Book 5: Volume 5 Chapter 4, Cooking Habits

Translator: Kazumi

Editor: Silavin

 

“Oh! Hamburgers today!”

 

Kousuke came to a stop in the doorway of the dining hall, looking at the table with an expression of undisguised pleasure.

 

“Hamburgers?” Floria repeated, tilting her head at him before following his gaze to the spread laid out across the table. Her expression said. ‘Yes.’

 

The management staff’s table was almost always full of variety. White rice held its place as the centerpiece.

 

Well, it was a quiet concession to Kousuke’s preferences. Still, Japanese food’s nature as something that paired easily with dishes from any tradition meant the surrounding dishes were constrained. In fact, the women’s tastes had slowly shaped the menu over time, a fact made more apparent by Mitsuki’s ongoing involvement in the cooking.

 

Floria looked genuinely pleased at the sight of the hamburgers, and Kousuke noticed.

 

“You always seem happy when we have these.”

 

“I love them.” She said.

 

She had eaten Japanese food far less often than the others, given how quickly she had taken on the role of Queen after joining the Management Team. Sylvia’s situation was similar on paper, but Sylvia had learned to cook from Mitsuki and had made certain dishes on her own.

 

Thus, to Floria, these were quite refreshing meals.

 

Which made Kousuke curious.

 

“Why do you like Japanese food so much, Floria? You grew up in Flores Kingdom. You’d have had access to cuisine that most people here have never tasted.”

 

Floria blinked at the question. She crossed her arms, tilted her head, and appeared to genuinely consider it for a moment before shaking her head.

 

“I’m not sure I can give you a satisfying answer. It just suits my taste. That’s all I can say.”

 

Kousuke turned it over in his mind. In his own experience, Japanese food had simply always felt right more so than any other cuisine. However, he recognized that he was probably not the most objective judge of the matter.

 

Japanese food itself was, in a sense, a long history of adaptation, of taking outside influences and reshaping them until they tasted of something like home.

 

“I guess,” he said aloud, “that’s true of most cuisines.”

 

Sylvia, arriving at the table with the last of the dishes, caught the tail end of the thought.

 

“For me, the more surprising thing is that familiar dishes exist here at all, and that they’re still being developed further.” She set down what she was carrying and settled into her seat. “The Central Continent is something of a meeting point for every culinary tradition. I thought I’d encountered most things. But the food here is unlike anything I’d had before.”

 

“I don’t really know how it all came about,” Kousuke admitted.

 

“Does it matter?” Floria replied, with the air of someone closing a discussion before it could fully open.

 

He thought about it for a moment. “No,” he conceded. “Probably not.”

 

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They sat down, and the conversation picked up again in the easy way meals normally invite.

 

“You’ve started worrying about strange things,” Schrein observed, not unkindly.

 

“I think it’s fine as long as it tastes good,” Peach offered.

 

“Food follows the climate and circumstances of the place it comes from,” Kousuke said, turning his cup in his hands. “I always thought that mattered.”

 

“It may,” Schrein replied, “but the food situation you’re imagining and the food situation in this world are probably quite different.”

 

Kousuke looked at her. “In what way?”

 

“There are monsters here.” She said it simply, as though it explained everything. “The culture of cooking began with the question of what to do with their meat. That’s the foundation everything else was built on.”

 

“That’s not so different from my world, though, is it? People hunted before they farmed. That’s where food culture starts.”

 

“In terms of hunting, perhaps. But hunting something dangerous enough to kill you changes what you develop around it.”

 

Kousuke considered that for a moment. “So the differences come down to seasonings and cooking methods, then?”

 

“Cooking methods are more or less the same,” Sylvia said. “The same technique can produce entirely different dishes depending on the ingredients and what you’re trying to do with them. But the seasonings—” She paused, recalling. “There are quite a few I’ve only recently encountered. Things I had no name for.”

 

“Also,” Mitsuki added, “fermentation and aging barely appear here. I’m still not sure whether that counts as a technique or a category of its own.”

 

“You mean things that require time to process?” Kousuke asked.

 

Peach tilted her head. “Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say they simply don’t exist?”

 

“How is that possible?” Kousuke glanced around the table. “We have alcohol, for one.”

 

“Peach’s point isn’t entirely wrong, though.” Floria’s voice was thoughtful. “Historically, recently, but in the past, entire towns could be destroyed without warning. Flooding, monster attacks. Anything that required years of careful storage never had the chance to develop properly. Even the idea of keeping food for multiple seasons only really became viable in the last few hundred years.”

 

“Closer to a hundred and fifty, I think,” Schrein said. “Maybe two hundred.”

 

“That long?”

 

“It depends on the region. But broadly, yes.”

 

Kousuke absorbed this quietly. He hadn’t thought about it before. But sitting with it now, it made a kind of sense he hadn’t anticipated, and he found himself wanting to follow the thread further.

 

“Excuse me.”

 

Kouhi’s voice was gentle, but it carried enough weight to bring the conversation to a natural pause.

 

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but if we keep going, the food will get cold.”

 

The table looked down. Several plates had barely been touched.

 

A general, slightly sheepish movement toward the meal followed, and the conversation settled into something lighter, carried along now by the sound of eating rather than questions that had no particular deadline.