Cooking with Wild Game (LN) - Volume 24 - Chapter 3.4

4

Large plates laden with giba cooking and sweets were set out on one table after another. Reina Ruu, Rimee Ruu, and Toor Deen had worked hard to prepare them. As I wondered what the guests would think of them, I felt my heart pounding as hard as it would have been if I had manned the kitchen myself.

As would be expected of a crowd of nobles, they didn’t all rush toward the food at once. They continued chatting with each other as they waited for the pages and maids to finish laying out the plates. Then, once everything was in place, they slowly started approaching. The food had been distributed equally to the various tables, so each one ended up with seven or eight people gathered around it.

“Ooh, so it’s finally time for the giba cooking? Now our real dinner can begin,” Geol Zaza triumphantly declared as he started moving. It seemed his mood had fully recovered, and he had quite a bit of alcohol in his system to boot.

“Ah, Sir Geol Zaza. The giba cooking you have been waiting for has finally arrived.”

We had just said farewell to Leiriss, but by coincidence, he happened to be standing next to the table we approached. There were also three young noblemen and a similar number of delicate noblewomen there. The ladies who had been staring at the food on the table with great curiosity backed away a bit as Geol Zaza approached, but they didn’t flee.

“Hmm? What is this? It looks pretty weird,” Geol Zaza said as he grabbed a piece and took a bite of it. Then, after chewing it with a look of satisfaction, he glared at the crowd surrounding him. “Staring at me won’t fill your stomachs. If you’re not going to have any, I’ll just eat it all myself.”

“Ah, no, I’ve been looking forward to the giba cooking myself. I was not in the right mental state to enjoy the flavor during the banquet held by the house of Saturas,” Leiriss said with a calm smile as he tried the same dish, and then his eyes opened wide. “Oh, this is delicious. You all should try it as well. You have been anticipating this too, correct?”

Following Leiriss’s advice, the nobles began taking some for themselves. This was surely their first time trying giba, and they showed even more surprise than Leiriss when they tried it.

“You were right, this is delicious... It has an entirely different taste to it than karon meat.”

“It has an unusual flavor. Is this the taste of giba meat?”

“Still, I cannot say that I dislike it.”

As there didn’t seem to be any unexpected reactions there, I breathed a sigh of relief. Giba was a lot quirkier than karon or kimyuus, but Reina Ruu’s group had taken care to flavor it so that it would be easy for everyone to eat.

“Hmm... It seems to differ a bit from the cooking I’ve had up until now. What sort of dish is this?” Polarth asked.

“This is a dish that uses the specially prepared jerky I mentioned before. For today, we went with a menu centered around the jerky and sausage meat that’s going to be sold in the castle town,” I explained.

“I see! If this leads to their charms being better known, it could result in even better sales!” Polarth remarked as he took a bite, an earnest smile breaking out on his plump face. “Yes, truly delicious! This is my first time trying giba jerky! It has a totally different flavor to it compared to regular giba meat!”

“Thank you,” I replied in place of the other chefs as I grabbed a piece myself. This was also a dish I had given advice on. It had a thin base layer of baked poitan, with gooey gyama dried milk and tarapa sauce on top. The giba bacon and other ingredients had been mixed into the poitan batter.

This was a bit of an odd dish, a pizza-style okonomiyaki. There weren’t any kilns or ovens at the forest’s edge, so I had racked my brain and came up with this creative solution. We had used aria and pula to take the place of onion and bell pepper from my old world, along with some mushrooms from Jagar. We had then folded all of those ingredients into the poitan batter along with giba bacon, and pan grilled it like okonomiyaki. Finally, we topped it with some tarapa sauce and dried milk mixed with karon milk, and cooked it for a while longer in a covered pan.

The dried milk had been mixed with milk so that it wouldn’t harden up too much after it got cold. After all, this was a buffet-style dinner. There was no way to guarantee it would be eaten hot. Either way, I was sure it would still be like eating small pieces of pizza bread.

To add a bit of an accent to the flavor, we had also included a small amount of finely ground chitt seeds and mamaria vinegar. We hadn’t been able to create pepper sauce yet, as that would need a long fermentation period, but I had come up with the idea in order to add a bit of sourness and spice.

Now then, how did they prepare it? I thought to myself as I brought the little fan-shaped slice of pizza-style okonomiyaki to my mouth. As it had just been brought out, it was still faintly warm, and the poitan was pleasingly soft.

The sourness and spiciness were rather restrained, so the tarapa sauce and dried milk flavors were noticeably more prominent. They really hadn’t held back in their use of dried milk, which I believe did a lot to soften the giba flavor. That said, the tastiness of the bacon hadn’t been harmed in the least.

