Cooking with Wild Game (LN) - Volume 22 - Chapter 2.3

3

“Sorry for the wait, everyone. It’s finally time to get started on our first study session in quite a while.”

The sliced meat was placed in leather bags stuffed with pico leaves and temporarily stowed in the pantry, so I was finally able to make that declaration.

According to the sundial, it would soon be the fourth hour. Preparations for dinner were also mostly done, which left us with two whole hours for our study session.

“Let’s go ahead and start with this,” I said, grabbing a cloth bag that I had left in the corner of my workstation and emptying its contents onto a wooden plate. Instantly, a fragrant aroma filled the kitchen. The ingredient in question was gigi leaves, which I had roasted yesterday at the Fa house.

“My, what a wonderful aroma! Who knew that gigi leaves alone could give off such a scent.”

“Yeah, they don’t seem like they would be all that bitter just from the smell, right?”

It was a cacao-like aroma that called to mind chocolate or cocoa. The roasted gigi leaves had turned jet black. They had started out as round leaves around five centimeters in diameter, but after being heated for a while, their fibers had broken down, leaving them in a half-crumbled state already.

“Apparently, they’re usually used as an ingredient for making tea. It’s quite bitter, so would you all like to try it too?” I asked Dora and the other guests.

“You don’t mind? Herbs from Sym aren’t exactly cheap, are they?”

“It doesn’t take all that much if you just want to have a taste. Besides, it’s not like it’s an especially expensive herb.”

Moreover, Varkas had been withholding information on the proper techniques to use it, so the pantry in the old Turan manor still had a mountain of the stuff in stock. If we could find a good use for them, Torst and Polarth would be absolutely thrilled about it.

However, all of the chefs and guests who tasted it frowned. In contrast to their mellow and fragrant aroma, the gigi leaves proved to be bitter like concentrated cacao.

“Varkas made that delicious food using an herb this bitter? I can’t even imagine what sort of dish it would work well in,” Sheera Ruu remarked, looking rather discouraged. Reina Ruu had a pretty glum expression.

“I still haven’t thought up a way to use it in my cooking either. Just like I discussed the other day, though, I’d like to give it a try in sweets first,” I said.

“Huh? I don’t want any bitter sweets!” Rimee Ruu complained.

“Obviously, nobody would enjoy a sweet that was bitter and nothing else. But arow and sheel are pretty sour, right? And yet, you can still use them to make something delicious if you combine them with a sweet ingredient like sugar. So I’m thinking of something like that.”

To start with, we heated up some karon milk, then added sugar and powdered gigi leaves. It started to look even more like cocoa, but to anyone who didn’t know what that was, it would probably just look like a brown liquid. In fact, because of how black and dark brown colors were associated with burnt food, they probably just thought it looked bitter.

Wanting to break down their preconceptions, I checked the taste multiple times while adding more and more sugar. Of course, turning an herb that happens to smell like cacao into cocoa wasn’t going to be as easy as dissolving the leaves in milk. There was a whole process involved in making cocoa from cacao, and besides, we were dealing with gigi leaves here. No matter how much sugar and milk I added, it just wouldn’t be possible to recreate that characteristic deep, mellow flavor.

But by pairing it with the sweetness of karon milk and sugar, I was able to make a curious drink that at least seemed cocoa-like. It had the sort of cheap flavor you might expect to find at a candy store. But even still, at least the bitterness of the gigi leaves had been covered up, and they seemed to have pretty good harmony with the sugar and milk, so perhaps if you didn’t know what real cocoa tasted like, it wouldn’t seem like anything was off about it.

“What do you all think? I’d say it’s not half bad,” I said, moving the contents of the small pot to some dishes and passing them around to everyone.

Rimee Ruu hesitated, but Toor Deen gathered her resolve and picked up a spoon. The young chef really did seem to be the most passionate person of all when it came to making sweets. And as soon as she took a little slurp, her eyes started sparkling brightly.

“So tasty! And it’s really sweet too!”

“Well, I did add a ton of sugar.”

Rimee Ruu and Tara went ahead and grabbed their own spoons, and they pretty quickly started looking even more overjoyed than Toor Deen. Yun Sudra and Sufira Zaza followed suit shortly after. It looked like all the sweet tooths in our group were quite happy with it.

“This is delicious! And all you did was add karon milk and sugar!”

“Ooh, yes, it’s remarkably sweet and tasty... Still, slurping it is one thing, but are you aiming to serve people a drink this sweet as if it were some kind of tea?” Dora chimed in, showing a bit of disappointment.

