CH 15

With my father’s permission secured, I quickly search for Helmut. Helmut had just come out of my room with Isabella, so I brought them back inside.

“Helmut!” I cried. “I have a favor to ask. Is it possible for Katharina to live in our home for her treatment?”

“Miss Flora!?” Helmut yelled. “What in the hell are you doing?”

He was confused because he didn’t the meaning behind my words. These days, Helmut is often like this. He is always upset when it comes to his younger sister. At first, I thought he was cool and handsome, but I’ve come to realize that he’s a gentle older brother who cares about his little sister.

“I want to try the cure that I’ve come up with,” I said. “To do that, she has to live with us in this mansion. You must be wondering what a child like myself is saying. But, can you leave her care to me, even if it’s just for a little while?”

Ordinarily, one would think that an eight-year-old child wouldn’t say something so ridiculous. It’s normal to wonder what I could do to help a child I’ve only met once when doctors and healing wizards couldn’t help her. But here I have to persuade Helmut and welcome Katharina to my house.

If she has other illnesses, I might be able to give up, but if she’s just malnourished and frail, there’s a high chance that even I can cure her. And in order to cure malnutrition, I will have to improve her diet under my supervision.

“My sister’s illness is something that even doctors tending personally to her couldn’t cure…” Helmut said. “If I can rely on anything, I would. But why would you go to such lengths for Katharina, Miss Flora?”

Helmut’s question rings especially resonant. Why would I go so far with Katharina, whom I had just met for the first time last time? If he was an idiot who accepted that without question, I don’t want Helmut to serve me. But Helmut is being skeptical, so I still want to keep him on.

“I’ll be honest with you…” I said. “I’ve just met Katharina for the first time then, so I don’t have that much affection for her. My goal is you, Helmut! It’s you!”

“Hold up…” Isabella said hurriedly and with disgust. “Miss Flora… your wording is misleading…”

It shouldn’t be a misunderstanding or anything, but it’s probably not enough of an explanation for the time being, so let’s expound on it.

“I don’t know about the future yet, but there is a high possibility that I will be sent to a school in the royal capital when I turn 15,” I said. “At that time, I want you and Isabella to accompany me then. I don’t know why my older brother left you two. However, I will most certainly take you both with me. At that time, Katharina will be left behind and you, Helmut, will have to go to the royal capital. You won’t come with me if that’s the case, right? That’s why I want to heal Katharina, for my interests.”

“…………”

Helmut is silently staring at me. I stare back without looking away.

“And… Katharina is also a citizen of my fief,” I said. “It is the duty of the territory’s lord to take care of their people. In addition, if Katharina improves with my treatment, it will also help those who suffer from the same symptoms. It may be terrible to say, but it means that Katharina will support the clinical trial of my treatment.”

Helmut says nothing. He just stared straight at me. I wonder if it’s useless… I phrased it too poorly. It sounds like I’m asking him to let his little sister become my subject for human experimentation. And from the perspective of people in this world, my cure would be nothing but a human experiment.

“… I understand,” Helmut said. “Miss Flora… my younger sister… please take care of Katharina.”

Huh? Helmut bowed his head towards me even though I thought it would be impossible. After that, discussions progressed with a bang, Helmut persuaded Katharina and their parents, and soon she was ready to live in my home.

On the morning of Katharina’s arrival at Carruthers Manor, I was nervously waiting for her and her escort to come to our house.

“Miss Flora, don’t be so impatient, she’ll be here soon,” Isabella said.

She’s trying to calm me down but I’m too restless. I’m not too worried about what Helmut and Katharina are doing, I’m uneasy when I think about whether my treatment will actually work. I’d feel terrible if it didn’t work because it was so big and involved so many people. This has become a situation that must produce results at any cost.

“Thank you for waiting, Miss Flora,” Helmut said.

“Hello, Princess!” Katharina said.

Helmut and Katharina stepped down from their carriage and greeted me in turn. Helmut just went to pick up Katharina in our family’s carriage. Their parent’s house is right over there, so I’ve been waiting here since Helmut left, but it seems they’ve finally arrived.

“Good day to you, Katharina,” I said. “And who might this be?”

