Three weeks have passed.
Recently, I've been eating with the servants. After all, my stepmother ordered me to. It seemed she wanted to treat me as one of them by surrounding my meals with servants. Naturally, it came as a blessing to me, and I had been giving ingredients to Dom to cook for all of us to eat together.
According to Giresse, these ingredients were considerably high quality, and I've been lavishly using salt and pepper. Honestly, it's the first time since I reincarnated that I enjoyed the food.
"Grey-sama, it's delicious," Satella said as she happily bit into the meat. The other servants nodded vigorously.
"Yeah, if the meat is high-quality, just sprinkling salt and pepper on top makes it delectable." I replied.
"Young master, the amount and quality of this meat is already on the level that a hunter would get. No, it's even better!" Dom said as he drank the soup, unusually excited.
Recently, when Dom and I are free, we've been testing out various recipes.
"Well, my bow skills have gotten better." I said.
"I wish I could let my parents eat this kind of food!" a servant said.
At his words, a shadow fell over everyone's faces.
The Millard territory was poor. Reason being they didn't practice animal husbandry and the produce they got was limited. Rye was their staple ingredient, and they made meals by adding wild plants and any meat they could find on the mountains.
Simply put, they were living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
"If you don't have any agricultural systems set in place, your lifestyles probably won't improve," I said.
That might have been a bit too difficult to understand. Originally, this knowledge came about after millions starved to death. There's no way they could understand this. I should change topics.
"Grey-sama, please continue," Sebastian said.
"Uh, sure."
I nodded at Sebastian's words which ignored what I had just thought, and I continued.
"The livestock's excrement can be directly used as fertilizer. It would increase the yield, ripen the clovers, and the amount of livestock would increase.
Once one would have achieved all that, the rest is easy. You can cultivate rice, wheat, and other crops. Then, you prepare for winter by stocking up. Potatoes are optimal for this because they store for a long time and have a high yield in proportion to how much land is used."
"Where did you learn this, Grey-sama?" Sebastian asked, his mouth agape.
"Uh, I just read a book I bought off of that merchant who rarely comes. I mean, I've been earning money off of my hunting you know."
I merely came to recognize the usefulness of legumes. Unless you were some weirdo who loved destruction, anyone who knew this would try to implement it. Basically, the Norfolk method hasn't been invented yet in this world. I think I spoke too much.
"I see..." Sebastian said, closing his mouth in deep thought.
I then changed the topic to food and said, "Let's eat."
[1] The author did a really bad job of explaining the Norfolk and Three-field method. My "translation" is more of me writing down what the methods actually are, instead of translating the author's attempt. For more info, check out the following two pages (they're short).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-field_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norfolk_four-course_system