Three Birds with One Stone Crêpes
Every chef shares one common saying.
The kitchen is a battlefield.
Of course it isn’t a real battlefield. The point is that it’s just as noisy, chaotic, and dangerous.
Rush hours—lunch, dinner, the late-night crush—are especially brutal. Orders never stop flooding in, the flames never get a chance to die, and the ingredients you prepped earlier inevitably run out. Everyone is racing toward their own goal, so paths collide. In a kitchen that is already cramped, people slam into one another; amid the clatter of metal, the only way to make yourself heard is to shout and swear.
Even after the worst of the peak finally passes, the “break” is barely more than a breath. Chefs have to scramble right back into motion to prepare for the next service. People never stop moving and the fires never go out, so a kitchen stays sweltering even in the dead of winter—hot as a midsummer heat wave.
The space Karem stood in right now was the exception.
It wasn’t hot. It was cool. No—borderline freezing.
He cleared away the mountain of eggshells and swept his gaze around the kitchen. Amid the chefs who were busily working their tools and prepping ingredients, thick rounds of timber, each about the size of an adult’s head, had been set out at intervals. One sat right behind him, steadily exhaling cold air.
So that’s why everyone in the desert kingdom of Adobis lost their minds over these things, from the lowest servant to the highest official.
They had claimed the hotter it got, the more fiercely the wood poured out cold. Karem could feel exactly what they meant. A sealed kitchen in the humid spring was already stifling; the moment the cooks began lighting fires, the damp air turned sweltering—and the logs answered at once, flooding the room with chill. The kitchen that had been heating up cooled in an instant. There even seemed to be a dehumidifying effect; everything, from the counters to the air itself, felt crisp and dry.
I should grab a few of these to take home.
He cut the idle thought short and looked around properly. There was someone nominally in charge of the kitchen, but no fixed theme seemed to bind the menu. Each cook was simply preparing whatever they did best. The inn’s original staff focused on meats and pies. The Adobis chefs were turning out dishes heavy with the flavors of various Middle-Eastern regions. And the cooks sent from Winterhome—men Karem had unknowingly helped and who had then been thoroughly whipped into shape by their superiors—moved with visible tension, fully aware that the duke’s prestige rested on their hands.
“In that case I only need to make a few desserts,” Karem murmured.
Most of the dishes coming off the stoves were savory. He could tell because every station that looked dessert-bound shared the same ingredients: sugar, butter, eggs. Fruit alone could go either way, but those three together left no doubt.
They had asked him for a few dishes that included dessert, which meant he was free to make nothing but sweets if he wanted. He had already decided what to cook while gathering the ingredients. Mary, currently at Catherine’s side, would have scoffed that a man who claimed to be hopeless at baking had no business sounding so confident—but he did have a trick up his sleeve.
Killing two birds with one stone? No—three.
A single base would give him three different desserts, and none of them required fermentation. The only catch was the sheer amount of labor involved. Mary would have been perfect for this.
He cast another hopeful glance around the kitchen, already knowing full well where she must be. That look, however, drew the first person who had spoken to him in this kitchen—Alberto—sidling closer.
“If you’re short of hands, may I assist? My own work is already finished.”
“You’re done already?”
“It’s a whole roast pig. I’ve had it on a slow fire since before dawn. It finished a short while ago and is waiting in another room.”
Large cuts always took hours; a whole pig was no surprise. Karem had no reason to refuse. He accepted the help gladly, poured pre-measured flour, sugar, and salt into a bowl of eggs and milk, then carefully stirred in melted butter until the batter came together.
“Even for a pancake meant to be eaten with a meal, that’s awfully thin.”
“That’s because it isn’t a pancake.”
“Pardon?”
Karem ladled the thin batter onto a preheated pan, spread it wide and paper-thin the way one might make a crepe-style omelette, and flipped it in seconds. He immediately handed the task off to Alberto. The man fumbled a couple of times at first, but he adapted quickly. As he poured the next ladleful he asked,
“Then what is it called? The method looks identical to a pancake.”
“The thing itself is a crêpe.”
“Ah—a Berseingeto name.”
A competent chef can estimate flavor from ingredients, process, and finished product alone. Alberto, temporary head cook to a duke, was no exception. He could size up the unfamiliar crêpe well enough, yet compared with everything the boy had shown so far it felt almost disappointing. The other cooks who had been watching Karem with mixed curiosity shared the same mild letdown.
It did not take long for that feeling to change.