The most important point to us had been the question of how much we should emphasize the taste of the meat for the sake of people trying giba cooking for the first time, but I had been sure they would have no issues accepting this dish. In fact, they clearly already liked it. The smiles those young nobles wore really didn’t look like they were merely for the sake of politeness.

I had only prepared it once as an example, then I left the rest to Reina Ruu. She had then adjusted the amount of each ingredient she used according to her own sensibilities as a chef. The difference could be seen in how she had gone light on the chitt seeds and red mamaria vinegar, and the poitan was thinner than when I had made it.

It was clearly an excellent recipe. If this wasn’t good enough for the nobles, then they wouldn’t have liked it if I made it myself either. The only thought I had was that I had to wonder yet again about whether we could build stone ovens at the forest’s edge in order to make proper pizza. They make such fine stoves that they could surely make stone ovens on their own too. There are some things that if you can’t slowly bake them in a proper oven, you’ll never be able to get them to come out as amazing as they could be, after all.

Still, I felt this unusual dish would be more than effective enough to demonstrate how good giba bacon was. Would the people of the castle town consider my usual pairing of tarapa sauce with dried milk and chitt seeds to be elaborate enough? Hopefully the bitterness of the bell-pepper-like pula would also help on that front.

“Sir Asuta, is this the sausage that you mentioned?” Polarth asked, pointing at the neighboring plate.

“Yes,” I replied with a nod. “That’s a dish referred to as a hot dog back in my home country. If it weren’t for the high cost of sausages, I would love to serve this dish at the stalls.”

We had sandwiched sausages in poitan along with finely cut strips of tino, then added ketchup and sarfaal herb for flavoring. By putting sarfaal in water, boiling it down, and then dissolving it again, you could create a sharp taste akin to mustard. It was an ingredient I didn’t get to use that often, but it was perfectly suited to hot dogs.

They had also cooked pieces of poitan that were thin and exceptionally long, to the point that they would stretch from one side of our pans to the other, so they could make their hot dogs as big as possible, before cutting them up into bite-size bits. As these hot dogs tended to fall apart easily, they had to be held together with wooden skewers. The crowd was staring with great curiosity at the unfamiliar food that had an exposed cross section of sausage showing on either end.

“Yes, this is delicious too! Did you chop the meat up finely and then harden it back together like with that dish from your stalls?”

“That’s right. Then we stuffed it into our intestines and smoked it just like we do with our jerky in order to make sausages.”

This seemed to surprise Leiriss and the other nobles even more than the pizza-style okonomiyaki. That was only natural, though, as they hadn’t had giba burgers before, like Polarth had. Mincing meat wasn’t a common cooking method here in Genos.

“How truly splendid. I’ve heard that giba jerky and sausages are quite expensive, but with this, I am certain that you shall find buyers,” Leiriss commented, right before a young noblewoman timidly spoke up from beside him.

“Um... You are the Asuta of the Fa clan who has made a name for himself as a chef from the forest’s edge, correct? The people of the forest’s edge can make dishes like this even without you?”

“That’s right. The women of the forest’s edge have been training on a daily basis and have developed a lot of skill as a result.”

Polarth looked satisfied as the noblewoman gave a sigh of admiration, then raised his voice and called out, “Now then...shall we enjoy some cooking from another table? If we stay too long in one place, there’s a good chance that certain things will be all gone before we can get to them.”

Following Polarth’s gaze, I saw both Geol Zaza and Darmu Ruu silently chowing down. Though Reina Ruu and the other chefs had worked hard and split the dishes up into lots of small portions, there was definitely a real chance that the plates could end up bare before everyone got to try what was on them.

“U-Um, there are lots of other dishes, so let’s move over that way. You really seem to like this one, though, don’t you, Geol Zaza?”

“Hmph. It’s giba cooking, so it’s only natural that it would suit the tastes of a person of the forest’s edge,” Geol Zaza shot back, sounding annoyed, and then he gulped down some fruit wine. “Well then, shall we get moving? I am eager to find out what else awaits us.”

With that, we once again set off walking around the hall with Polarth at the head of our group.

I started to wonder how Ai Fa’s group was doing and glanced around until I noticed that the table farthest from us had quite a colorful group gathered around it. Ai Fa and the others were surrounded by a swarm of noblewomen, making it look as if flowers of many different colors were blooming there. I was looking forward to asking her later about their interactions with each other.

“Hey there, Asuta! This giba cooking is absolutely incredible!”

