Ch.221Cooking (1)

In truth, the reason I became properly interested in cooking began with something utterly trivial.

That is… the cuisine of this era, especially high-class cuisine in general, somehow doesn’t match my taste.

First of all, in this world, the more you venture into high-class cuisine, perhaps because they can use all sorts of magical plants or monster by-products, the food enjoyed by the upper and highest classes can be described as surpassing even modern cuisine.

Particularly, beyond the ingredients themselves, there’s also the significant factor that dishes made by chefs who have reached the intermediate level, in warrior terms, are imbued with mysticism.

The one time I ate food prepared by an intermediate chef, it was like having hallucinations… the kind of reaction you’d see in some cooking manga.

Except that it actually manifests as magical illusions, and similar to potions, consumption alone produces specific magical effects.

…How one can produce magical effects just by grilling an ordinary beef striploin is truly a fascinating mystery.

Anyway, the truly delicious foods satisfy my tongue in a different way from modern food engineering, making it unfair to dismiss them as merely medieval level.

However, such cases are rather the exception to the reality.

Even if you searched the entire kingdom, you’d be lucky to find ten intermediate chefs at most.

In other words, unless you’re a high-ranking noble, most people eat food of average medieval quality….

This represents a truly extreme contrast.

The food served at parties or balls is aimed less at actual taste and more at displaying power or wealth, so it’s not only tasteless but also disgustingly expensive for what it is—something you’d eat just enough of for ceremony’s sake.

For instance, most banquet dishes consist of rare beast roasts slathered with spices, but rarity doesn’t necessarily equate to good taste.

Take peacock roast, for example, which appears at almost every large banquet due to its magnificent appearance symbolizing power, but it’s notorious for having terribly tough meat and awful taste because they preserve the feathers during cooking.

Of course, among rare beasts and ingredients, there are quite a few that taste good, and especially monster meat with high magical content makes for excellent meat with maximized umami.

…But when soaked in spices, that’s a different story.

Perhaps to flaunt their wealth by using expensive spices excessively and to maintain prestige, over half of this world’s banquet dishes are literally disgustingly tasteless with the worst aromas.

Roasted meats so heavily preserved with pepper, salt, and sugar that you can’t even taste the original flavor of the meat. Spice stews made by carelessly dumping cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, cloves, and cinnamon without any regard for proportions, like some kind of curry.

These days, the trend is slowly shifting toward taste, improving the situation, or moving toward dishes like whole roasted lamb simmered in wine.

‘…What is luxury, really?’

Well, at least the somewhat edible foods include pies made from bread dough or pastry dough, and further, sweets or desserts prepared with fruits and sweeteners like sugar and honey….

But even here, when they sprinkle nutmeg all over cookies as if it’s fashionable, I wonder if it’s really any better.

Of course… compared to these dishes, everyday noble cuisine is not bad.

Well-roasted meats (roast dinners), seasonal vegetables and fruits, various processed food ingredients, pies wrapped in pastry or bread dough, soups made with good ingredients.

While staying at the castle, quality fresh cheese made at the dairy farm was delivered daily, and they use spices moderately enough not to interfere with the eating experience.

But how should I put it… the food certainly tastes good, but it feels like it lacks that distinctive soul.

Roasting and adding sauce, simmering in wine, applying seasonings and steaming, sometimes implementing relatively innovative cooking methods.

The food wasn’t bad due to the chef’s skill, and I ate it deliciously without any complaints at the time….

Whether something has changed due to the influence of “gluttony” or not, eating and eating without satisfaction inevitably brought a sense of deficiency to my mind.

‘…I want to eat that.’

Simply put, I started craving foods that only remained in my memories.

Of course, my already unstable memories had mostly become vaguely blurred, and perhaps for that reason, I didn’t know how to cook those foods from my memories before, and now it’s naturally impossible.

Still, what’s fortunate is that there are at least a few foods I remember.

In particular, as an example, there’s this chicken soup I’m currently attempting to make, which has the taste of home.

In the Western continent, chicken soup is simply a food eaten for recovery or nutritional replenishment when suffering from colds and such.

Typically, short pasta is added to provide the missing carbohydrates.

However… despite its decent appearance, to me with my K-soul installed, the taste is bland and salty in a word.

The broth doesn’t properly infuse, so the deep flavor of chicken stock doesn’t come through, and when they try to compensate by just adding salt, the taste naturally becomes terrible.

Especially from the perspective of a soup dish containing chicken, by the standards of someone like me whose past life memories remain and whose standards are extremely high, it’s far from passing.

It’s true that since chicken is boiled in it, it can’t be tasteless, but eating it gives me the feeling that it could be much more delicious.

The stock doesn’t properly infuse, and the chicken fat is excessively greasy. Particularly, the herbs used to mask the chicken smell—if I had to pick one, celery—stand out too much.

That’s why I was preparing a delicious chicken soup to my taste after a long time… if I had to compare it, something closer to baeksuk or samgyetang.

In the village’s communal (technically my own) chicken farm, a considerable number of chickens were being raised, so it was no trouble to obtain a chicken that was nearing the end of its life.

However, what’s truly important is what comes next, I suppose.

This chicken, if compared to modern terms, would be classified as a spent or old hen—quite large and aged, no longer laying eggs. While it’s as big as modern chickens due to its mixed monster bloodline… it’s also proportionally tough. Incredibly tough.

If cooked like a young chicken, the meat becomes rubbery and tough, requiring long, slow cooking to be edible, which is why in the Frankish Kingdom, the mainstream approach is to simmer such chickens with cheap wine.

Since older chickens have tough meat and particularly strong odors, using alcohol helps eliminate the gamey smell and tenderize the meat.

And so, I also began cooking this by simmering it thoroughly for at least an hour in this manner.

Besides chicken, the ingredients included garlic, onion, something slightly different but similar in taste to jujubes, and vegetables similar to green onions. I threw in most ingredients known to counter the chicken’s gaminess.

Especially the medicinal herb cum spice (milk vetch) that Gretel gifted—said to be used by commoners and gathered from the forest—which smells similar to samgyetang herbs, and the long-grain (Indica) rice I happened to acquire.

And in this state, a full hour. While a pressure cooker would have been much more convenient, not knowing how to make one, I simmered this baeksuk? for a good hour and a bit more….

‘…Yes, this is the smell.’

Thus, as I was admiring the aroma wafting from this chicken dish that I had put so much effort into simmering, I was in the process of removing the vegetables used for making the broth—now too mushy to eat.

But just then.

-Knock knock knock.

‘…Hmm?’

Suddenly, at this moment just as I finished cooking, the sound of someone knocking on the door… was enough to make me feel anxious.

Specifically, I was worried that Hannah might have smelled this and barged in to eat it with me.

Especially since Hannah had a track record of doing this sort of thing several times before, my anxiety was amplified.

‘…Surely not, right?’

So, deliberately ignoring the ominous feeling from my somehow non-functioning intuition, I carefully opened the door of the house….

“Lord, it’s Charlotte Mainster. I’ve come on official business.”

‘Thank goodness….’

Fortunately, the person who appeared when I opened the door was Charlotte, who said she was visiting on business.

“Come in, Administrator Charlotte.”

It was truly a relief.