And besides the siblings, there was another attendant. She’s dressed as a maid, and she was there the last time I went to Helmut’s house, so I know that she’s Katharina’s maid. I had heard her family had brought in a maid specifically to care for Katharina. I don’t know her name simply because she never introduced herself.

“My name is Clara and I am working as Miss Katharina’s maid,” she says. “Lady Flora, please take good care of Miss Katharina for me.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Clara,” I said.

Damn it! Katharina already has a young maid! I’m jealous that I still don’t have a young maid!

Anyway, Katharina came to my house safely, so first, we let her go to her room. The room was already prepared, but since they were supposed to prepare their own clothes and so on, Helmut and Clara unloaded the luggage from the carriage and then carried them in. After they finished cleaning and sorting things out, we had tea in the living room for a while, and then my mother came and joined us.

Mother seems to have accepted Katharina as well, so she speaks with a loving smile. Apparently, she wanted more girls. Well, she’s still young, so she’ll probably be able to have children from now on, but if she seriously still wants a child, she might be approaching the age when she has to worry about conceiving and carrying to term.

I had already confirmed various things with Helmut beforehand, but I also confirmed with Clara about Katharina’s unbalanced diet. From what I’ve heard, it’s just her likes and dislikes, and I decided that it doesn’t seem to be an allergy, so I would be serving Katharina’s meals from today’s dinner.

For lunch, our family chef made the menu I asked Clara about, but I personally prepared Katharina’s dinner. The cooks didn’t look very happy about that, but I already got permission to enter the kitchen and cook, so there’s no problem. Well, even if they really don’t like it, there’s no way to refuse if my father, their employer, told them to let me.

That’s why I started cooking to fix Katharina’s unbalanced diet. I should mention that the names of the ingredients that appear after this are just the names of their closest earth equivalents, and they are not necessarily the same ingredients. I can’t say it’s beef-like or carrot-like, so I’m going to say beef and carrots, but they’re not what I say they are.

First of all, I take out a lot of vegetables. Chop the onions, carrots, and green peppers into small pieces until you can’t tell their original shape. Next, mix the minced beef and minced pork well. Into that minced meat mix, add the vegetables, eggs freshly harvested this morning, and bread crumbs. Then, cook it in a pan with oil and make a depression in the middle as it cooks. Yes, it’s a hamburger with plenty of vegetables.

When the hamburger steak is cooked, take it out and add the special ketchup and wine to the meat juice that came out as it cooked, stirring and simmering until it’s become a thick sauce.

Both the hamburger and ketchup have seasonings to adjust the taste, but there is almost no pepper, so it cannot be said that the taste is as strong as Japanese cuisine usually is.

There is often a scene in light novels where the main character is a master of Japanese cuisine, but that is nothing but opportunism written from a Japanese perspective without doing any homework. It’s common to see sugar as a luxury item, but it’s not just sugar, it’s also salt, cooking oil, pepper, spices, and everything else you’d flavor with would usually be scarce.

Since Japan is surrounded by the sea on all sides, salt production was prosperous. That’s why there are many dishes that use plenty of salt like the pickled plums and dried fish from long ago. However, even the sea salt that’s been commonplace in Japan since time immemorial is an extremely valuable commodity everywhere else in the globe. In Japan, it was natural to have plenty of pot-boiled and sun-dried salt, but in many other countries, there was only poor-quality rock salt.

In modern Japan, low-quality rock salt is sold at many times the price of sun-dried salt, but no matter where you look outside of Japan, rock salt is the worse product due to its many impurities and powerful taste. Conversely, outside Japan, sun-dried salt is considered a more luxurious and expensive product.

In Japan, rock salt is rarely used because sea salt is available to the point you never need to use a replacement, but in recent years, for some reason, it is treated like a luxury item and is only used as a luxury item. Rock salt may contain toxins such as other minerals, so it can be dangerous and should not be something so coveted.

And the same thing goes for oil. I often see the main characters frying croquettes, french fries, and potato chips with fried foods, but oil isn’t something you can acquire so easily that you can use a whole pot full of oil just to fry a little bit of food. Furthermore, frying oil on an outdoor bonfire does not produce enough heat. It’s a completely unrealistic depiction. 1

It’s hard to boil water in a bonfire where most of the heat escapes. And yet, how is it possible to heat the oil to a temperature that must be raised to 100-odd degrees, or even 200-odd degrees? 2 I wonder if the radiant heat would be more intense and the oil won’t rise to a deep frying temperature no matter how long you tried to heat it.

