Crepe Cake, Roll, and Suzette at the Small Banquet (1)
The servant closed the dining hall door and withdrew. A short while later, the door opened again and a line of servants filed in, their hands laden with dishes.
Even combining both the Adobis and Winterhome sides, fewer than twenty people attended the small luncheon banquet welcoming the distinguished guests, yet the number of plates and bowls the servants carried far exceeded that.
One might call it excessive, but a table reflected the host’s dignity. Of course, even this scale was clearly insufficient compared to the value Adobis wheat held in Iceland and to Nepaneck’s own status. Still, if the guest refused, nothing could be done. This was the compromise finally reached between Nepaneck—who consistently urged that the welcome banquet be scaled down every time she visited for a renewal—and Alfred’s stubborn insistence on proper hospitality. To ordinary eyes, though, the amount still looked overflowing.
Beasts and monster meats cooked and garnished in every style, vegetable dishes, pies and breads of every shape and size, soups and stews, raw vegetables and fruit for the palate, and desserts of every kind—plus a few purely decorative party pieces meant more for the eyes than the stomach—filled the table.
Yet the Adobis guests, especially Nepaneck, wore expressions of mild surprise. Guessing as much, Alfred rose from his seat.
“Unlike your last visit, there have been a few… changes in Winterhome’s kitchen of late. Some of these may look unfamiliar to you, Nepaneck.”
“Indeed. There are familiar dishes, but also ones I’ve never seen. Changes, you say?”
“A boy appeared who shook the complacency out of Winterhome’s kitchen.”
“A boy…”
The boy chef named Karem he had mentioned earlier? Sensing the implication, Alfred simply nodded.
While a few Adobis guests who remembered previous visits quietly compared past and present, Alfred stood at the center of the table and personally carved the whole roast pig. With a clean crack like dry bark splitting, the meat was revealed and the first portion was placed on the plate of the banquet’s guest of honor—Nepaneck. The tenderloin and loin, the most prized cuts, arrived first. Over meat already glistening with red sauce came soft belly that had finished cooking in residual heat and a sheet of golden-brown crackling; herb fragrance rose from the elegant plate.
In the water-scarce desert, pork was a luxury only a few ever tasted. To those seated here it was no rarer than beef, yet that hardly mattered to her now. Among the familiar dishes sat others that were only slightly—or entirely—strange. Amid the uniformly lavish spread, a few dishes seized the eye with an unnaturally familiar yet alien look: a yellow cylindrical pouch folded so the filling could not be seen; a thin pancake folded twice, submerged in sauce and blazing with open flame. And most striking of all—
Isn’t that cheese?
Did they invent a new cheese?
A bit small for a party decoration, though.
A smooth white cylinder, flawless as pure marble, sat on a plate. For a heartbeat Nepaneck felt curiosity, then she forced her attention back to her own plate. She was not worried about the food cooling; every dish and bowl present was a magic tool. When the host himself had served her, leaving the plate untouched was unthinkable. Placing more than two items on one plate was also considered impolite.
Nepaneck moved her utensils with practiced ease, speared a piece of crackling together with loin and tenderloin, painted a little of the vivid red fruit sauce across them with her knife, and took a bite.
Bulp.
“…Hup.”
She instantly concentrated every nerve and swallowed the sound. Objectively the dish could not have been bad. Seophon’s meat cookery, if nothing else, had to be acknowledged: soft flesh swimming in juice, and savory crackling that shattered as if burned yet kept every bit of its flavor and texture. But the first sensation was something else entirely—an intense stimulus her tongue had never met.
“Keuhup!?”
“Ugh.”
“Huuuup!”
The other Adobis guests reacted in exactly the same sequence. Fine hairs stood on end; Nepaneck’s ears shot straight toward the ceiling and her lips pursed. Alfred finally spoke, wearing the expression of a man who had landed a clean hit.
“A new spice that began circulating in Winterhome this winter. Care to guess its name?”
“Ahem—ahem! What is this!? My tongue is on fire! What sort of blunder turns pepper into something with no aroma left, only pure heat—”
“Taste carefully. It is not pepper.”
“How does my hand keep… reaching for it?”
A hot flare had raced across her entire tongue—five times the bite of chewing a whole peppercorn. Yet unlike pepper, which vanished in an instant, the heat lingered steadily inside her mouth. Beneath it a faint, pleasant sweetness completely erased pork’s natural greasiness while leaving the savoriness untouched. As the meat’s oil coated her tongue, the throbbing pain also faded. When the unfamiliar sensation finally receded, only a residual burn and a strange… regret remained.
Nepaneck quickly replayed the taste that had filled her mouth mere seconds earlier. Northern-spiced pork and crackling accounted for most of it. What remained was the sauce.
“This is something I have never once tasted in Iceland’s barren hospitality. I do not know what it is, but is it a new spice?”
“You will recognize the name the moment you hear it. Finger of the Red Witch.”
“Haa?”