We arrived at the next table, where Diel and Labis were. The only other noble standing nearby was an older gentleman, of which there weren’t all that many at this event. Had they been negotiating some sort of business deal having to do with metalwork? Well, whatever they had been talking about, they were also snacking on giba manju and an original dish Reina Ruu’s group had come up with.

The original dish involved cooking bacon with herbs, then serving it together with chatchi that had had its starch extracted, all on top of poitan. The two herbs they had used were ones I didn’t know the names of, but Reina Ruu must have been quite fond of them, as she had employed them in her herb-grilled dish as well. One of them had a sharp stinging taste, while the other was fragrant like olives. Both of them went quite well with bacon.

The addition of the starch-extracted chatchi would cause the texture to grow dry. However, the chefs of the forest’s edge had added reten oil to make it smooth instead, then adjusted the flavor with tau oil and pico leaves, and added crushed ramanpa nuts to boot. Ramanpa had a similar texture and flavor to walnuts, and they were really good when paired with fried chatchi.

Toor Deen and the women under my guidance had prepared the giba manju. It was a dish that had mainly been sold by the Fa clan, so Reina Ruu and the others weren’t especially familiar with it. That was why the women from our area of the forest were the ones who were taking care of it.

“Toor Deen was only assigned to work on the sweets, but we really wanted the people of the castle town to give this a try, so I asked if we could specially prepare it,” I explained.

“Hmm?” Polarth questioned with a tilt of his head. “This is a dish sold at your stalls, is it not? I do think that they are delectable morsels, but do they hold some sort of special meaning to you, Sir Asuta?”

“No. But it is flavored differently than the ones from the stalls. It should be a flavoring you’re familiar with too, Polarth, and it’s quite an interesting combination.”

Polarth bit into the miniature giba manju with a look of confusion, only to then let out a surprised “Oh! This is the flavoring of your giba curry!”

Indeed, it was a dish designed to emulate curry manju. Since this was a standing-buffet-style meal, people weren’t using plates, which meant that normally it wouldn’t be possible to serve giba curry. That was why I had come up with this instead. It wouldn’t be as good as when it was freshly steamed, but I figured it should maintain its flavor to a similar degree that curry bread did. If I’d had more time to experiment, I would have liked to try frying it with oil to make it into actual curry bread, though.

“The ordinary ones are delicious, of course, but these are just as good! I don’t care for folks from Sym, but their herbs are definitely worth eating,” Diel remarked, sparking my memory.

“Speaking of folks from Sym, I haven’t seen Arishuna. Has she not arrived yet?”

“She’s sitting over in that corner. I think she got here before I did.”

Looking in the direction Diel had indicated, I found that it was the same place where Ai Fa’s group was, along with all those noble ladies. Polarth was smiling as he ate his curry manju, but he seemed to notice our discussion and added an explanation.

“Lady Arishuna was given a seat so she could display her star reading talents. As she is the only one seated, I suspect that the crowd has simply been hiding her from your view all this time.”

“Ah, I see. Has she been eating the food too?”

“I’m not certain. I’ve only really taken note of the continuous stream of young noblewomen who have been visiting her. Perhaps she plans to eat after her work is done, like the musicians.”

Arishuna had been invited as part of the entertainment rather than as an honored guest. Perhaps there was no helping that her meal would have to be pushed off for later.

“In that case, would it be possible to have some pieces of this dish set aside for her? As you know, she’s really fond of giba curry.”

“Oh, I see. In that case, we can make a request of the pages,” Polarth replied with a smile.

At that, Diel shot me a sulky look and said, “You really are taken with that Sym woman, aren’t you, Asuta?”

“Well, we know each other fairly well.”

“But you’ve definitely known me longer than her,” she grumbled with a childish pout, causing me to smile brightly.

“I don’t rank how important my friends are. If you were in the same position, I would ask them to set aside food for you too. There are a lot of dishes I want you to try, after all.”

Diel stared blankly for a moment, but then she broke out in a smile that made her look like an angel. “I’m happy to hear it. I’d love to have you make dinner for me sometime, Asuta.”

“Well, before anything like that can happen, you’ll have to consult with Polarth about it. I can’t get into the castle town without his help, after all.”

The moment I finished talking, though, Diel excitedly grabbed ahold of my collar. “Do you really mean it?! Genos-style lip-service won’t work on me, you know.”

“I’d never try something like that with you.”

Fortunately, Diel let go of me before she could accidentally damage my banquet attire.

“Of course not. But in that case, I’ll try asking when I have an important business deal or something! I’ll have you make something with lots of tau oil and sugar then!”

