Englesia had a lot of good food to enjoy, but nothing I’d describe as Japanese. Guy Crimson had prepared a Western-style full-course meal for me, but I just didn’t see a lot of Asian influence in this world’s cuisine. One reason for that: Few of the Western Nations bordered an ocean, so seafood wasn’t in plentiful supply. Attempting to preserve the freshness of ingredients with magic, it was explained to me, took a massive investment that few were willing to make. Thus, even if you had otherworlders who ran kitchens back in Japan, they couldn’t do much without the right raw materials.
That made me recall the Japanese otherworlder, Yoshida, who ran that bakery and cake shop I liked in Englesia. He lamented how he used to enjoy making “drunken” cakes with gin, bourbon, and so on, but just couldn’t find anything like that in this world. I remember how excited he got after I told him I’d throw some his way.
Thinking about that made me realize just how blessed I was over here. Just because you have a recipe doesn’t mean you’ll pull it off flawlessly on the first try, after all. And with Japanese cuisine in particular, tracking down ingredients was a challenge. I’d do things like go to the sea and capture a bunch of different fish species to try to find an equivalent to make bonito flakes from. Having a skill like Spatial Motion made it possible to transport goods in as fresh a condition as possible, which greatly expanded what was available to us. (I wanted to build a transport network that wasn’t so dependent on magic skills, but that was a topic for the future.)
Cuisine, after all, is culture itself. If a nation doesn’t have a vibrant, expansive food culture, then if you ask me, what’s the point? Out of the three basic needs—food, clothing, and shelter—food was number one by far to me, although your mileage may vary.
This was why I was expending (some would say wasting) a lot of energy developing new dishes. Wheat-based grain was easier than I surmised at first. I saw loaves of white bread in the Englesian capital; if you were well-off enough to afford it, it seemed like a daily staple. Studying the production process for that got us bread in Tempest in relatively short order.
Right now, the main issue to tackle was white rice. We still hadn’t engineered something up to snuff taste-wise. Compared with what one saw in Japan, painstakingly curated and improved since ancient times, the quality just wasn’t there. That was expected; I wasn’t anticipating a sudden breakthrough for this one. Raising plants with magic, at least, sped up the harvests quite a bit, although research was still at a halt right now due to the winter season. For the moment, we just had a few experimental rice plants growing indoors, managed by researchers. Real results seemed like they’d be a while to come.
I actually did have a solution for this, though. When I asked Raphael about a potential answer, it gave it to me right off—basically, use Shion’s Master Chef skill to alter the resulting rice. Tinkering the final plant rather than the initial seeds, after all, made improving the quality quite a bit easier. But was that really the right thing to do? It wasn’t like anyone else could copy this method, and it seemed kind of ethically suspect to me…but given how much I relied on just that method to fine-tune our alcoholic drinks, I was in no position to moralize. Put my conscience and my appetite on the scales, and the latter’s gonna win every time.
Since we couldn’t ask Shion to alter every harvest for us, our research continued. But I did have her engineer a small supply of lovely white rice, though. Just a bit. Mainly for my personal consumption. Shion was more than glad to help, so I gave the bag to Shuna and had her steam it up for special occasions. Occasions like this one. I was entertaining a demon lord. Let’s live a little.
If I wanted to make our relationship a good one, I had to demonstrate how useful my nation could be. The carrot and the stick. When someone you don’t like treats you well for a change, your impression of them goes up much higher than it does with someone you’re already on good terms with. Imagine the ex–juvenile delinquent who volunteers to help out kids for charity—that kind of thing.
Maybe a little show like that could turn Luminus and crew to my side. I wasn’t sure the paladins would be that gullible, but appealing to people’s stomachs is a pretty classic—and effective—strategy to take. It was a tad underhanded, but it was also a great excuse to turn this evening’s feast into an extravaganza. And sure, the white rice might disagree with their palates—that particular element of our cuisine is more for me as a Japanese person—but I bet Hinata would appreciate it. It sure wowed me after going without it for a while.
Plus, who doesn’t like tempura? Nobody, that’s who. It was already a hit with the adventurers and merchants; Benimaru, in particular, was actually a huge fan. Clearly, there were no obstacles to its acceptance in this world.
As I reflected on this, the serving trays were all put in place. Now we just had to wait for the paladins to get out of the bath.
The place settings were lined up in the shape of the letter C, with three seats at the center—me in the middle, Veldora and Luminus on either side. It gave me a view of everyone at the banquet, with the