What in the world? For a fleeting moment Nepaneck’s composed mask cracked and open dismay showed. Who would not be startled upon being told they had just been fed a poisonous herb? Alfred, having finally scored a point after years of being on the receiving end, was thoroughly satisfied inside—though he kept the triumph from his face.
“After last winter, when it became known that Firehand is a spice in the same family as pepper, it began spreading through Coldon without regard to rank. This is a portion of that harvest.”
“Even when I was starving I refused to eat poisonous herbs, yet the moment my belly is full I am already risking my life on the path of gourmet cuisine! Has the Seophon Kingdom grown that friendly with Berseingeto?”
“Surprisingly, it is not a poisonous herb. Overuse would be dangerous, of course—but by that measure alcohol is equally dangerous if drunk in excess.”
“Alcohol does not set a person’s tongue on fire for this long!”
Nepaneck bristled. To any Adobis, beer was synonymous with water and bread; highborn and lowborn alike shared that truth. Alfred ignored her booming protest and simply pointed an index finger at her, as though asking whether she had noticed anything else.
“Stop focusing only on the tongue. Feel your whole body. The cold should have eased a little.”
“What warming— …huh?”
She had been about to retort that he was talking nonsense when she finally registered the change. Iceland’s cold defied even magic tools; that was why Alfred’s consideration had her wearing thick furs indoors. A faint chill had still seeped through—yet now she felt none. No, more than that: a very slight warmth.
The instant she felt the difference, gold coins began cascading through the mind of the New Kingdom of Adobis’s treasurer. Spices, large or small, always called money. And this one offered a swift, unmistakable cold-protection effect. Nepaneck understood exactly what Alfred wanted.
“Export rights… and cross-verification?”
“Iceland is barren and our imports limited. I am looking toward the next contract renewal rather than the present one.”
“Meanwhile Firehand’s reputation will travel beyond Iceland by word of mouth; its name, efficacy, and effects will become known. By then someone will already have staked the claim in advance?”
“I knew you would understand.”
Unlike every previous spicy spice, this one began with a powerful punch, then settled into clean, certain heat, with a pleasant sweetness rising faintly beneath. Above all, the cold-protection effect was so rapid that the eater could feel the change in their own body. Nepaneck could smell money. But first—
“I will extract a proper price for letting you use me, you know?”
“You did it again, little guy.”
“Huh? Out of nowhere like this?”
“Then are you claiming it wasn’t you who fed the guests consecutive spicy punches?”
“This is a smear campaign. I only made the desserts.”
Karem was genuinely aggrieved. The moment kitchen work ended and he slipped into the servants’ throng to peek at how the meal was progressing, this was the greeting he received. Fortunately the guests were clearly enjoying themselves. He had first been shocked that Firehand powder was being used at all, then shocked again to learn it was Alfred’s order; there was nothing he could do about either. Just make the requested desserts in bulk, that was all.
At Karem’s thoroughly resigned expression, Catherine shook her head as if he were beyond hope and pointed her chin at the three desserts Mary had arranged on a plate.
“So—these desserts I’ve never seen before. They’re your work, little one?”
“Crepe cake, crepe roll, and crepe suzette, respectively.”
On important occasions one served what one was confident in rather than taking risks. In that spirit Karem had chosen the crepe triple set: labor-intensive, yet free of unpredictable variables. Cloud-light whipped cream, crepes only a little thicker than paper, and—so long as one’s hands were delicate—simpler to produce than almost any other dessert in the world. Fortunately the boy had both ample ingredients and reasonable confidence in his own skill.
“The failures were deliciously eaten by the other cooks.”
“And how do these taste? Looking at them, the two with white filling are clearly whipped cream.”
“As for taste—”
The moment Karem opened his mouth a servant approached and cleared his throat, drawing their attention.
“Lord Nepaneck asks whether she might borrow the chef for a moment.”
“The guest? For what reason?”
“She said there are things she is seeing for the first time and would appreciate an explanation.”
“Hmm. Mary is here, so it should be fine. Go on.”
With a wave that carried little real enthusiasm, Catherine dismissed him. The boy immediately followed the servant and took his place beside Nepaneck. One slice of crepe cake, one piece of crepe roll, one crepe suzette—her plate looked exactly like the one Catherine had just been examining. Facing Nepaneck’s mixture of arrogance and curiosity, Karem bowed.
“Greetings, Lord Nepaneck. I am Karem, personal chef to Lady Atanitas.”
“So you made all three of these?”
“Yes. I did receive a little help preparing the crepes themselves.”
“Hmm.”
Nepaneck, already short, looked down at the boy who was a shade shorter still with faintly suspicious eyes. She had heard the story directly from Alfred, of course. Even so—was he not far too young to have accomplished so much? She decided to verify it herself.
“First of all, what is this white filling on the outside and between the layers of the cake, and inside the roll?”
Attached materials:
- Crepe Cake -
- Crepe Roll -
- Crepe Suzette -
Pictures drawn by ChatGPT.