Chapter 87
Chapter 87. A Full Spread of Chicken
He had returned late the night before, but Jurgen was back in the kitchen early the next morning.
It was to continue the research he had barely managed to do the previous day, having spent most of it on a pleasant culinary talk with Brigitte.
Just because Brigitte was a formidable opponent didn't mean he could give up without doing anything, did it?
On top of that, he had come to feel it keenly after their conversation yesterday.
Brigitte was an artist who pursued her own path.
If she were to get her hands on the Royal Warrant —
No matter how sound the advice Jurgen offered, she would leave to forge her own way.
In other words, they first needed to secure the Royal Warrant before there was even the possibility of recruiting Brigitte or not.
Clunk!
Just then, Penelope lurched and made a loud noise.
Penelope, who had been nodding off, had startled herself awake and was now blinking her reddened eyes open.
"Are you very tired?"
"No, not at all."
"Your eyes look like a rabbit's……"
"Never mind that. It's nothing. I must have slept fitfully because the bed felt unfamiliar. Aaaahhh…"
Saying that, Penelope covered her mouth elegantly and yawned so deeply her eyes watered.
"If you're really that tired……"
"I'm staying here. You need me to taste things anyway, don't you?"
"That's true enough."
"See, I thought so."
Before the words were even fully out, Penelope's expression turned serious and she tied her apron firmly, as if to show her resolve.
It seemed she was determined to claim this Royal Warrant one way or another.
"So what's this secret weapon that's supposed to beat Brigitte?"
The enthusiasm, well.
Too much of it never hurt, but there was a fact he needed to share with her first.
"Hmm……. This may sound discouraging, but as things stand, I think our chances are slim."
If Brigitte's Aglio e Olio had been a shock, then Brigitte's signature Duck Confit was pure terror.
A flawlessly well-rounded foundation that was hard to believe had come out of Britannia.
Add to that an elegant technique carrying a philosophy all her own.
The moment he tasted the Duck Confit, Jurgen cleanly acknowledged defeat.
When it came to taste alone, beating Brigitte was impossible.
"Hmm, is that so? Is this Duck Confit really that extraordinary?"
Unexpectedly, Penelope seemed to accept this with a refreshing lack of resistance.
She didn't even look particularly disappointed.
"Can't be helped. You're not invincible either. Who could have predicted a monster like that would just pop up out of nowhere? What a shame, what a shame."
"……?"
Perhaps it was just his imagination, but……
If anything, the weariness seemed to lift from her face, replaced by a kind of energy.
"……However, that's just to say there's no answer with a direct approach. It doesn't mean there's no answer at all."
"Do you have something in mind?"
"I intend to show you right now."
Jurgen placed a strainer into the container of oil left over from yesterday's frying.
A few passes of the strainer through it and he was able to scoop up the brown fried bits that had settled at the bottom.
He tipped them into the wok without hesitation, and Penelope — who had looked half-asleep — jolted in alarm.
"What is that? Don't tell me you're actually cooking with those scraps?"
"They're not just any scraps. They're fragments that have concentrated the flavor of the chicken. I'm going to use them now to make a Gravy Sauce."
"Gravy Sauce……"
Penelope's brow furrowed visibly.
That made sense — in Britannia, Gravy Sauce was the very byword for unpretentious food.
Not merely the level of 'Chicken is street food and it tastes bad!'
Gravy Sauce — wasn't it the sort of thing servants scraped together from the leftover drippings after roasting meat?
In reality, it wasn't far off.
Gravy Sauce itself was a sauce built on the remnants of cooking, the fond that had stuck and caramelized at the bottom of the pan.
And there was no sauce quite as flavorless as a carelessly made Gravy Sauce.
"As always…… the important thing is the details."
"Is there anything I can do to help?"
"Ah, would you boil some potatoes for me?"
"Sure. I just drop them in boiling water, right?"
"A pinch of salt."
Jurgen and Penelope's hands began to move busily.
Flour was scattered like snowflakes over the pan where the chicken oil was sizzling.
Soon the raw, grassy smell of uncooked flour faded and a nutty fragrance began to spread through the kitchen.
This was the process of making the Roux that would serve as the base for the Gravy Sauce.
"That should do it."
Swish…
Into that he slowly poured a measured blend of the chicken stock he had prepared the day before and milk.
The chicken stock had been brewed by simmering chicken cooked just before burning along with various spices — he had left it to steep leisurely while chatting with Brigitte yesterday and had let it cool through to this morning.
Swish…
The key was not to pour it all in at once but to add it in small amounts, managing the volume while reducing it.
What mattered was drawing the concentrated flavor of the chicken up to its peak.
It would take some time.
"Anything more I can help with?"
Just then Penelope poked her head forward.
"Are you done boiling the potatoes?"
"I put them on the heat so that's done."
"Your hands have gotten incredibly quick."
"That much is easy. We've been working together for a while now. That's why we named the trading company Y&P in the first place, isn't it?"
"That's true."
"Here, let me. I just add it slowly and reduce it, right?"
Penelope wedged herself in front of Jurgen and picked up the pot.
"In my opinion, adding some butter would make it even better."
"The chicken oil should stand in for the butter."
"Really? But butter has its own distinct flavor, doesn't it."
"Penelope, you're particularly full of enthusiasm today."
"What are you talking about, I'm always full of enthusiasm? So how long do I keep going?"
"Just keep adding water little by little and stirring until it reaches a good thick consistency."
Penelope nodded and began stirring the pot steadily with the ladle.
Having picked up a few recipes along the way, she seemed to have taken a genuine liking to cooking — and that gave him a quiet sense of satisfaction.