“No,” I replied with a shake of my head. “This is ultimately just an ingredient for desserts. Toor Deen, how would you go about using it?”

“Huh...? What about kneading it into poitan or fuwano?”

“Yeah, that would be the most direct way to do it. Why don’t we go ahead and try combining it with baked poitan once it cools down? In the meantime, we have a couple other things to take care of,” I said, picking up a jar that was down on the floor by my feet. It contained some additional karon milk, and had been left in the Ruu pantry since yesterday. After having been allowed to sit for a night, a noticeable amount of fat had floated to the top. I carefully scooped it out, then sealed the jar again and called out to my beloved clan head standing by the entrance, “Ai Fa, could I ask you to shake this a bit like before?”

Ai Fa shot me a doubtful look, but went ahead and accepted the jar. It had been several months since we had last done this, but we were finally making whipped cream again. This was basically how milk fat was produced too, but Mikel had taught us an alternative technique to make whipped cream, by packing the liquid into a large leather bag and pummeling it with a stick, so it had been quite a while since we had done things this way.

The process would have taken me seven or eight minutes, but it could be done in half the time if I asked Ai Fa to do it instead. She held the jar with one of her hands on the stopper to ensure that it didn’t come loose and silently started shaking the vessel vigorously.

In the meantime, I had Toor Deen cool off the pseudo-cocoa using water from a jug, and then told her to knead it into some poitan flour. It started looking a lot like cocoa powder, and eventually it turned into a dark brown poitan batter. After tasting it, Toor Deen added a bit more karon milk and sugar, carefully kneaded it a little longer, and then started cooking it on a metal tray.

I took the thoroughly shaken jar back from Ai Fa and emptied the contents onto a wooden dish, along with some more sugar and gigi leaves. Then I whipped it up with a pair of long chopsticks, creating a version of whipped cream that was only slightly off from what I considered ideal.

I also used the skim milk to make custard cream by mixing it together with some sugar, fuwano flour and gigi leaves, plus a couple egg yolks. Then I added a bit of milk fat, but only a spoonful so that the custard wouldn’t be too rich. After that, I just had to heat it for a while to boil off the moisture, and it was done.

We had now made baked poitan, whipped cream, and custard cream with gigi leaves. Rimee Ruu and the other young girls all had stars in their eyes, and they hadn’t even tasted our new confections yet.

“Mmm, delicious! It’s not bitter at all! Or, maybe it is? I don’t know, but it’s really tasty!”

“It is, isn’t it? I could happily eat a whole lot more.”

Yun Sudra and Sufira Zaza looked just as delighted as the younger crowd. Telia Mas seemed surprised, while Myme, Reina Ruu, and Sheera Ruu all had serious expressions on their faces. Yumi and Vina Ruu didn’t appear to be completely satisfied, though.

“Would you like a taste too, Pino?” I called out, only for her to answer me with a rather conflicted smile.

“We forced you to let us stay here, so won’t it anger the forest if you keep being so charitable to us?”

“I don’t think the mother forest is that petty. And I did make sure to whip up enough for everyone.”

Besides, Rolo hadn’t returned yet, so it was just Pino and Shantu here. The two traveling performers were still a little hesitant, but they did finally go ahead and reach out for the baked poitan.

“Oh my... It’s surprisingly sweet.”

“This is wonderful. And I can still sense the aroma of gigi tea about it,” Shantu commented with a smile. He was a good-natured old man with a white beard that hung all the way down to his chest. He seemed to be an unusually mellow guy compared to the other traveling performers.

“You’ve had gigi tea before, haven’t you, Shantu? It must be really bitter, right?” Pino asked.

“It is. But if you skimp on the tea leaves, it just turns out dull. Bitterness is what defines gigi tea.” These were traveling performers who had journeyed all the way into the far-off reaches of Sym and back. That made their opinions about these new sweets really valuable to me.

“Of course, if you use gigi leaves in everything, all the different delicious flavors would start fighting each other, right? It might be even better to spread gigi cream on a normal sweet, or make a gigi sweet with ordinary cream on top,” Toor Deen humbly yet firmly stated.

I turned toward her and nodded. “Right. And anyway, there’s still plenty of room to experiment with the amount of gigi leaves we use. Especially with cooked sweets and custard cream, where the flavor changes after heating... I’d like to leave it up to you to figure out the proper proportions, Toor Deen.”

“Huh? M-Me?”

