Back-Alley Pub Consulting (2)
Beer had grown up alongside human civilization itself. That was hardly an exaggeration.
Breweries some thirteen thousand years old had been unearthed, and traces of beer turned up in Egyptian records from eight thousand years ago. There had been ages when it was treated as a noble's drink, but on modern Earth it had settled, in the end, as the commoner's.
Noble or commoner—what did it matter? So long as it tasted good, that was enough.
Yes. Taste. Taste was what mattered most, and the owner had already nailed that crucial part. Hit even an average mark with the bar snacks, and the place ought to do a roaring trade...
"Ugh, it got on me over here too..."
"S-sorry. How long has it been like this? I had no idea."
I'd been mid-thought when I wiped the nut-breath off my elbow. I'd cursed the moment it hit me, sure, but I'd more or less seen it coming. One mouthful of that flavorless junk and anyone would spray it on reflex.
I told the apologetic owner as much.
"It's fine. These things happen. More to the point, boss—you don't really like cooking, do you?"
"Huh? It's not that I dislike it... I just don't do it much. I don't hate it."
"Yeah? Then what do you usually eat?"
"Bread."
"And?"
"Beer."
Kang Jinwoo, roughly half a year into his otherworld tour of duty. Conversations like this were nothing new. Dig any further and I'd only get the same one-word answers on a loop. I could feel it—this talk was going nowhere.
I changed the question.
"Uh... is there anything you actually cook before you eat it?"
"I grill a sausage now and then... not much else."
"Whoever taught you, I don't know, but you ought to thank this beer recipe every single day."
"What? Why?"
"Because a man with zero intention of cooking can still run a shop and somehow not go under. If the booze had been bad on top of that, you'd have been finished."
"You little—! ...Hah. You're not wrong."
He flared for a second, then let it go without taking it any further.
Still, if he couldn't cook at all, that was a problem. The menu I could actually work with would shrink to almost nothing.
Chicken's obviously out. Stir-fries too.
What remained was truly simple grill work, a broth or two, and finger food—plus ready-to-eat things like fresh fruit and nuts. The latter didn't even need teaching. Buy whatever fruit and nuts were in season, then store them clean and tidy. That was the whole of it.
"If you're all right with it, want me to take a look and see whether the snack menu holds up?"
"I'd be grateful, but... are you sure you're okay doing that?"
"I'd lose more if you shut the place down and I couldn't drink this beer anymore."
"Brat. Saying it right to my face."
At the blunt praise, the owner whipped his head aside, embarrassed. A hulking, muscle-bound middle-aged man snapping his face away, beard swaying along with it... Not a sight I particularly wanted, but it was funny in its own way.
Consulting rights secured, it was time to look the place over properly. Interiors weren't my field, so I'd skip that. Kitchen hygiene and the menu would be enough.
"Boss, let's see the kitchen."
"I may not cook, but the kitchen's clean. Can't have filth getting into the beer."
"Fair enough. Oh—this really isn't bad."
Once I had permission to step inside, the kitchen proved cleaner than I'd expected. Did brewers just instinctively understand microorganisms? Eilenna was the same way, and so was this pub owner. A sense of hygiene you rarely saw in a medieval fantasy world.
Which made me want to needle him—someone this competent, and he'd still let the nuts go rancid—but he'd looked pretty glum earlier, clearly kicking himself, so I held my tongue.
And this wasn't an inn or a restaurant. It was a tavern, closer to a pub. No need for full meal menus, which meant the kitchen was extremely simple: two burners, and that was it. Seeing it only firmed up my thinking. Anything with a fussy process was out.
"Kitchen passes. So how many snack items you got, then?"
"Your way of talking went weird again."
"Ah, sorry. It's kind of settled into a habit."
"Hmph. Nuts, dried fruit, sausage, and salted ham. That's the whole menu."
"Well... textbook, I suppose."
Nuts and dried fruit were fine so long as they were looked after. Salted ham kept for ages, too; unless he stored it like a slob, it was all right. The problem was the sausage.
The other three were ready to eat as they were. Sausage was the only item that actually needed cooking. All you had to do was drop it in a pan and brown it—how big a problem could that be? Someone might ask.
To which I had a question of my own.
"Be honest. Does the sausage even taste good? You put it on because you figured you ought to have one, right?"
"Wh—how did you know? Hah. Guess rounding people up at the Academy wasn't just luck after all."
"Obviously. Who do you take me for?"
It wasn't a fact that required sharp insight. And for good reason...
This sausage tastes like actual death!
Medieval sausage wasn't even properly sanitary. You were grateful if it didn't have filth stuck to it—that was the standard for a preserved food. Sausage, at its root, was meat stuffing packed into an animal's intestine, then smoked or salted.
That's right. Intestine. The organ that soaks up nutrients from whatever you've eaten and digests the leftovers into, ultimately—[redacted]. Could medieval craftsmanship even clean a thing like that properly? Even in the modern world, sausage picked up a foul smell easily enough without commercial equipment. Magic or no magic, I could read the flavor without taking a bite. It would be god-awful.
