My First Time Cooking
When the time comes to cook, what do you need first?
Most likely, to take a look at the kitchen.
And so the mansion's kitchen, which I was seeing for the first time, turned out to be quite a bit larger than I'd expected. Was that simply because this was a noble estate? The kitchen alone looked easily twice the size of the studio apartment I used to live in. A storeroom for ingredients opened off it, and as for the cooking setup, there was not only a heating apparatus that resembled a hearth, but even a proper oven. Pots, pans, and every other sort of cooking tool lay scattered about, along with spice jars that had clearly been left to neglect.
If the family that had once lived in this mansion were still thriving, I could almost picture how delicious the food coming out of here every day must have been. But of course, the state of the hygiene was dire. Broken dishes, dust, soot, cobwebs, and rotten food besides...
The lobby, which you might call the face of the mansion, and the bedroom where I was staying had been brought to a more or less acceptable condition, but I had never once thought to come in and check the kitchen, so I supposed there was nothing strange about it looking like this. Even so, it was a little revolting. If I weren't undead, I might well have thrown up from the stench pouring out of the place.
"All right. Let's clean this up."
Clack.
Eeng!
I rolled up my sleeves and urged my summons on, and Unit 1 and Unit 2 answered in whatever sounds each of them could make, as if rising to the call. And yet—why were the two of them just standing there staring at me?
"So what now? Hurry up and clean."
"......?"
Eeeeng...?
So I'm supposed to do this myself?
Buoyed by my cheering, Unit 1 and Unit 2 set about cleaning the kitchen in earnest. They cleared the dust, swept away the cobwebs, threw out the broken dishes, hauled off the rotten ingredients... Watching the two of them move in such perfect coordination, I was reminded all over again that I really was cut out to be a summoner.
Look at me. I am the sort of person who can't even be bothered to throw out a snack wrapper in time, and ends up sharing the bed with it. How was someone like that supposed to clean?
Unit 1 and Unit 2, at any rate, had quite a talent for the work. Even without detailed instructions, they tidied and wiped things down on their own. At first I'd wondered how I was ever going to survive after possessing a character like this, but with kids who had a head for work the way Unit 1 and Unit 2 did, I figured I wouldn't have starved no matter where I ended up. Well—being undead, I wouldn't have starved to death anyway.
Unit 3, meanwhile... still had nothing to be given except lounging idly out in the garden. A tree spirit probably couldn't haul firewood, either. Think it over all you like: aside from being enormous and impressive, it was good for absolutely nothing.
Around the time the kitchen had been brought into some kind of order, Evelyn returned with the ingredients I'd asked for.
"Ira, I'm back."
"Evelyn!"
She had packed a great bundle to bursting with cooking ingredients, and she lifted it with evident pride before setting it on the table in the middle of the kitchen.
"You've already cleaned quite a lot, huh? Unit 1 and Unit 2 really do have a knack for this."
Praised by Evelyn, the two of them grew shy, for all the world as if to say it was nothing. How creatures that couldn't speak, and barely had expressions to begin with, managed to be so emotionally expressive, I had no idea. They'd only known her a few days, and already they seemed quite fond of Evelyn. To be fair, the time the summons had spent with me and the time they'd spent with her weren't all that different. Anyway, that was that.
In high spirits, I undid the bundle Evelyn had brought. Let's see how properly she'd gathered everything I'd asked for. But the moment I opened it, I couldn't help but be thrown. The ingredients she'd brought back were nothing like the forms I knew.
The tomatoes were small and lumpy, and the onions had leaves sprouting from them. The flour was coarse and dry, and the spices hadn't been ground or processed in the slightest—they were still in their raw, original shapes. No. The biggest problem of all was something else entirely.
"Th-the chicken is alive...!"
The ingredient for the fried chicken was perfectly, unmistakably alive. Evelyn only tilted her head, as if she couldn't see what the problem was.
"But you have to keep it alive if you want it to stay fresh on the way, don't you?"
Come to think of it, I had forgotten that this world had no refrigeration, and nothing resembling a fast, precise, large-scale system for moving goods. If you wanted ingredients to keep for as long as possible, storing them as unprocessed as you could was simply the normal thing to do. Right now, though, I was in no state to be reasonable, faced with ingredients that weren't in any of the forms I knew. Before the overwhelming majesty of a fully grown chicken—the first I had ever seen in my life—all I could do was panic and tremble.
And when the bird finally shook off my frail grip and started pecking the crown of my head, the only thing left to me was to wail for someone to please get it off.
"H-help me...!"
Evelyn, watching all of this, shook her head with a faint smile, as if something about the sight were terribly amusing. She was probably thinking something along the lines of, And this is the girl I mistook for a dark mage?
After a whole series of ordeals, the cooking proper finally began. At first the ingredients, so different from what I remembered, had thrown me badly, but once I checked them one by one I got used to the fact that they weren't completely unlike what I'd pictured. Cheese, butter, and salt, at least, looked the way I remembered them.
