The Knight Order's Honorary Mess Officer (2)
There was a time in Earth's history when a single kilogram of pepper was worth its weight in gold.
All sorts of interests and the circumstances of the age had let pepper climb that high, but the heart of the matter was plain. Spice was not there merely to lend a dish its fragrance. It functioned as a luxury good.
Another world was no different. As far as I knew, pepper was a precious spice a commoner could hardly even hope to see. Even in Earth's history, where there were no magical beasts, the cost of moving spice had been ruinous. A world that also had mana and monsters could only be worse. Never better.
And the problem was hardly limited to pepper. Fennel, cumin, turmeric, clove, nutmeg, cinnamon—the spices of the Middle East and of Asia were the same story. In that light, buying the entire assortment for a mere twenty-two silver coins was an absurd coup. Practically free.
Why had the tanned blond adventurer sold them so cheap? Only he would know the details, but perhaps it was because each spice came in such a tiny quantity, and because they weren't relatively familiar ones like pepper. They were the sort that split people cleanly into love and hate.
Well, however it had happened, it was good news. Thanks to him, I could make curry. Even the knights of a ducal domain—had they ever tasted a dish in which a vast quantity of spices came together in harmony? Absolutely not. Probably not even Duke Kailan. In every respect, it was a dish more than fit to make an impact.
I set the mess cooks to prepping the vegetables for the curry stew. While they scrubbed away the skins and chopped, I claimed a secluded corner of the kitchen and drew the spices—still not entirely spilled—out of my pack. The indiscriminate assault of scent hit all over again, and Iseria hacked and coughed.
"A—achoo! What are you even planning to do with this stuff?"
"Just wait. This right here is stimulation taken to its absolute limit."
To make curry stew, I obviously had to blend the curry powder first. The spices that absolutely had to go in were turmeric, cumin, coriander, chili, clove, cardamom, fennel, and on and on—far too many to explain one by one. The core of the method, though, was to take turmeric, coriander, and cumin as the base, then add the rest to taste.
Because the variety of spices was endless, curry in India tasted different in every house. Those individual blends were called garam masala. Put it in Korean terms, and it was like how every family's kimchi tastes different.
See? It clicks right into place.
Thanks to the spices I'd picked up cheap, I already had nearly everything the curry powder required. They were registered as items in Mana Market as well, so quantity was no concern. However much mana it cost to trade ingredients like vegetables or meat through Mana Market, it never exceeded a tenth of my total. What appeared varied by type, but by the standards of a restaurant it came to roughly one crate. The important point was that spices worked exactly the same way.
A single kilogram of the ordinary curry powder everyone knows from a grocery shelf yields about fifty servings. Boxed curry powder and proper curry powder are entirely different ingredients, of course—the only real difference is whether that mass of spice is already seasoned. Which meant that a dish whose cost-efficiency was already absurd could, with one click of Mana Market and only a little exaggeration, become a thousand servings of curry. Make a generous three kilograms of curry powder, season it with salt and chicken stock, and three hundred servings were finished in an instant.
I started the blend at the universal ratio everyone swears by: turmeric three, coriander two, cumin one. Once the base was set, I added the other spices a little at a time and gradually built up the total, and before long I had a curry powder whose fragrance sat in harmony.
Iseria had been watching my hands from the side. She grew more and more astonished as each scent found its proper place, and when the powder was finally complete—
"Hiek... hieeek..."
Sniff, sniff. She buried her nose in the powder like a cat melted by catnip.
"Hey! People are going to eat that!"
"Just... just a little more..."
I snatched the curry powder away. Iseria shoved her face after it in time with the motion, and I shoved her right back. There wasn't even any animal ingredient in it yet—nothing but a mass of fine plant spices—and she was already this far gone? Watching her, I found myself looking forward to the soldiers once they actually ate the curry.
I mixed chicken stock and salt into the powder and adjusted the seasoning. I dipped a finger in to check. It wasn't quite the flavor that called Indian uncles to mind, but it landed squarely in the overlap between Indian curry and Japanese curry.
Oh. That's seriously good.
The original plan had been a curry stew kept a little loose, something to eat with flatbread, so a flavor closer to that purpose than a fully Indian-style curry was exactly what I wanted.
