Of course there isn’t any. Do you really think you can make a proper dish with poitan of all things? Seriously, do you want to be whipped that badly?”
Right. Kamyua Yoshu had said that poitan was ultimately just seen as portable rations for travelers and soldiers, and didn’t even make it to dinner tables in the post town.
As I loaded a variety of vegetables into a basket, I was left at something of a loss. A stew that wasn’t thick really wasn’t a stew at all.
“Umm... Then there’s something I wanted to ask. You mentioned fuwano flour before, right? Fuwano’s eaten as a staple food here in the castle town too, right?”
“Of course it is.”
“Well then, what process do you use to get it like that, exactly?”
“Huh? You finely grind the fuwano, then knead it with water, naturally. You call yourself a chef, but you’ve never even baked fuwano?”
“Yes, because I haven’t needed to before now. Then there should be some of that finely ground fuwano here, right?”
Rather than bothering with opening his mouth again, Roy just pointed to the corner of the pantry.
In the shadow of the vegetable shelf sat a large, but unassuming bag. And sure enough, when I opened it up I found it was packed with a white flour.
While poitan had a slightly creamy color, this stuff was pure white, like snow. Its grain was super fine, and when I gave a pinch of it a lick, I found it had a fluffy, wheaty flavor to it, like the flour I was more familiar with from my old world.
Yeah, this seems like it’ll work... In fact, it may be even closer to wheat flour than poitan.
In that case, when added alongside my milk and butter substitutes, it should be easy to make up a white sauce like normal. So of course, I had to start by confirming that.
“Alright, I’ll be borrowing a stove, then.”
With that, I carried all my necessary ingredients into the kitchen and stood before the stove.
I lit a flame, placed a small pot above it, threw in some milk fat, and watched as it melted in no time at all. The aroma it gave off was a lot like butter, and it was seriously stirring up my appetite.
Then I added in the fuwano flour bit by bit, stirring it carefully so that it didn’t lump up.
With poitan, it would quickly burn when I tried this. And I had been using giba fat rather than milk fat back then, too. Because of that, when I made a stew back during the Rutim banquet, I had to add raw poitan in order to force it to take the appropriate thickness for the dish.
As I had expected, the fuwano flour and karon milk fat really did harmonize well.
Once it had become a viscous, half-liquid roux, I added some karon milk and gave it a taste. Both the flavor and the texture were pleasantly mild. While it was a richer flavor than a sauce made with milk and butter, it also didn’t have as strong of an aftertaste to it.
And when I added rock salt, pico leaves, and some of that pseudo-bouillon to adjust the flavor, it ended up as a nice white sauce I’d have no qualms about serving anywhere.
“Those are some pretty unusual preparations, there,” Roy sneered, but since he wasn’t directly asking for a taste I just went ahead and ignored him.
Alright, next up is the meat and veggies.
Aria, chatchi, tino, nenon... They would be acting as onions, potatoes, cabbage, and carrots in my dish. For the chatchi and tino, I went with bite-sized morsels, while I cut the aria into wedges and the nenon into half-moon slices. And since we were just talking enough for three people, I didn’t need to make all that much.
For the kimyuus, I went ahead and settled on breast meat. And since it was apparently an entree I was preparing, I made it a pretty good helping. This manor fortunately had kimyuus meat with the skin still attached. I had heard it was significantly more expensive that way, but apparently that was no concern at all for a noble.
Cutting with their meat and vegetable knives felt fantastic, too. It really was ironic how blessed this environment felt.
“Um, is it alright if I use milk fat when frying meat and vegetables, too?”
“Huh? Just do as you please. You don’t have to go asking me about every little thing.”
“But it’s a valuable ingredient, isn’t it? You need a lot of milk to make just a little of it, right?”
I had heard that when making butter from milk, you only got 20 grams from each liter.
But Roy just gave back a sneer of, “Hmph. That may be true, but this manor buys so much milk we could never drink it all, and the extra’s made into milk fat. No matter how crude a dish you make with it, it’s at least better than letting it go bad, right?”
“You’re talking about extra and having it go bad... You’re not saying you throw the stuff out, are you?”
“What else would we do with it? Rub it on our skins like the high-ranking ladies in the capital do? Anyway, it’s customary for nobles to just buy too much rather than risk having too little.”
That custom was a crock of shit. Karon milk, milk fat, and dried milk were all ingredients you couldn’t even get a hold of in the post town. It would be one thing if they were just too costly to produce... But when the nobles were recklessly overbuying the stuff, that just unnecessarily drove up the prices.
Now that I think about it, you’re only supposed to be able to buy karon torso meat in the castle town, too.
This was seriously pissing me off.
No matter how fantastic of a cream stew I might make, it felt completely hollow when I thought of how it would only ever get eaten by nobles.
Couldn’t I at least get a hold of karon milk in the post town somehow? If we could make our own milk fat and dried milk from it, that would seriously increase the breadth of my cooking.
If you had the connections, it was at least possible to get gyama dried milk and tau oil through merchants. By looking into the distribution channels and having the funds, maybe it would be possible to purchase stuff like this karon milk, reten oil, and Jagar-made sugar in the post town, too. Or at least, I couldn’t help but hope that was the case.