“Got it. As long as we receive the request at least five days in advance, I should be able to make it work.”

By this point, Diel’s smile was shining so brightly that it wouldn’t have been surprising if an angel’s wings were to burst from her back. Her girly dress was adding to her smile’s charms too. But as Diel and Polarth looked at me from their respective directions, I suddenly recalled something else.

“By the way, is Lefreya allowed to come to events like this?”

“No, she’s still supposed to stay away from big social gatherings. A tea party with a handful of attendees is one thing, but letting her come to a party with this many people would be pretty problematic,” Polarth explained.

Lefreya was the head of her house, if only in name. For that reason, her movements were restricted in order to ensure that nobody with any wicked schemes involving the house of Turan could get close to her, or anything of that sort.

Diel looked rather pained after listening to Polarth’s words, and brought her face close to mine. “Hey, once the rainy season comes around, there’s going to be northerners working around the settlement at the forest’s edge, right? It seems Lefreya’s been really concerned about that.”

“Huh? Why would that concern Lefreya?”

“I don’t really know, but apparently, someone related to Lefreya’s maid is going to be one of them. I guess that means she can’t just treat it like somebody else’s problem.”

Was that how it was? When I thought about it, I realized I had absolutely no grasp of what the relationship between Lefreya and Chiffon Chel was like. Has she really gotten that close to a northerner like Chiffon Chel...? Well, that would be great if it were the case, I thought to myself.

Then Polarth clapped his hands together and said, “Now then, I would say it’s about time to meet back up with the ladies. Then after that, why not split up into even smaller groups and spend time getting to know a few more guests?”

“Yes, that sounds like a good idea to me,” Dari Sauti replied with a smile as he bit into a bacon dish prepared by the members of the Ruu clan. We then headed off to the corner where the women were.

With the crowd around them being entirely composed of noble ladies, getting close turned out to be rather difficult. However, Merrim quickly noticed us and called out, “My, we were just talking about you gentlemen from the forest’s edge, and here you are. Please, come this way.”

What kind of stuff had they been talking about, exactly? Well, anyway, we were swiftly led to the center of the group, with stares aimed at us from every direction. Then as we approached the table, I started to smell a sweet aroma. There were all sorts of desserts lined up there.

“We have sweets prepared by the chefs from the forest’s edge here as well, and they all came out splendidly,” Merrim remarked, and the other women all smiled to show their agreement. When I glanced in the direction of the table, I found Eulifia and Odifia there. I hadn’t seen the two of them in a while.

“Ah, so you have finally arrived. Odifia’s legs have been rooted in place here, which has proved to be quite troublesome.” Unsurprisingly, Odifia was standing there silently eating the desserts she so craved, one after another. The noblewomen around her were all looking down at the adorable sight with warm gazes. “She seems especially taken with this poitan confection. This was, of course, prepared by Toor Deen, correct?”

“Yes. I gave her the idea, but Toor Deen was the one who perfected the flavor.”

I had asked Toor Deen to make something based on the roll cakes from my old world, to serve as the centerpiece of the desserts they had prepared for the party tonight.

The main difficulty was that they had to be fluffier than our usual pastries. Getting the right outcome involved thoroughly beating a large number of kimyuus eggs, and then mixing in poitan flour and panam honey. That was easy enough to put into words, but figuring out how much she needed to beat the eggs and how long she needed to stir after adding the poitan flour had required quite a bit of trial and error. There had been many failures along the way, such as the whole thing collapsing, or the poitan flour getting all clumpy due to not being stirred enough.

A lot of experimentation had been needed to find the right thickness for cooking it too. After all, we didn’t have any specialized molds or even ovens at the forest’s edge. Instead, we had lined the four edges of a tray with metal plates, and then poured the batter onto it to cook on a stove over a carefully managed flame. Just like with the pizza, it had made me desperately want to have a stone oven.

Still, the effort had been worth it, as we had eventually managed to produce a roll cake similar enough to what we’d been aiming for. After that, we had simply slathered the freshly baked pastry with a large amount of whipped cream and wrapped it up into a coil. Then we cut it into shorter slices, like the hot dogs, taking care not to let it crumble.

Furthermore, we had made multiple flavors by adding cocoa-like gigi leaves to the batter and the cream. That gave us four different varieties of roll cake to offer, produced by combining the plain and gigi flavors in different ways. Personally, I thought the varying colors we had on display made it a perfect fit for such an event.

As Odifia had been stuffing her cheeks with them, the outside of her mouth was coated with cream. Her mother wiped it away with a napkin frequently, but since she never stopped eating, it didn’t take long for her to get dirty again. While I was a little concerned about letting the expressionless six-year-old continue to gorge herself on desserts in total silence, apparently everyone around her thought it was all too cute to put a stop to.