With the curry powder finished, I checked whether the mess cooks had prepped everything properly.
"Did you do it all the way I told you?"
"Yes, sir! Thirty kilos of potatoes, twenty of onions, ten of carrots, and seven of turnips—all chopped."
Just as he said, clean vegetables sat diced in great baskets. Honestly, I hadn't expected them to finish. I'd figured they'd be chopping along at a reasonable pace and I'd step in to wrap it up.
And they handed me people this good...
Unless the prep was a disaster, speed in the kitchen was a serious advantage. Fast hands meant you could finish the cutting and the cooking, then still have room for sanitation, fine adjustments of flavor, and a recipe carried out without mistakes. To think they'd produced slop like that with people like these... The previous mess officer had been nothing but a jack-of-all-trades. Master of none, more than likely.
Both of them looked up at me with cute faces caught between expectation and curiosity.
"Um... Mess Officer, sir. The dish you're about to make, what exactly... ah, I'm sorry!"
"Huh."
The cook who looked the most senior had asked what I was making, and I'd been about to answer him kindly. He never finished the sentence. He startled hard and dropped into a ninety-degree bow.
What was that about? Don't tell me he was reacting like that because he'd been fishing for the recipe. The urge to scratch his curiosity had slipped out before he could stop it. To a modern person's sensibilities, it wasn't a problem in the slightest.
"Forget it. Temporary or not, I'm the mess officer. I ought to teach you the recipe properly before I go. The dish is called curry, and I'll write the full recipe down for you later."
"S-sir? Truly?"
"What would I gain by lying about something like this? Let's finish the cooking first."
"Yes, sir!!"
At my offhand promise to hand the recipe over, every mess cook snapped to with full spirit. It was something I'd be embarrassed even to call obvious, and yet my chest felt tangled even as I was proud of them.
I told them to divide the prepped ingredients among six great cauldrons. Six hundred servings couldn't be done in one pot. Even split, that was a hundred servings a cauldron, so the deep, concentrated flavor peculiar to large-batch stew would be more than enough.
Truthfully... from here, it was hard to even call it cooking. Making it at home, or eating it in a restaurant, was one thing. Curry for mass mess-hall service? Then there was no caramelizing the onions, no Maillard on the potatoes and carrots. None of that.
"Pour in the hot water!"
"Yes, sir!"
Glug, glug, glug—!
I poured the water that had been boiling beside us until the ingredients were submerged, and raised the fire. Then, once the curry powder I'd made was worked in so it dissolved without a single lump—
"Huuurk! Wh-what is this smell?"
"I don't know... I've never smelled anything like it in my life. It's so intense... haah..."
"Hnnng!!! Hiyuuu..."
As the powder loosened into the hot water, the aroma of curry exploded. The mess cooks, who had been bracing themselves against a spice scent that was already anything but ordinary, came completely undone before a fragrance that shook them to the brain. Iseria unraveled right along with them, breathing the smell in to the very limit of her lungs.
"Now keep stirring so it doesn't catch on the bottom, and boil it for another hour. And... is there any jerky left?"
"Yes. There is."
"Put a reasonable amount of that into the curry too."
Medieval jerky could not honestly be praised for either taste or smell, but shove it into a hell of spices that permitted no gaminess and it became nothing more than fragrant protein. They were out there suffering through a fight. They deserved meat, not just starch.
With the curry set, I used the remaining time to bake every piece of flatbread meant to go alongside it.
"You—do you think spirit arts are a joke?!"
"The fire spirit says it likes this too~"
"That may be, but...!"
For the record, Iseria took the hard part of baking the flatbread. The oven the mess kitchen used had a fire that couldn't make up its mind, and dealing with the fat was a hassle, so we'd borrowed a spirit's power. She thrashed as if using a spirit for something like cooking felt deeply wrong, but when she saw how much the fire spirit was actually enjoying itself, she couldn't quite bring herself to complain.
Beyond the northern wall, the roar of battle kept rolling in. But the sun was already sinking low, and the people who had been fighting until a moment ago were rotating off and trickling back. Feeling the encampment grow a little noisier, I spoke.
"All right. Let's start serving dinner."
"Yes, sir!"
The eternal staple of the mess hall—curry's official debut in another world!