But what if the Mana Market was in the picture—and so was I?
"Boss. I'll make you something. In return, could you do me one favor?"
"A favor? What kind?"
"If you like what I make, teach me the secret to this beer."
"What? You want me to tell you that?"
He couldn't answer right away. He just stared at me with a face that said, Do I kill this guy... or let him live? Medieval European monks would sooner have died than reveal their recipes for beer, wine, and liqueur. Measured against that, it was a pretty unreasonable ask.
Even so, the dish I was about to make would be worth it.
"Heh. Make it first, then we'll talk. If it's really good, I'll tell you. But if it falls even a little short, I can't. You understand?"
"Of course. That's plenty."
If what I was about to cook fell short of his standards, then nothing he ever ate with beer again would satisfy him. And for good reason. Germany, on Earth—one of the undisputed great powers of beer. In the land of beer and sausage, there was a dish they loved without reservation, favored at the level of a national bar snack, beloved enough that they'd built a museum for it.
I was about to serve him Curry Wurst.
I sent the owner—who resembled a dwarf to a suspicious degree—out of the kitchen. He understood the weight of a recipe himself, so he sat obediently at the bar and waited. Which meant I could use the Mana Market in peace.
From it I traded for World Tree sap, ketchup, curry powder, onion, and sugar. A single serving wouldn't burn much mana.
Today's dish: the heart of Curry Wurst was the sausage, first and last. The sauce only shone if the sausage was good. If the sausage was bad, nothing else mattered.
Sizzle—
I cut a piece of the shop's sausage and grilled it for a taste.
Hmm... even accounting for the smell, it's better than I expected. The spice blend is just right.
I'd been harsh about sausage hygiene, but shops that made it cleanly did make it cleanly. In that sense, this one wasn't bad at all. For a medieval sausage, not spitting it out mid-bite was already a pass. The essential spices—cumin, fennel, anise—were doing everything they could to beat down the pork's gaminess.
And despite their noble efforts, that pig funk kept rearing its head.
One shot of this and it's finished.
I spread World Tree sap evenly over the sausage. With every pass, I could feel the stench vanishing in real time. If the day ever came when I could trade for a World Tree seed, I'd plant it in a little pot and snip from it whenever I needed, the way you do with basil. Institute a one-household, one-World-Tree-pot policy, and this world's cooking could climb to a whole other level.
Which is never going to happen.
Of course it wasn't.
The sausage rested until the sap finished killing off the last of the pork funk. In the meantime I needed a sauce simple enough that even an owner who could barely grill a sausage could make it.
I oiled a pan over low heat and added finely chopped onion.
Hissss—
Hot oil met the onion's moisture and played out a little harmony of evaporation. I kept sautéing until that sound dropped in volume, or until the onion took on a brown cast. Finely chopped, the onion offered far more cut surface to the pan, and because the big pieces had been broken small, the moisture they held was split up as well. I could brown them faster than if I'd cut the onion into thick strips and caramelized it the usual way.
The onions took on color in no time. Over them I added ketchup, water, sugar, and vinegar at a ratio of three to two to one to one, then the long-awaited curry powder—a generous two spoonfuls.
Bubble, bubble—
Once everything was well mixed and hot enough to simmer, it was done. I set the finished Curry Wurst sauce aside and checked the sausage.
Hmm. Fragrant.
Take a medieval sausage seasoned with any balance at all, strip away the gaminess, and it was no different from a modern handmade one. It actually looked appetizing now. To grill it into an even better shape, I scored the casing with a few quick cuts of the knife and browned it in an oiled pan.
Sizzle—!
Ah. This was it. That particular ferocity in the smell of spice-loaded pork hitting the heat. There was no way sodium nitrite had gone into this sausage, and yet the aroma exploded, setting my mouth watering. And right beside it, as if that weren't enough, the Curry Wurst sauce announced itself—bright yellow, eyes snapping open.
Boss, I'll be taking that beer recipe. Much obliged.
If he ate this and still called it bad, I'd have to run to Ermia and beg her for a lie-detection spell. That was how sure I was of the flavor.
Golden-brown, beautifully grilled sausage, and bread I'd crisped up because it had been rolling around the kitchen. I finished by ladling the Curry Wurst sauce over the top in a pretty drizzle, then carried the plate out into the hall with a swagger—
"Hah... haaah. Would you smell that. Hey, owner! I told you to bring out whatever's making this smell!"
"I keep telling you! It's not on the menu—"
"Huh? Huh?! It's out!!"
Thump-thump-thump—!
What spread out in front of me was a shabby old pub that had been empty enough for dust to drift—now packed wall to wall with middle-aged men, every one of them boasting a magnificent beard and a set of muscles, sniffing so hard their mustaches fluttered.
"Hey!! Chef! Five servings of that!"
"Over here—this table wants three!"
"Shut up, all of you! I was here first!"
"H-hey. Black-hair! Do something about this!!"
"Ah, shit."
Curry Wurst, the finest beer snack there was, by anyone's reckoning. Its fierce, bewitching aroma had apparently called in every drunk in the neighborhood.