“Hmph. In the future, I will have to make certain that you finish eating your other food before I give you any sweets. At this rate, your body will end up all out of sorts.”

“Yeah, you really should,” I said.

Toor Deen’s sweets typically had a relatively restrained sweetness to match the tastes of the people of the forest’s edge, but they still used lots of eggs and karon milk. But regardless, it definitely wasn’t healthy to eat nothing but desserts.

“These confections were a wonderful surprise for the rest of us as well. They were so delicious, I felt as if they were bewitching my tongue,” an unfamiliar young noblewoman remarked.

Our other desserts included the familiar chatchi mochi and pudding prepared in the style of chawanmushi. As there were no plates here, they were instead being served on top of thin pieces of baked poitan. I was honestly a little tempted to peek into the kitchen to see what sort of face Rimee Ruu was making as she tasted them.

“What about you, Darmu Ruu? You don’t hate sweets, do you?” Sheera Ruu asked.

Darmu Ruu silently popped a piece of chatchi mochi into his mouth, and the light in his eyes visibly brightened. “This...might have been made with more skill than even Rimee possesses.”

“I don’t think anyone can beat Toor Deen and Rimee Ruu when it comes to making desserts. I’m no match for them at all,” Sheera Ruu replied, making Darmu Ruu frown dubiously.

“But what’s most important is how you handle giba meat, right? You’re more skilled at that than Rimee is, so there’s nothing to get upset about.”

“Oh, I wasn’t getting upset or anything,” she said, looking surprised, then her eyes narrowed as she smiled. “Still, it makes me glad to hear you worrying about me like that.”

“I wasn’t worrying. I simply spoke the truth.”

The noblewomen watched the two Ruu cousins talking with wide eyes. Several of them soon cast their gazes down in disappointment, though, perhaps because they saw the blue flower on Darmu Ruu’s chest. In his current getup, he looked as wild as a wolf and as refined as a nobleman at the same time, so it was possible that he was now almost too attractive for the ladies to handle.

Behind them, the Zaza siblings seemed to be having some sort of back-and-forth as well.

“Are you really saying you don’t see what makes this dessert so wonderful, Geol?”

“It’s not like I said it was bad. But it’s too sweet and doesn’t have any giba meat in it, so I just don’t think it’s suitable food for a hunter.”

“People can’t live on meat alone. Don’t be so shortsighted. Will you really be able to inherit the post of leading clan head like that?”

Now that I thought about it, Sufira Zaza was one of the people who had shown the most interest when it came to sugary foods. When she’d heard that Toor Deen, a member of a subordinate clan under the Zaza, had made these, she must have felt a great deal of pride. In fact, I felt a bit disappointed that I had missed the moment when her usual coolheaded expression had broken down, as it didn’t happen very often.

“Sweets sure are delightful, aren’t they? Still, I was quite surprised to learn that these were made without Asuta around,” Mil Fei Sauti said.

“I can’t compete with Toor Deen or Rimee Ruu when it comes to sweets,” I told her. “If you have the time to do so, maybe you should consider trying to learn how to make desserts for the Sauti clan too.”

“Indeed. As long as we have the time for it, of course.” Mil Fei Sauti rarely smiled, but I thought I saw the corners of her mouth rise a little then. Dari Sauti was enjoying some roll cake when he noticed it too, and it seemed to surprise him a bit.

“Oh, it seems you’re finding it a lot easier to talk to Asuta now, Mil Fei. When we invited our comrades to come to the Sauti settlement, I don’t remember you ever letting that strict expression of yours slip. Not even once.”

“Is there some sort of issue with Asuta and I being able to chat casually? After all, he and many others have done so much for the Sauti clan,” she replied, a demure look on her face. She still had a smile in her eyes, though. She had first started to open up to me right before we left the Sauti settlement.

That just left Ai Fa. Even now, she was surrounded by noblewomen, completely unable to escape. Despite the fact that she was clearly wearing a dress, it almost looked like they were fawning over some gentleman. Every last one of them seemed to have teary eyes and red cheeks, as if they were maidens in love. Perhaps Ai Fa’s commanding expression and natural composure were making them feel as if they were in some sort of forbidden flower garden that only they could enter.

As I wondered what was going on, my gaze met Ai Fa’s from a distance. Her gallant expression was as unwavering as ever, but the look in her eyes was clearly saying, “Save me.” Holding back a smile, I picked up two roll cakes from the table and headed over to her.