Early Jam Donuts for a Snack Before Lunch (1)
Strength, in every age, has always been measured by a handful of familiar yardsticks—some shifting with the times, others eternal.
How strong are you in a fight?
How much can you eat?
How much liquor can you put away?
And here in Iceland, Karem had come to believe, they added one more: how much spicy food can you handle?
Whew! It's the heat that makes you crave it even more, right, Haifon?
Brrr-aarrr. Of course! Have some of this fiery Highland pork tenderloin.
Naturally! And greasy food like this just isn't complete without beer!
Thinking it over again, that was the only way any of it made sense. Otherwise no one would keep eating after their lips had already swollen and their eyelids were quivering like a newborn fawn's legs.
Watching that spectacle had been enough for Karem to remind himself once more that he had been wrong.
A chef has his own tastes, after all. Forcing them on people who don't share them is simply bad form.
All he had to do was remember Catherine refusing his Red Witch kkakdugi, then turning around and demolishing every spicy dish at the banquet until her lips were bright red.
Guoyoubufji—excess is worse than deficiency. Sotamdaesil—a small greed can cost you the greater prize.
The sages' old warnings applied to cooking just as well as anything else.
Over-season a dish and you have to drown it in extra water and more ingredients just to salvage it. Under-season, and a pinch of salt usually fixes everything.
And salt was only the beginning.
What one person called a fishy stench, another called the pure scent of the sea and loved.
What one person called the deep, melting aroma of fat, another recoiled from as gamey reek.
If he were only cooking for himself, none of it would matter.
But a chef who feeds others has to meet other people's tastes.
With that in mind, Karem held out the jar of garum to Jigmeser.
"Could you spare me just a little? I'll share the recipe."
"Fine. But not much!"
Dinner in the great hall had ended. The next morning came.
Karem rose early, collected Mary after she finished her dawn chores, and headed for the larder.
The storeroom was a whirlwind of workers sorting deliveries for Winterhome and hauling out requested goods, yet Karem simply closed his mind's eye, strode straight in, and snatched the ingredients he had still been short for seasoned fried chicken before marching right back out.
"So, Junior Karem. You dragged us out at this hour for a single jar of jam?"
"Yes. None of the jams in the tower kitchen were the ones I wanted."
"If my memory serves, there are more than ten varieties. Not a single one suited you?"
"You're the one saying that? Is your conscience…?"
Karem turned and fixed her with a piercing stare.
Mary worked as hard as any house brownie, and therefore, in Karem's eyes, put away a truly terrifying amount of food.
Three things never left her meals or her snacks: bread, butter, and milk.
She claimed to prefer pure white wheat loaves, but the truth was she loved any bread at all. The sheer volume she demolished every day was terrifying.
And because snack bread simply could not be eaten without jam, the amount of jam she inhaled was equally staggering.
Fully seven-tenths of every jam shipment to the Mage's Tower vanished down her throat. The jars in the box she was carrying right now would, barring disaster, end up as her personal share.
Mary knew exactly why he was staring. She looked away and quickened her pace.
Back at the tower, Karem snatched a short nap and woke feeling far more human. He prepared Catherine's breakfast, then refused to leave the cleanup to Mary.
"How dare you try to steal my work! Truly, one can never drop one's guard!"
"No, that's not it! I need to get things ready for lunch!"
"Ready?"
"Oil. I need oil."
Unless he was making whole roast chicken, he could not skip the oil for seasoned fried chicken. Before the sauce went on, it was simply fried chicken.
The chicken was already waiting in the cold room.
The fat had come from the slaughterhouse the day before; all that remained was to render it.
Bubble-bubble-bubble—sizzle-sizzle-sizzle!
"Ahhh—that sound."
He set a little water boiling hard, then dumped in every scrap of finely chopped leaf lard.
Within moments the water vanished, the fat began to fry and surrender its oil, and the pot filled at an almost alarming rate.
"That should do it."
"That's a great deal of oil. What do you intend?"
"I'm going to use every drop."
Mary's mouth had just started to open in disbelief when the kitchen door slammed open.
Catherine strode in.
"Damn it all, how am I supposed to work when you fill the place with a smell this rich?"
"Would you care for some fried pork cracklings?"
"Obviously! Why else do you think I came all the way down here?"
The moment Catherine sat, Mary was already at her side with the bowl of cracklings Karem had just offered.
Pork cracklings were the inevitable byproduct of rendering lard. As the fat released its oil, the last traces of protein crisped into something so fragrant it was almost impossible to refuse.
Mary had already seasoned them with salt and pepper. The result spoke for itself.
"Mmm. This crunchy richness… I can't stop!"
A little salt to lift the flavor, a whisper of pepper's heat and perfume to cut the richness, and what remained was pure, concentrated pork savor and shatteringly crisp texture.