While the inn’s own cooks sneered, the Adobis chefs one by one began looking away. Perhaps they had simply expected too much. The small hands of a boy who had not even come of age moved with undeniable skill—dark elves of that age would still have been clinging to their parents, nowhere near a kitchen—but a genius chef doted on by an entire ducal house? Maybe the praise had been measured by the standards of some frozen Europa backwater.
The cooks who had arrived with the envoy fleet had been hand-picked from the royal kitchens of the God-King himself, sent to serve the treasurer the God-King favored. Adobis was the oldest nation in the world. For thousands of years it had watched kingdoms rise and fall, weathered its own crises, and still stood in full glory. Though the kingdom sat in the desert, its people claimed—and believed—that no land on earth was richer. The annual flood of the Sobek River never permitted famine. Sitting at the crossroads of East and West, every luxury of both hemispheres flowed through its markets, and its culture, cuisine included, had advanced further than any other. Their dishes were refined, spectacular, and lavish by necessity; nothing unworthy could ever touch the lips of the desert’s ruler.
By that measure most of Europa’s kingdoms were rootless upstarts. The entire history of Seophon was a blink of an eye to Adobis. The Felwinter line, at least, was old enough to command a little respect—even if it still belonged to a barren ice-bound corner of the continent. They had allowed themselves a modest hope. The result so far had been underwhelming.
Then one dark-elf cook muttered,
“Hm? I’ve never seen that before.”
Never seen it? In the kitchens of the God-King, where every ingredient under the sun was said to gather?
Heads that had already started to turn away snapped back around—and the cooks froze in astonishment. Their eyes locked on Karem standing on a footstool, his small hands working a bowl of cream set atop one of the cold-breathing logs.
Moments earlier the bowl had held ordinary cream, thick as a painter’s white pigment. In the brief interval their attention had wandered, that cream was transforming into something none of them had ever witnessed. The dense white liquid, which had looked like lead-white mixed with oil, was turning under the rapid motion of a strange whisk into something closer to half-melted cheese. And the change did not stop there. Between the bright metallic ring of the whisk against the bowl rose a softer sound, like children packing great handfuls of fresh powder snow into snowballs, growing louder with every stroke.
“That should be enough.”
“H-Head Chef Karem—what in the world is that?”
“Not raw cream—whipped cream.”
A dark elf who had been listening in spite of himself frowned on pure reflex.
“No gift for naming, apparently.”
The other Adobis cooks, and the few from Winterhome and Obsidianberry who had caught the words from a distance, all silently agreed. Milk snow, white silk cloud—any of those would have been better than “whipped cream.”
A servant hurried into the kitchen as if to jolt them out of their trance.
“The guests have finished their light refreshments and are beginning conversation!”
“Damn it—no time for gawking!”
“Phew. Another second of staring and we would have been finished.”
They had nearly committed the most basic of kitchen sins: losing themselves in someone else’s work while their own dishes were still unfinished. The quiet kitchen erupted back into a battlefield. Only a handful of cooks managed to keep their full attention on their own stations.
Making whipped cream demanded real labor. The principle was complex, but the essence was simple: force enough air into the cream that it becomes almost solid—an act that bordered on craft. People, however, are tool-users. Electric whisks did not exist here, yet other methods did.
“Hoo… I might catch a cold at this rate.”
Karem set the whisk down and rubbed his stomach. He had been practically embracing a natural air conditioner; the boy’s midriff felt like a block of ice.
“….”
“Alberto. Alberto! Snap out of it!”
“Y-yes! Head Chef Karem!”
Small hands began lining a mold with crêpes, spreading lemon syrup and an equally thin layer of whipped cream, then repeating the process. Building a crêpe cake looked simple; in reality every scrap of Karem’s concentration was focused in his eyes and fingertips. If the crêpes sat even slightly off-center the finished stack would lean. Too much syrup and the delicate sheets would tear, throwing the balance of flavors; too little and there was no point. Cream that was not perfectly even could never be fixed later. He had the ingredients, but not the time—he had to get it right in a single pass.
He still had other desserts to begin, so he called Alberto over at once.
“You watched what I did. The critical points are the placement of each crêpe, an even coat of syrup, and a uniform thickness of cream. Mistakes now cannot be undone.”
“Understood, Head Chef Karem!”
Alberto nodded with the solemnity of a knight receiving his lord’s command. Karem immediately picked up his footstool and shifted to the next station. Given the scale of the banquet, he would need several more.