“Yeah. They say people do better at the things they enjoy. There are a ton of other ingredients that need my attention, so I’d like to leave the sweet-making up to you and Rimee Ruu.”

It was easy to see how nervous and yet excited the young chef was as she nodded back to me and said, “I understand.”

“I’ll be looking for other ways to use them too. Making a dessert out of these leaves might have been my idea, but I want you to see it to fruition, Toor Deen. I think that would be the most effective way to go about this. And of course, I’d love it if you would think about other recipes they could be used in as well.”

A new way to use the leaves had already popped into my mind while I was making the gigi-flavored custard cream. A way to create a kind of pseudo-chocolate. It would be difficult to manage without any means of refrigeration, but I got the feeling that this would let me get even closer to the chocolate flavor I knew.

“I see. Sweet making, huh? Are you making these for the nobles?” Dora asked.

“I’m not sure,” I replied, cocking my head. “Of course, the nobles have asked us to make sweets for them before, but I want to prioritize the people of the forest’s edge. As you can see, plenty of folks here like them too.”

“Ah, I see. In that case, what about the post town? I don’t think I would go out of my way to spend money on them for myself, but Tara seems to enjoy them a lot.”

I was interested in that question too. There never seemed to be very many women and children among the travelers who visited Genos—some visited from nearby towns, but they virtually never came from Sym or Jagar. That was simply because of how dangerous long trips were in this world. As such, virtually all of the women and children who came to our stalls were residents of Genos, so Yumi and Telia Mas were the ones I had to ask for their thoughts on the matter.

“Hmm. I’m not sure. If I wanted to buy something, I’d probably go with a meat dish. And these don’t seem like the kind of side dish I’d want to have alongside meat,” Yumi remarked.

“I think I might like to have some every couple days or so. Their flavor is pretty different from any other dish I’ve tried, after all,” Telia Mas added.

Sugar and honey hadn’t even been available in the post town until a few months ago, and prior to that, they had only had a few kinds of sweet fruit to enjoy. That meant that sweet foods in general were still unfamiliar territory for them.

“Well, it might be interesting to try selling them sometime in the future. They apparently have an oversupply of gigi leaves in the castle town, and it’ll probably be hard to use them up without getting our stalls involved. Still, I’d like to focus on things we can eat here at the forest’s edge.” At that point, I turned toward Mia Lea Ruu to hear her opinion. “I know we discussed this before, but what about eating sweets during the day as a snack? Or would it be a problem that it won’t give you as much strength as jerky does?”

“Well, lately we’ve been eating baked poitan as well. Not just the women, but the men too. Many of the men even say they feel stronger when they also eat poitan.”

“Yeah, I usually eat the same amount of poitan as jerky. And I bet I’d get even stronger if you could throw some aria in there too,” Ludo Ruu chimed in from the entrance.

“In that case, how about having the women add a little sweet to the food they eat during the daytime as a snack? And maybe even pair it with tea too...” I suggested.

“Tea? I can’t speak to that, as I’ve never had any myself. But I’ve heard from Reina and the others that people drink it in the castle town and the Daleim lands,” Mia Lea Ruu said.

“They drink it in the post town too, at the inns. You can get drinkable water from wells in the post town, but everyone seems to prefer having tea instead. It’s tasty, and it’s nutritious too.” At that point, I took another item out of a cloth bag: a chatchi skin that I had dried out yesterday. “We’ve had chatchi skin tea before while we were visiting the Daleim lands. The topic of tea came up a bit in the castle town, so I asked about how to make it on the way back.”

It really wasn’t anything difficult. You just took a crispy, dried-out chatchi skin and crumbled it up. Then you added the skin to hot water, strained the liquid after a while, and drank it.

Even though chatchi were vegetables similar to potatoes, their skins were like something you’d see on a citrus fruit, so chatchi tea had a fruity aroma and a refreshing flavor.

“Now that I think about it, you have zozo here in your pantry, don’t you? I’m pretty sure it’s been in there for the last seven months since the first time you showed me your food stores.”

“Yes. It doesn’t go bad, so it’s been left untouched all this time. Reina and the others will sometimes take a bit of it to try using it in cooking, but it never seems to add anything, so they just put it back where they found it.”

“I also learned how to make zozo tea, so why don’t we have everyone give it a try too?”

Zozo was shaped like a snake wrapped up in a coil, and had a texture that called to mind a shed snakeskin or a beehive, but it was really dense on the inside. Overall, it was around the size of a rugby ball.

