Vanilla. That Enchanting Name (2)
Once the rescue party had achieved both of its objectives, it converted into a subjugation force and began drawing in every available hand from the surrounding area. In that situation, Catherine and the mages under her command had one clear duty left.
The safe return of Elder Iona.
The reason Catherine and her mages had been mobilized in the first place was for the worst-case contingency. Adding a grand mage—plus a few extras—to a single Sword Master made it far easier to respond quickly if something went wrong. That much was obvious.
But if the root cause turned out to be nothing more than the periodic rampage of grizzly beavers?
Then Catherine and her mages were no longer necessary. Frankly speaking, the force they brought was overkill.
Alfred seemed to share the same thought. The letter that reached the rescue party ordered Catherine and her subordinates to return together with Iona.
Yet they still needed time.
There were several reasons, none of them particularly special. The rescue party had only just arrived at Blackwood Village—their designated rally point—and preparations were still incomplete when the grizzly beavers began stirring. After the first subjugation, field cleanup had piled on top of everything else. On top of that, a temporary adventurers’ guild had somehow taken root in the village and adventurers came flooding in, temporarily paralyzing the subjugation force’s administration.
As a result, Catherine’s schedule was left floating in midair. The same went for the mages under her.
So for the first time in days since arriving at Blackwood Village, Catherine was actually enjoying a little leisure.
“Right… I did see them using that part of the grizzly beaver in women’s cosmetics up in the northern part of the continent. It was a long time ago, though.”
Her face was crumpled beyond recognition. This was the last resistance of an intellectual who had just witnessed something unspeakable.
“But.”
Catherine pointed with visible distaste at the heap piled high on the kitchen table—a mound of shriveled, twisted things that still gave off a faint, sweet fragrance.
“These… things are all grizzly beaver reproductive glands?”
“Yep.”
Karem met her eyes and answered without a hint of hesitation.
Spices were normally dried for ease of storage and convenience. The same applied to grizzly beaver vanilla harvested from a living creature.
Of course, if these had been ordinary beavers from Karem’s old world, the cost-benefit would never have made sense. But this was Europa. A grizzly beaver rivaled a full-grown bear in size. Traditional drying methods took far more than a day or two—and the sheer bulk only made it worse.
If they had been heading straight back to Winterhome, it wouldn’t have mattered. But Karem could not wait that long. His patience had already been kicked clean out of him by Gordon’s boot.
A true chef found a way even when circumstances and ingredients were lacking. Karem immediately came up with a faster, simpler method.
Y-you just show up out of nowhere and ask me to do this?!
Here, just smell this. Incredible, isn’t it?
Well… it is sweet, I’ll give you that…
What if we added cream and milk and turned it into a dessert?
S-so I just need to dry them completely, right?
Karem had gone straight to Narke with the request. Necromancy dealt with corpses. Surely there had to be a spell for drying organic matter as well. It was a thoroughly one-sided assumption, but after a little persuasion Narke had obliged without much fuss. The mountain of dried material currently cluttering the kitchen—the very thing Catherine could barely bring herself to name—was the result.
“Well, the harvesting location is a bit… unsavory, sure. But people eat animal offal all the time, top to bottom, don’t they?”
Unlike the appalled Catherine, Gordon was every bit as nonchalant as Karem. A rough mercenary life had shown him far worse; nothing here was going to faze him.
“Or is the noble mage simply too refined for this sort of thing?”
“That’s animal offal. Monster parts are not the same.”
“I’ve heard monster guts and the like get used pretty often. Balls too, right?”
“Do those look like ordinary reproductive glands to you? No—before that, have you ever once heard of someone using monster parts in cooking, let alone in a dessert?”
Gordon raised both palms in surrender.
Balls, balls… damn, I still can’t get used to that word.
“All right, a moment of focus, please.”
Karem clapped his hands to reclaim their attention.
“Since ‘offal,’ ‘balls,’ and ‘reproductive glands’ all sound rather unappetizing, let’s just call them vanilla from now on.”
“Hmm? Out of nowhere?”
“We’re going to turn this into dessert that will eventually go into the mouths of very important people. Imagine the disaster if someone carelessly says we put balls or glands in it.”
“Ohh…”
Gordon understood at once and sat down. Karem turned to Catherine this time.
“You said they use these dried things as cosmetics, correct?”
“Yes. Same northern countries where the grizzly beavers appear. But did you just haul them back without even looking into it first?”
“Ah… honestly, the moment I smelled them my eyes rolled back in my head.”
On that point Karem had nothing to say for himself. Catherine was so dumbfounded she couldn’t even manage a sigh.
No, wait. Come to think of it, it’s always been like this with him.
Karem scored the dried vanilla husks and peeled them while he thought. It had been nearly a year since Catherine first hired him. In that short time the boy had a habit of stirring up large and small incidents and winds of change whenever things started to settle.
Well, there had only been one truly major incident. But that single finger of the Red Witch had stretched across all of Iceland and was completely rewriting the food culture that had taken root in the region for generations. The Red Witch’s Finger had simply become a fad—yet the moment spring and summer arrived, that fad had swept the entire territory and was transforming Icelandic cuisine.
On top of that came the various recipes he scattered among Winterhome’s cooks, the outrageous dishes that captivated everyone from top to bottom, and the somewhat forced friendships he had forged with the core figures of Icelandic power.
In that case, there was only one question left for Catherine to ask.
