Custard Pudding
The weather grew steadily colder, and the people of Coldon and Winterhome grew busier by the day.
Karem, of course, remained a full step removed from all that bustle, living out his ordinary days in the Mage's Tower.
His wages came through Catherine, his employment contract was a private arrangement with her alone, and the only person who could truly be called his direct superior was Catherine herself. All hail Catherine, in other words.
Even the eternal nemesis of every beginner and seasoned cook alike—the cleanup—was handled by his senior, Mary. Time, for Karem, was overflowing.
No, more than that: across both his previous life and this one, he had never possessed so much free time. The sheer surplus left him vaguely at a loss for what to do with himself.
People said money could not buy happiness, yet the reality was that happiness required money above almost everything else.
In his past life he had worked himself ragged just to afford ingredients and tools for the cooking he snatched at in spare moments or pursued in earnest. In this life, scrambling across bare dirt simply to stay alive, he had not even had the luxury of glancing at a kitchen.
It was a mercy his old instincts had not completely faded.
Vegetables had been plentiful enough, but protein had been so scarce that whenever the chance arose he had grilled insects, snakes, rats—whatever he could catch.
Now that both money and time had finally been handed to him, the tension drained out of Karem’s heart and left only emptiness behind.
So this is how those revenge-obsessed types must feel once the deed is done!
The wording was a little extreme, yet Karem found it plausible enough. He had clawed his way free of death with a single goal burning in his mind, only to be hired on a whim, achieve that goal almost by accident, and then watch his entire situation flip upside-down in the span of a few short days. A boy’s heart could not help but feel unsettled.
Still, he could not simply sit and stare into space while his feelings wandered.
He was being paid, after all. By any measure he was a professional. Emotions were not allowed to interfere with the work. More importantly, although Mary had softened a little since the beginning, she still kept her walls firmly in place; he could not afford to give her any opening.
So Karem decided to throw himself into the job he currently held.
“Lady Catherine. What sort of snack would you like this time?”
“Hmm. Lunch was rather rough, so something soft, I think.”
“Soft… Then perhaps the cas—”
“Castellan again? No, I’d rather have something else.”
“It’s castella, not castellan—ugh. Fine, fine.”
Karem finally gave up on correcting the name of the sponge cake that had somehow become “castellan” forever in her mouth.
“I’ve decided.”
“Yes?”
“Surprise me with something new!”
“Lady Catherine… what on earth is that supposed to mean?”
The employer he regarded as his lifelong benefactor had just handed him a truly terrible order.
In any case, his superior had made a vague demand. As the employee, Karem had no choice but to obey.
Well, it was not as though he could not make something.
The request had flustered him, yet it was not entirely without conditions. She had at least specified something soft; without that single concrete clue he would have been forced to wring a far more complicated set of ideas out of his already crowded head.
Thanks to the way human perception worked, the dish had not been invented until the early twentieth century, yet its ingredients were almost insultingly simple. Easy enough to make at home, yet most people bought it ready-made out of fear of failure or sheer laziness.
The very emblem of pudding.
Karem set about preparing custard pudding.
Vanilla was unavailable, which was a pity, but eggs, milk, sugar, and water were all he needed. With a delicate touch and a little extra time, the rest was straightforward.
In fact, if one set aside the cooling period, custard pudding came together far faster than most other desserts.
First he simmered water and sugar into a deep-brown caramel sauce and poured it into butter-greased copper cups that would serve as molds. Over that he poured a carefully measured amount of pudding mixture—milk and eggs beaten completely smooth and strained several times through a sieve—until each cup was filled to the proper height. Then the cups went into a water bath for a brief bake before being transferred to a preheated oven.
“So, Senior Mary?”
“What is it, Junior Karem? Don’t tell me you’ve already finished.”
A presence. Mary had slipped into the kitchen at some point and was now peering into the oven beside him.
“When did you even get here?”
“Just a moment ago.”
And in that brief interval she had already restored the kitchen he had left in disarray to a state of pristine perfection.
“Well then, Junior Karem. What is the name of the thing inside that oven?”
“Ah—custard pudding.”
“…Pudding?”
As a brownie who had served countless contractors over long years, Mary naturally knew how to prepare a wide variety of dishes. To her, “pudding” was little more than a scrap-use food.
From some distant, unrecorded past, people had mixed stale bread with milk, eggs, and whatever else was at hand, pressed the mess into a mold, and baked it for immediate eating—the simplest method imaginable. Bread pudding, in other words.
(Though in the Seophon Kingdom, pudding tended to mean something closer to bread soaked in meat juices and then baked.)
At any rate.
“You’re calling that pudding?”
“Then what do you think pudding is?”
“Well…”
It certainly did not look like any pudding she knew. And custard? Was the contents of those cups really custard?
Karem understood her puzzled reaction perfectly.
Bread-based primitive pudding—bread pudding—might well stretch back to ancient Rome or even earlier, and custard itself was just as old. Custard pudding was simply the refined marriage of those two traditions, perhaps their ultimate evolution.