“Hey, if you keep dawdling like that, you really won’t make it in time,” Roy called out in a teasing tone, and I turned to face him.
He really was a perfectly ordinary-looking young westerner. He had a mouth on him, but I didn’t think he was all that much of a villain. However, he also didn’t seem to realize in the least just how blessed he was working in an environment like this.
“Let me use the stove again...”
Anyway, for now I just needed to hurry up and finish this job, even if I hadn’t taken it of my own volition. Thinking about the forest’s edge and the post town would have to wait. Still, I definitely felt I needed to at least bring back some helpful information after being forced through this insanity.
Holding on to that thought, I went ahead and fried up the chunks of kimyuus breast meat in milk fat. It had been pickled in salt to start with, and so I only used pico leaves for seasoning.
Once the surface of the meat turned a golden brown, I went ahead and threw in the vegetables, too. Then once those were nice and cooked, I added water and let it boil over a low flame.
30 minutes or so after, around when I heard a solemn distant bell ring out four times, even the chatchi (which cooked slowest) was plenty soft.
It wasn’t like I was using giba meat, plus I had a bouillon substitute at hand, so I didn’t need to boil it quite so thoroughly. And so, I went ahead and poured the milky white sauce I had made earlier into the pot.
After that, I carefully stirred it over a low flame, and once it was properly heated I gave it a taste.
It seemed a little lacking in salt, so I added a pinch, as well as some tau oil as a secret ingredient.
What a truly nostalgic cream stew flavor. It was a dish I had honestly never thought I would be able to make here in this world.
Just how overjoyed would I be feeling right now if I was feeding it to Ai Fa, the people of the forest’s edge, and the folks from the post town instead? At any rate, I desperately held back those feelings as I told Roy, “It’s done.”
“Hmph. That was surprisingly quick... Hey, the food’s done!” Roy yelled, at which point Chiffon Chel entered through the previously shut door.
“Good work, Sir Asuta, Sir Roy... Ah, what a wonderful karon milk aroma...” she stated as her eyes narrowed with excitement.
“Stop prattling on and do your job already,” Roy retorted, snatching the plate for the sample of my dish out of my hands.
He ladled out some of the finished cream stew and thrust it toward Chiffon Chel. The woman then gave me a bow, and then accepted the wooden plate.
“Well then, I will now taste this dish for poison...”
So she even had to handle stuff like that?
I felt a deep gloom as I watched Chiffon Chel bring a spoonful of my stew to her mouth.
And then, with a, “My...” her eyes opened wide. And soon enough, she broke out in a faint smile full of both surprise and admiration. “What a truly delicious dish... This may well be the tastiest thing I have ever eaten in my entire life...”
Instantly, Roy’s eyebrows shot up.
“Hey, don’t go overboard with your flattery like that, slave girl. Or have you forgotten who exactly makes the food you test for poison each day?”
“I most certainly do not intend to look down on the cooking made by everyone else... I simply felt this dish was truly outstanding...”
“It looks like you don’t get it. The most distinguished chefs in all of Genos are gathered here in this manor. So I’m warning you, if you run your mouth and make light of them like that, you’re gonna get whipped.”
“Yes... But I was born in the nation of Mahyudra. As such, my tastes surely differ from those of westerners, so I do not believe I am making light of anyone...” Chiffon Chel replied with a smile.
It was at that point that Roy’s expression finally turned full-on hostile.
“So you’re saying you have no intention of taking back that drivel you spouted...?”
Chiffon Chel gave a troubled tilt of her head, then replied, “That is correct...” with a small nod.
In the next moment, Roy picked up the ladle left sitting beside the pot and threw it at her with all his might.
The projectile hit its mark right on her temple, and Chiffon Chel let out a feeble, “Ah...”
“You wretched slave woman!”
Roy then reached out and snatched up the karon milk container I left on the workstation. Right before he could throw it, though, I grabbed hold of his wrist.
“Cut it out! You’re flying off the handle over something like that?!”
Roy’s bloodshot eyes glared my way.
“Let me go. You’re just some fake chef from the post town. Who do you think I am?”
“I’ve got no damn clue. You’re the ones hiding your identities.” Roy was squirming, so I firmed up my grasp. “Still, you’re a chef too, right? In that case, you shouldn’t be handling cooking utensils and ingredients like they’re weapons.”
Roy’s face twisted in pain as the blue container fell back down on the workstation with a clunk.
“Oww! L-Let go! You’re going to break my arm!”
“That’s an exaggeration,” I stated in astonishment, but I was taken aback when I saw how his eyes were tearing up. He might have been seriously hurting, here.
“Sir Asuta... Please, let go...” Chiffon Chel stated, clinging to my feet from where she had collapsed down on the floor. And when I turned to look at her, I gulped.
Over her head, I saw the soldiers grabbing the handles of their swords from beyond the door.
With that, I immediately let go, at which point Roy sunk to the brick floor and clasped his wrist up against his chest.
“Thank you... However, there is nothing for you to gain from covering for someone like myself, Sir Asuta...” Chiffon Chel stated.
I gave a big, deep sigh.
All that had been in my mind even while cooking up that dish had been, I want to return to Ai Fa as soon as possible.
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