“Usually they just melt the contents of the dried pods straight into oil for a scented oil, or pack them into small pouches as sachets.”
“Hmm. So no refining or filtering of impurities is required?”
“Not that I know of.”
Then Karem no longer had any reason to hesitate. From the beginning he had already decided exactly what he was going to make.
He immediately poured milk, sugar, and the powdered black vanilla into a pot, set it over the fire, then took the chilled dough, added butter, and began the folding-and-rolling process. He did not stop there; he worked on two things at once.
“Karem. So what are you rushing around so frantically to make?”
“Custard tart. And ice cream!”
“…Ice cream?”
“Ah, you don’t know what ice cream is, do you?”
“Are you mocking me? Of course I don’t. What is it?”
“A frozen dessert made by freezing cream instead of fruit juice or wine.”
A frozen dessert… like sherbet? How? It isn’t even the dead of winter, and there’s no ice around.
Gordon’s gaze carried exactly that meaning. Karem turned his head with perfect nonchalance. At the end of that gaze sat Catherine. Gordon’s expression grew distinctly strange.
“Mage-nim. Does he do this often?”
“Yes. I’m clearly the boy’s employer, yet somehow he ends up putting me to work.”
“And you just go along with it.”
“What choice do I have? If the results were mediocre it would be different, but they always turn out novel and delicious.”
What the hell happened while I was gone?
The last time Gordon had seen them, things had not been like this. Catherine was now getting thoroughly swept up in Karem’s antics. But Gordon’s thoughts could not continue any further, because Karem promptly shoved a large bowl into his hands.
Inside was fresh cream. And a whisk.
“What’s this for? What am I supposed to do?”
“Whip it into foam for me, please.”
“What?”
“Like this.”
Karem took the bowl and whisk himself and demonstrated. For Gordon it was hardly a difficult task. Still, there was the matter of pride…
But there was no time to argue. Karem immediately held out the pot of vanilla liquid—cream, sugar, and vanilla brought to a boil—to Catherine.
“Could you cool this down to lukewarm for me?”
“Well, it’s nothing difficult… though it’s a little unexpected.”
“Y-yes? What is?”
“Boy. Whenever you bring in some bizarre new ingredient, you always cook something I’ve never even heard of.”
Catherine glanced around the kitchen.
“Custard tart and ice cream? Those are familiar dishes.”
“Ah, once you taste them you’ll change your mind.”
“Hmm. The aroma is certainly richer… but is it really worth that much boasting?”
“Of course.”
Karem nodded with absolute confidence.
There was a reason people said to hold your breath when a smell made food hard to eat. The sense of smell played a far larger role in taste than most realized. The Age of Exploration merchants who had turned the entire world upside down for the sake of a single spice proved it with their capitalist fervor. Or simply consider that when your nose is blocked, an apple and an onion don’t taste all that different.
Even on modern Earth, vanilla ranked second only to saffron—which cost more than its weight in gold. And the vanilla from grizzly beavers was even more potent than the vanilla beans Karem had occasionally encountered in his previous life.
When Catherine cooled the pot with a look that said she had given up trying to talk sense into him, Karem promptly retrieved the nearly finished whipped cream from Gordon, poured in the vanilla liquid, and folded everything together evenly. He lined tart shells with the dough, filled them with custard, and slid them into the oven. Then he picked up the bowl that would soon become ice cream, along with a spatula.
* * *
“Haaah…”
Gordon, who had been watching the entire spectacle, tilted his head with a distinctly uneasy look. He had been thinking the same thing earlier.
Just what had happened in almost a full year?
The boy whose cooking skill had already been extraordinary for his age—Gordon could force himself to accept that Karem’s talent exceeded every expectation.
“I think you could cool it a little faster.”
“If I do, it’ll freeze solid and turn into plain ice instead of ice cream.”
“Ah. That wouldn’t do.”
“Just keep churning it with this level of cold until the tarts finish baking.”
But the scene unfolding before Gordon’s eyes was something else entirely. The words were polite enough, yet the sight was pure and simple: a servant ordering his master around.
Yet this reversal of the master-servant relationship was clearly not a one- or two-time occurrence. Karem’s requests came out completely natural, and Catherine accepted them as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
And before long Gordon understood the reason—two reasons, in fact.
The liquid that had merely sloshed about in the bowl as the spatula stirred it began, little by little, to develop viscosity. Then, suddenly, the contents of the bowl transformed into something Gordon’s vocabulary struggled to describe.
Gordon himself had wandered the continent of Europa for many years and tasted all manner of dishes. Among them had been shaved ice topped with fruit juice, wine, and honey, as well as sweet sorbets made by freezing the juice or wine itself. But the thing sitting in the bowl before him now was nothing like any of those.
How am I supposed to describe this…
Yes—like a snowfield after a heavy snowfall. A small, untouched snowfield that shifted and rolled in soft waves every time the spatula moved. Yet unlike waves, its form never collapsed.
And at some point a gentle, sweet fragrance began to fill the room. The already intoxicating scent of grizzly beaver vanilla blended with the creamy aroma of milk and became even softer, even sweeter.
“Boy. I think that’s about enough?”
“Yes. The tarts should be just about done too.”
Creeeak—whoooosh!
The oven door opened.
Everything that had come before had been child’s play. A dense, tongue-on-the-nose sweetness rode the wave of heat and completely conquered the kitchen.