Strip bread pudding down to its bones and it was nothing more than milk and sugar used to bulk up flavor and volume while eggs bound bread and other ingredients together. Change only the components and you had custard pudding.
The principle itself was simple.
Eggs, whether altered or not, set firmly once heated enough. That single property was all that mattered. Beat eggs thoroughly into rich, fatty milk and apply heat: the mixture solidifies. That was the entire secret of custard pudding.
Swap the eggs for gelatin and you arrived at the clear, ubiquitous modern puddings found everywhere.
“Just a change of perspective. Eggs firm up when cooked, right? So why bother adding bread at all?”
“…I see. Come to think of it, the custard that fills a pie shell is also made of eggs. And eggs can become fried eggs or omelets depending on how you treat them.”
“Huh. You accepted that faster than I expected.”
Brownies really were a different breed. Mary lifted her nose with an air of absolute nonchalance.
“Even if I look like this, I am an elite among elite brownies who has spent decades seeking out and supporting only the most hopeless contractors. Of course I would understand.”
“Fair enough. They say people’s tastes are as numerous as the stars in the sky.”
“Precisely. I have known contractors of truly every variety.”
“Hmm?”
Some unpleasant memory?
Mary, still staring into the oven, suddenly twisted her face into a deep scowl.
“…Yes. Everything else was fine, but every last one of them made preparing meals feel utterly pointless.”
“In what sense?”
“Being told that delicious food weakens the soul and ordered to remake the entire meal was almost a kindness. One contractor locked himself away claiming research was more important than eating… and starved to death.”
“Ah…”
Karem thought it over carefully. Hours spent preparing dishes only for the appointment to be cancelled at the last second, or friends who suggested takeout instead. For anyone who cooked, joy came not only from eating but from serving others and watching them marvel. Those situations were nightmares.
And while Karem’s world revolved around cooking alone, Mary was a house-elf brownie who oversaw every aspect of household labor. The hollowness and irritation she must have felt would have been far greater than his own.
“They really were contractors who offered no reward for the effort of serving them.”
“Junior Karem. I will accept the consideration. Hmph. You may be a rolling stone that rolled in uninvited, but I will give you credit for that much.”
“Excuse me—the person you’re talking about is standing right here, you know?”
“What, are you claiming you’re not a rolling stone?”
Mary’s eyes sharpened as she glared at him.
“I had finally found a perfectly hopeless contractor and was enjoying myself thoroughly, only for her to go and bring home an even better cook the moment my back was turned! And all you can do is cook!”
“A cook is supposed to cook well. Would you rather I was good at laundry instead?”
“Kh—you can’t even tidy the kitchen properly after yourself…!”
“Ah, so the three meals a day have been to your liking, then?”
That—
Mary’s head jerked upward at a sharp diagonal, the bull’s-eye struck cleanly.
After all, even she, who had never once eaten a meal prepared by someone else, found herself looking forward to every single sitting for the first time in her life.
Having silenced the resident stone, Karem opened the oven with a lighter heart. The custard puddings in their copper cups released gentle wisps of steam.
The soft scent of warm milk and sweetly caramelized sugar drifted out. Mary, who had been staring into the empty air, turned her head just a fraction, interest flickering.
“…Junior Karem. Do we eat them like this?”
“They’re far too hot to eat as they are. They only become complete once they’ve cooled.”
“Junior. We don’t have time, do we?”
Mary was exactly right.
While the custard puddings had been baking, Catherine’s snack hour had crept right up to the doorstep. There was no leisure to wait for copper cups fresh from a hot oven to cool on their own.
Karem carefully transferred them with tongs onto a wooden tray.
“I’ll just have to ask Lady Catherine for a favor.”
“A favor? Ah.”
“With her magic they should cool in the blink of an eye, right?”
Using one’s employer—no, a great mage—simply to chill a few copper cups of dessert.
Was he out of his mind?
One could certainly say so.
“Ahem. So they only become complete once these hot things have cooled?”
“Yes. We could scoop them out as they are, but cooling is almost—”
“Then what are we waiting for?”
Before Karem could finish, Mary was already on her feet.
In her left hand she lifted the tray of plates and utensils she had prepared in advance; in her right she took the tray of copper cups.
“Our contractor will be waiting. Let us go at once.”
“Oh my. If you’re willing to carry them, I’m grateful, Senior.”
“Hmph. Don’t get the wrong idea. This is purely for the sake of our contractor’s snack time.”
She said that while wearing the expression of a child looking forward to today’s treat. Karem would have loved to call her out on it, but for the sake of her image he kept his mouth shut and simply followed the brisk steps of the brownie ahead of him.
They left the kitchen and were walking the now-familiar broad corridor when the brownie in front suddenly stopped dead.
“Hm?”
“Senior Mary? Why did you—”
“We have a guest.”
“This suddenly? Without any prior notice—wait. A guest…?”
“Look over there.”
With both hands full, Mary jerked her chin toward the far left corner of the corridor, where a curtain hung.
“It is Lady Alicia.”
“Lady Alicia!?”
Attached Materials
A picture drawn by ChatGPT.