Though seven months or so had passed since I had first seen it here in this pantry, there was still around eighty percent of it left. It was true that it seemed to have been shaved down here and there, but it was incredibly bitter, so I had a hard time picturing a use for it outside of tea.

“Some houses apparently keep them around for a year or two. If you do that, the bitterness strengthens, but so does the aroma. Of course, if it gets wet in the meantime, it’ll end up rotting.”

The tea-making process once again simply involved shaving some zozo off of the mass, boiling it, and straining it out. I didn’t have any specialized netting for the last step, so instead I had to use a coarse cloth to finish up both the chatchi and zozo teas.

Compared to the citrus-like chatchi tea, the zozo tea had a strong smell like Chinese herbal medicine. But when I gave it a try, it was surprisingly mellow and not even all that bitter.

“Ah, this is good tea,” Dora remarked, looking quite satisfied. “Granny Mishil shares her chatchi skins with us, you see, so we don’t buy zozo all that often.”

“We serve zozo tea in our shop. The fruit you have here is a good one. Asuta said you’ve had it for at least seven months. Do you think it could’ve been sitting for around a year, perhaps?” Telia Mas asked.

“That may be so,” Mia Lea Ruu replied, breaking out in a smile. “We bought it so we could add it to our soup, but we only needed a little to get all the aroma we needed, so we were never able to use it up.”

“Why did you buy zozo in the first place if you don’t drink tea? And at this size, it must have been pretty pricey too,” Dora questioned.

Mia Lea Ruu shrugged her sturdy shoulders. “I’m not quite sure. We just wanted to check what kind of flavor it had. Back then, we never had an opportunity to become friendly enough with any of the vegetable sellers to ask them about these things. And we didn’t know anything about tea or the like.”

“Ah, I suppose that’s true. Up until half a year ago, the people of the forest’s edge and us townsfolk didn’t get along at all,” Dora said, looking over at Ludo and Vina Ruu. “I can still remember that time when you two came to my shop with Asuta. I heard you talking about liking chatchi and hating pula and so on, which really surprised me. I figured you people of the forest’s edge were just eating my vegetables without even thinking about how they tasted.”

“Huh? Did we ever talk about stuff like that?” Ludo Ruu wondered.

“We did... That was when we came to town with Asuta, and he was trying to decide what sort of dish he should serve at his stall.” Vina Ruu replied, narrowing her eyes nostalgically. That must have been back when I had asked them to accompany me to make purchases, as Ai Fa had been busy with her work as a hunter. Back then, seeing the two of them in town had been really surprising for Dora.

The atmosphere had grown somewhat solemn, but then Mia Lea Ruu cheerfully spoke up. “Still, this zozo tea is certainly bitter. It’s not that I wouldn’t drink it, but I would hardly say it’s better than water.”

“Really? But bitter tea draws out the flavor of sweets better. And it could change your impression of other foods as well,” Dora said.

“I think I like it quite a bit. I’m enjoying just having a hot drink, even without any meat or vegetables in it,” Granny Tito Min chimed in.

Hearing that, Mia Lea Ruu said, “I see,” with a nod. “Well, I’m just grateful that we’ve found a use for this zozo so we won’t just be letting it rot. We can decide whether it’s good or not by the time it runs out.”

“Yeah. And we do use a lot of chatchi. We have a noisy little kid in our family who starts fussing if there isn’t any chatchi for dinner, after all,” Granny Tito Min said.

“Hey, everybody likes chatchi, right?” Ludo Ruu grumbled, taking a sip of his chatchi tea. “And I like this stuff too. It’s even tastier than fruit wine.”

“I think I really like it too! And if I drink it with sweets, it’ll make them even tastier, right?” Rimee Ruu asked, looking like a puppy wagging its tail.

“That’s right,” I told her with a smile. “Why don’t we give it a try with dinner tonight? You’re going to make dessert for us again, right, Rimee Ruu?”

“Yeah! I promised Tara I would!”

Tara was smiling happily. In fact, almost everyone was smiling, except for a few people like Ai Fa and Mikel. Things had already been pretty friendly the last time our guests had come here, but a month had passed since then, and there seemed to be even less of a boundary between the townsfolk and the members of the Ruu clan now.

“Well then, let’s deal with the next ingredient. This keru root seems like it would go well with myamuu giba.”

With that, our first study session in a while continued as the sunset steadily approached here at the forest’s edge.

Pino and Shantu both ate the same things we did and stood in the same general space, but they treated the entrance to the kitchen as a boundary, always watching over our exchanges with a small gap between us.