The real problem, though, wasn't how the ingredients looked. It was that I didn't know the exact recipes. I had always eaten pizza and fried chicken. I had never once made either of them myself. In effect, I would have to invent the recipes by chasing the tastes in my memory. Still, it didn't seem as if it would be that hard.
I wasn't entirely without a foundation, either. Among the shorts I used to watch out of habit, whenever I had nothing better to do, cooking videos would sometimes flash past—highlight reels from cooking shows, videos calculating the ingredient cost of delivery food. All of them, however briefly, had shown someone actually cooking.
Evelyn had gone to butcher the chicken, so I decided to start with the pizza. Flour into a bowl, water in, a pinch of salt. I mixed it all together and worked it hard with my hands, and somehow something resembling dough came out of it. Good. This would be the dough. Now for the sauce.
I took the things that had been called tomatoes and onions out of the bundle Evelyn brought. They'd been so ugly at first that I'd been disappointed, but the taste was still tomato. The onion merely had a few leaves on it; the flavor itself wasn't much different from onion. Then it ought to be fine, right?
I chopped the tomatoes and the onion. In truth I'm hopeless with a knife, so I had Unit 1 do it—but a summon is basically my own hands and feet, so it was the same as if I'd done it myself. By that logic, I could also claim that I had cleaned the kitchen.
Anyway, I put the tomato and onion in a bowl, mashed and mixed them thoroughly, and tasted a little. Hmm. Something was slightly off. Did it need sugar? I immediately dumped in a fat handful and tasted it again. Hmm. This was pretty close, I thought. And yet something was still a little lacking. From what I'd seen in those videos, this was the point where you added herbs, so I put in just a touch. Maybe an herbal scent would improve it.
I added the herbs, tasted it once more, and decided this much might be all right. It was obviously still a long way from good, but with no store-bought sauce on hand, surely this was good enough. Dough and sauce more or less finished, I immediately shaped them into a basic pizza—rolled the dough out thin, spread the sauce, and laid sliced cheese over the top. Looking at it like this, it really did look something like a pizza. Cooking was nothing!
The pizza I like is a combination buried under toppings, but under the circumstances I could hardly hope for a result that extravagant. How long were you supposed to bake a pizza in an oven, though?
"Hmm..."
I had no idea. I'd just put it in, and pull it out once it looked done. I slid the pizza into the oven and was going through the motions of wiping away sweat when Evelyn, finished with the chicken, came back.
"Is that pizza thing done?"
"It's baking right now."
Curious, she glanced into the oven, caught the smell of my pizza as it cooked, and tilted her head just slightly. Was something wrong?
"So how were you planning to make this chicken?"
"Well, about that."
I lowered the chicken Evelyn had brought into the bowl of batter I'd prepared ahead of time. Water and flour mixed one to one, with a beaten egg loosened in—the batter coated the chicken in a thin layer at exactly the thickness I'd pictured. Now I only had to put it in the oil...
Sizzle—!
The sound of chicken frying in hot oil rang out like the most wonderful music. Beautiful. Everything was going perfectly.
The finished food looked more convincing than I'd expected. The pizza, which I'd kept checking on, hadn't burned, and the chicken—if you judged by color alone—was golden and crisp, the very picture of something well fried. Well. That was easy. Wait. Did I have a gift for cooking? If I'd known it would be like this, I never would have wasted money on delivery. I should have just cooked!
"Please, try some."
I offered it to Evelyn with a broad grin, and she picked up a slice of the pizza I'd made and brought it to her mouth without a moment's hesitation. And her verdict...
"I-Ira. Did the Elysia family actually eat things like this?"
Hearing that delicately ambiguous review, I immediately picked up the pizza myself. The way the cheese stretched, and the look of the thing, didn't seem to have any major problems. And then...
"Ugh."
...I spat it out, because it tasted awful. What was this? It only looked delicious. It didn't taste good at all. The dough was hard and tasted of nothing but flour, and the sauce had tomato, onion, and herb all going their separate ways, and it was far too sweet. The cheese was at least edible, but melted pizza cheese tastes good no matter what you put it on. Wait. Then don't tell me...
I snatched up the chicken I'd fried. This one definitely looked fine on the outside.
Chomp.
The instant I bit down, my face crumpled.
Gamey.
In the juices that burst through the batter and ran out, a severe off-smell—you might as well have called it the concentrated essence of chicken stink—stabbed straight up my nose, not removed in the slightest. The texture might have been passable, more or less, but the thing was bland, fishy, and greasy on top of that. It was closer to something you'd scrape into the trash than to fried chicken.
And so I sank into profound despair before that shockingly vile parade of flavors.
"It's ruined. I... I made garbage..."
Flustered, Evelyn began trying to comfort me.
"I-it's still an interesting flavor, though! The, the idea was good, maybe...?"
It wasn't the least bit comforting. I looked at the disastrous mess the kitchen had become, and I thought it plainly.
I am never cooking again.