Also, pepper is used too much in the cuisine. I want to use plenty of spices if I have them. But I can’t do anything about it because I can’t get many of them. Even in Europe during the Age of Discovery, pepper was said to be worth its weight in gold. 3 Unless there is some special background, it’s strange that the hero of the adventuring business could use them so liberally for cooking.

Of course, there are no such seasonings or anything else like in this world. There isn’t even ketchup. That’s why I made it myself. That said, I’m not that good at cooking, so I can adjust to make something that tastes similar to ketchup by seasoning and simmering tomatoes, right? It was made with a sense that it was all so sloppy. It has a tasteless finish that can not be compared with Japanese ketchup.

But in this world where the cuisine is so poor, whether it’s the flawed ketchup I made or an imitation hamburger, it’s groundbreaking and has a sufficiently strong taste. I’m not sure if it’s acceptable, but as far as Helmut’s and Isabella’s trying it, it seemed okay.

I don’t have butter or cream, so I make milk stew with goat milk. The ingredients are potatoes, carrots, onions, and broccoli. Broccoli was rarely eaten in this world. Or should I say that it is not cultivated very actively because it seems that continuous crop failures will occur?

But it must have been rich in nutrients, so I thought it would be good for Katharina to eat, so I grabbed it. If you cut the ingredients too large, Katharina may not eat them, so keep everything small.

Our chefs and Clara are staring at my cooking. Even I haven’t eaten this kind of food since I came to this world. If it was my brother or my father, maybe the chef would have prepared elaborate dishes, but the dishes I eat are lightly salted vegetable soup, salted meat and fish, and so on.

“I think it looks very delicious, but…can Miss Katharina eat something that has so many of her dislikes…?” Clara asked.

Yes, it seems to be full of ingredients that Katharina doesn’t like. However, unlike vegetables that are usually just boiled with a salty taste, I wonder if they can be eaten with this much seasoning. I once saw a TV program that even Japanese children will eat hamburgers with finely chopped vegetables, not even noticing the latter ingredients. Whether it’s true or not will be known by observing Katharina from now on.

“Anyway, let’s go!” I aid.

Nothing will start if I let myself get scared. Freshly prepared food gets cold quickly. There are few places in this world or on earth where you can have a hot meal. In Japan, freshly cooked hot rice is taken for granted, but that’s a luxury in this world. Even in my high society, I don’t eat freshly cooked hot food, but it doesn’t taste good regardless. I quickly went to Katharina’s room and arranged the dishes.

“Come on, Katharina, let’s have dinner,” I said.

“Uu… okay…” Katharina said.

She couldn’t hide her flinching when she saw my cooking. Specifically, my milk stew contains lush green broccoli and bright orange carrots, so it looks like she can’t eat it. Right before me, she couldn’t go, “I won’t eat this kind of food!” because it was my parents’ house, I’m sure she would have screamed and cried and demanded I serve her usual menu otherwise.

“Lady Flora prepared all these for you, Miss Katharina,” Clara added.

“The Princess did…?” Katharina asked.

Normally, you wouldn’t think I made it myself. Not just because I’m the daughter of Margrave Carruthers, but normally it’s impossible for someone with such a vast gap in our social statuses like me and Katharina to serve home-cooked meals to each other.

“I don’t know if it tastes good, so let me taste it first!” I said.

And with that, I cut up the hamburger steak before her and put it into my mouth. There is a possibility that you don’t know how to eat it, so if you show a sample, it will be easier to eat. There is no need to worry about the order in which she eats these. Katharina and I are the only ones eating here, so first of all, I want her to eat hamburgers that are an easy pass even for picky kids.

“Ugh… well then… I’ll eat it…” Katharina muttered.

She can’t take the option of not eating the food I made even though I started eating it before her. Even Katharina, selfish and ignorant of the world, could understand that much. As if she was making her peace, she brought the hamburger cut into small pieces to her mouth. And then…….

“Delicious! What is this flavor?” Katharina said.

After one bite, the rest was easy. Katharina seems to have liked my cooking, she ate everything I served today, including drinking the milk for the stew. It seems that I was able to break through the first barrier to her eating my cooking.