Catherine chewed, eyes still on her book.
"So. What are you actually up to?"
"Pardon? What do you mean?"
"You're cooking something separate, aren't you? You can't possibly mean to use all that oil."
"No? I mean to use every drop."
Catherine's chewing stopped. She turned from her book to stare at the cast-iron pot in front of Karem.
He was steadily skimming scraps with a spider. The pot itself was large enough to feed ten grown adults if it had been full of soup.
And he planned to use every last drop of oil filling that cauldron?
Even in the Seophon Kingdom, the rich and powerful ate well enough that fried foods existed. But at best they meant a shallow pan of oil and something half-fried, half-sautéed. Even a king would not casually eat anything so extravagant. What on earth was he making? Well, frying, obviously, but still…
Mary, ever the brownie who read her mistress's mind in a heartbeat, asked the question herself. She was just as flabbergasted.
"Junior Karem. Do you intend to grease the stomachs of every last soul living in Winterhome?"
"Come on, that's a bit much."
"Yes. It is exaggeration. Your claim, however, is not. Exactly where do you plan to put that much oil…?"
"I was going to start lunch, but…"
Karem glanced out the window.
Yesterday the sky had been heavy with endless snow. Today it was a cloudless, brilliant blue, sunlight pouring down as if it had been storing itself up for weeks.
And lunch was still hours away.
"It's a little early, but how about a snack? What do you say to donuts?"
"An excellent choice, Junior Karem. I shall prepare the drinks."
At the mere word "donut," Mary's lost composure snapped back into place and she fell into step with him at once.
In his previous life Karem had thrown himself into every kind of cooking as a hobby. The one field he had barely touched was baking and pastry.
He was not worried.
No one could do everything alone.
Mary, after all, knew her way around a dough board.
"Donut dough? Nothing difficult about it. But why…?"
"I have no confidence in baking."
Mary looked at him as though an ogre had just announced it wanted to dance. The boy himself, however, was perfectly serious.
He could follow a remembered recipe and substitute missing ingredients, but that was the limit of his pastry knowledge.
Baking's true flower was precise measurement, controlled fermentation, and timing—plus the desperate prayer that the oven gods would not burn everything to ash.
The praying part he could manage. The rest he knew almost nothing about. Vague notions of wild yeast and commercial yeast were the sum of his lore.
Mary, as expected, produced a superb donut dough exactly to his specifications.
First rise, portioned into fist-sized balls, second rise.
When everything was ready, Catherine asked,
"So you mean to fry every last one of those?"
"Yes. A trial run before I start lunch."
"Double-fermented donuts… they'll be absurdly soft."
"That's exactly what I wanted. Mary, could I trouble you for some fruit punch?"
While Mary stepped out, Karem began sliding the dough pieces into the oil one after another.
Thanks to the two rises, the dough was full of air; each piece bobbed up at once and began to fry.
The sound was like a waterfall turned down to one-tenth volume.
He nudged the pieces gently, checking the submerged sides, then flipped them.
A clean golden-brown line now ran across the middle of each donut where the oil's surface had been.
"Ha. Even plain honey would make these heavenly."
"But you won't be satisfied with that, will you?"
"Of course not! Now that it's come to this, you'd better live up to my expectations!"
"When have I ever disappointed Lady Atanitas?"
"The Red Witch pickles."
The words were barely out before Karem spun back to the oil pot and concentrated with fierce intensity.
That particular episode had been… well, the result of a homesick local boy finally tasting his hometown flavors after far too long and completely losing the brakes.
He studiously ignored the scorching glare boring into the back of his head and gave the floating donuts a few unnecessary prods.
Fortunately the glare could not last forever.
"All the donuts are fried."
"So. How exactly do you plan to meet my expectations?"
"With these."
Karem set out a funnel and a row of jam jars on the table.
Catherine watched, curiosity unhidden—then her eyes flew wide and she slapped the table.
Karem stabbed the funnel into a donut and forced a full quarter of a jar of jam inside.
When he pulled the funnel free, almost nothing remained visible except a thumb-sized plug of jam in the hole. Yet Catherine, who had watched every gram disappear, simply stared in a daze.
Apple, grape, plum, fig—fruits he knew and fruits he did not—jam after jam that he had only just collected a few hours earlier vanished by the third into the waiting donuts.
Mary returned with the drinks, turned her head, and reacted exactly as expected.
"Titania preserve us! That much jam—every last bit of it—inside those?!"
"That's what I've been saying!"
As the final flourish he dusted the whole tray with the leftover powdered sugar from earlier. Even Mary, who normally waited until Catherine had eaten her fill, was now wriggling her fingers in open longing.
Karem carried the pyramid of jam donuts to the table. Mary split one the instant it landed.
Attached Material
— Jam Donut —
A picture drawn by ChatGPT for us.