Herald of Steel

Alexander’s plan for his food recipes was mostly as Lady Parthia suspected.

Money, land, and titles were all good… but for some, a cooking recipe was much more valuable.

It was also something more personal and less transactional, thus creating stronger bonds.

Alexander hence planned to give some of the easier and simpler ones as gifts to potential allies and as rewards for success and loyalty, while keeping a few more unique ones for yourself.

And when he was coming up with this plan, Alexander was glad that he was not short on recipes- although he had re-created a lot of dishes, there were also lots of them left in his hat.

In fact, he thought he might have had too many which ranged from simple ones like shawarmas, sandwiches, hamburgers, chicken fries, and even mayonnaise, to sweet and sugary unknowns like jams, candies, all types of simple cakes and pastries, and other desserts, to very sophisticated cuisines like beef wellingtons, consommes, ravioli, and various noodles and soups to name only a few.

And this was not even talking about dishes he could not make due to missing ingredients- such as tomatoes, for pizza as well as half of the Italian cuisine, potatoes for fries, chips, poutine, and delicious mashes, a large part of the Chinese and Indian cuisine which required rice as well as many other species like cumin, cardamon, turmeric, cloves and cinnamon to make things like biryanies, fried rice, and all their tens of different of variants, and chocolate, tea, coffee and vanilla beans for all those delicious desserts.

So when Alexander listed them like that, the number of recipes he still had as opposed to the ones he gave away for free appeared quite modest.

This even made Alexander wonder to itself,

’Hmmm, maybe I should also open up a few restaurants around the city offering some of them. Everyone drools over the food anyway… so why not make some money anyway? Many of the rich merchants and residing nobles will no doubt pay through the nose for it. It will also help Zanzan’s fame grow… make it a cultural hub.’

’It might even help make the more neutral nobles from across the land grow attached to the city and want to join me voluntarily.’

Such thoughts were naturally made with great optimism, but before Alexander could start to run away with it, soon, he had the breaks pressed on him,

’Hmmm, to start, the problem is finding qualified enough chefs to run these places. It took Mean’s kitchen years to learn the new recipes and even then… dishes like ravioli and noodles look too crude to me… like they were made by an amateur Hmmm… maybe I should start a chef school first?’

This idea however had the same problem- it was impossible to find proper instructors who could teach others how to make these dishes.

And the reason was pretty obvious when you thought about it- all of Alexander’s dishes were completely brand new to the Adhanians and held no culinary basis in their culture.

It was not at all how nature worked.

Normally, the way new dishes evolved was by incorporating new ingredients and techniques into already existing ones- thus adding more layers to them.

For example the Indian biryanis we all know and love is thought to have come from the Middle East, where they have a similar dish called ’kabsa’.

It is an item also made of rice and meat cooked together, but without the cream, yogurt, and other spices native to the Indian subcontinent like saffron and garam masala, thus giving it a more mellow, sweeter flavor.

Alexander had them both and personally, the biryani packed a lot more punch, full of all kinds of loud and bold flavors.

In addition to the introduction of new ingredients, another way new foods were invented was through changes in tastes and demands, with the best known example of this being perhaps the pizza.

It is common knowledge by now that this iconic dish came from the port city of Naples where dock workers and the working class wanted something quick and cheap before heading off to work in the morning.

So one day, instead of serving flat breads with cheese along with a side of a few slices of tomatoes and cucumbers, garlic, and olive oil, someone had the brilliant idea of just putting a bunch of them together and making it into a single dish.

Viola- that’s how you got pizza.

But with Alexander’s cuisines, multiple steps, if not even the entire floor were skipped.

None of the chefs in the land remotely knew how to make his dish because they did not even know what he was asking.

So without him personally showing them, it was hopeless for them to even try.

’Hmmmp. Maybe I should write a cookbook first then. Help a few cooks learn how to actually make these dishes.’ Hence Alexander logically thought.

But this idea too had its major stumbles.

Mainly that the idea of a formal recipe was quite alien to most chefs.

In fact, most recipes for dishes were never actually written down- the broadly basic part was relayed orally from master to apprentice and then the details were straightened out through practice.

This was the style of the time.

A few number of master cooks did write their recipes down but, it was only in the loosest of sense.

These were not really meant to be instructions on how to cook things but more so a general guide to the ingredients and their preparations, done as part of the master cook’s instruction to the stewards and clerks who were responsible for the estate’s food purchases and their preparation.

It was basically a grocery list.

Perhaps the level of obscurity in some of the books could be demonstrated by this example of a type of cheesecake written by an Adhanian Royal chef-

The short version of it went like this-

’Make a crust. ( So it does not say how to make it, how big it should be, or even what type of crust it was- hot water, tart, etc. Just ’make a crust’, thus assuming the chef leading this knows such a ’basic’ technique.)

Stairn cheese out of all the water, add eggs, honey, cream, and spices, and whip them all together until adequately fluffy to make the filling. (Once again only names of ingredients, very little about measurement or technique).

Fill the crust with filling, and bake until golden brown. (So no mention of temperature or time or even what type of dish to use).

And then it finished by saying- Serve hot or cold with cream on top drizzled with honey.’

As it can be seen it simply gave the basic guidelines with very wide room for interpretation. It was basically written with a similarly skilled chef in mind, one who could take one look and figure out the rest just from experience.

It would be also these exact kinds of recipes the lords would have as cookbooks, and the very same ones others went crazy over.

Alexander dreaded to be the cook who was handed such a cookbook that his master had just bought for tens of thousands of ropal and then asked to exactly recreat that dish.

There was little chance of it ever being anything like the original.

But this was also likely how most noble houses had at least one unique dish- it was just a slight variant of some local dish.

As for the nobles finding the new variant disagreeable, well, mostly they would not mind because this was what they had come to expect from birth.

And given that not even the most passionate of them had ever stepped inside a kitchen and seen how the food was actually made, the thought of asking the chef to make the text more eligible probably never even occurred to them.

As far as they were concerned, this was the way things always happened.

This ignorance was then taken advantage of through a certain degree of deliberate obfuscation by the guilds and the chefs regarding the way professional cookery was taught.

Like all skilled artisans, cooks and their guilds also zealously guarded the secrets of their trade, keeping out outsiders and only training trusted apprentices.

This was their way of controlling prices and maintaining power.

Although thankfully, this sounded more powerful on paper than in real life.

For example in Adhania, most cooking guilds and other trained master cooks were considered to be socially quite low, certainly much lower compared to a blacksmith or even a potter, and thus mostly relegated to running modest stalls and small inns like the ones Alexander saw by the roadside.

They were far, far, far away from being anything like their fellows in noble kitchens, who were most of the time generational servants- with fathers passing the torch to their sons.

In fact, outside that very small and very privileged bubble, the quality of cooks differed greatly with most cooks actually being quite terrible!

This was because many of them were not cooks per se but simply someone who learned on the job.

Perhaps they had started as a slave or servant in the kitchen doing odd jobs and slowly picking up on the head chef’s technique through simple observation.

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