In any case……
Jurgen straightened up and glanced around.
"Miss Brigitte isn't coming."
Thump
Penelope's movement stopped abruptly.
"……She must be busy with her own recipe research."
Then she began stirring the ladle around and around with rough, sweeping motions.
The ladle clattered against the edge of the pot, making an unpleasant sound.
"Penelope, if you stir that roughly won't it splash out?"
"I'm managing it so it won't splash. And I said it before, didn't I? I'm not 'Miss' Penelope — I'm just Penelope. Penelope."
"S-, sorry about that."
"Repeat after me. Penelope."
"Penelope."
"Again — Penelope."
"Penelope."
Jurgen had been scolded for no good reason.
.
.
.
A short while later.
Under a perfect division of labor, the food was complete.
Half Seasoned Chicken and half Fried Chicken, both well-seasoned.
A Gravy Sauce rich with the deep fragrance of black pepper.
And a smooth Mashed Potato made with butter and heavy cream.
Penelope had been thoroughly disgruntled in every possible way, but perhaps because she had been expending energy since morning — she seemed hungry.
From within the composed figure sitting properly upright, her stomach let out a succession of rumbling growls.
"So this is the finishing move……"
"It'll go up at this competition too, and I plan to sell it as an official side at CCC. Give it a try."
"How do I eat it?"
"Just watch."
Jurgen demonstrated by hand.
He picked up a freshly fried, crispy Fried Chicken drumstick and——
Schlup!
Dunked it ruthlessly deep into the container of Gravy Sauce.
"Now you eat it."
There had been one thing that nagged at him a little this time around.
No matter how much CCC pushed the Seasoned Chicken as its main, the Fried Chicken felt a touch lacking.
As they say, the pinnacle of modification is stock, and the pinnacle of Chicken is Fried — and yet there it was.
But now he could rest easy.
The Gravy Sauce would be the spotlight that brought Fried Chicken to center stage.
"……!"
Penelope, carefully biting into the drumstick so the sauce wouldn't drip, made that face.
Her normally sharp eyes went round as she pressed her lips tightly together.
It was the face she made when eating something utterly delicious.
Penelope swallowed the chicken and spoke.
"This is so different from any Gravy Sauce I know?"
Ordinarily, Gravy Sauce was a matter of taste.
Bland and greasy, with an unsatisfying quality like a meat broth that never quite finished brewing —
Yet once you were accustomed to that distinctive meaty aroma and its subtle flavor, it became a sauce you couldn't easily escape — the Naengmyeon of the sauce world, you might say.
"Yours is…… incredibly rich and addictive!"
But the sauce Jurgen had reworked was different.
To make it cling to the chicken's flavor, he had made the Roux from the outset using the oil the chicken had been fried in and the fried crumbs.
On top of that, he had reduced the deeply savory chicken stock to a near-glaze and heaped on a generous amount of black pepper.
It served to compensate for the dry quality of the Fried Chicken, while simultaneously delivering a 'kick' to a flavor that might otherwise tend toward the monotonous.
Truly a sauce made for the sole purpose of dipping Fried Chicken.
"Now try the side as well."
Next came the side, not the sauce.
Mashed Potato — the potatoes mashed and strained twice through a sieve, then finished by using the heat of the fluffy potato itself to melt in butter and heavy cream.
Like pouring caramel syrup over a pudding.
Drench it generously with the rich Gravy Sauce and——
"Wow……!"
Penelope was moved.
A chicken that the word 'divine' seemed to suit of its own accord.
Yet the slight two-percent gap that the chicken alone had left unfilled was at last complete.
"If I were to give it a name, I'd call it something like Chicken Full Spread."
Carbohydrates, protein, fat.
Before the Chicken Full Spread — the so-called holy trinity of carbs, protein, and fat — Penelope could not hold back her admiration.
Had it been before she ate Brigitte's Aglio e Olio, she would have predicted an easy victory without question.
But a thought also occurred to her, somewhere inside.
Would 'that' Brigitte's cooking, made with her whole heart, really fall short of this Chicken Full Spread?
She hadn't personally tasted anything called Duck Confit, but……
She had a feeling it probably wouldn't.
Still, maybe that was alright.
If Brigitte won, she didn't need to join Y&P Trading Company.
The carefully designed Royal Warrant plan would fall through the water, and Brigitte would be lost too, but.
She wouldn't have to agonize any longer over the matter of Brigitte and Jurgen.
"……"
Even so.
Penelope suppressed the conflict within and offered her honest opinion.
"……Will this be enough?"
Because Y&P Trading Company was Jurgen and Penelope's trading company.
Even if there was no longer a place for Penelope to stand — she wanted Jurgen to achieve his Culinary Revolution.
After much deliberation, Jurgen answered her doubt.
"To be frank, beating Miss Brigitte's Duck Confit on pure taste alone is impossible."
"……And?"
"If you and I were the judges, that would be that. But where are we right now?"
Britannia.
The judges?
Two Britannia nobles and Fifth Princess Luiza.
"Miss Brigitte's final round dish will be Duck Confit. It's an outstanding dish and intuitively delicious, but our food is far more intuitive than that."
Gastronomy is instinct.
Even a Britannian would marvel at something truly delicious.
However, their level of 'palate' was clearly not great.
The judges' level was no different from elementary school students — and one of them was, in fact, a noble elementary school student.
Place before that elementary school student a clean-tasting, rich Fried Chicken, a Gravy Sauce of insane depth and savoriness, a sweet-sour-spicy Seasoned Chicken, and a smooth Mashed Potato to fill up that empty, aching stomach —
"What do you think? Isn't it worth a fight?"
"Ah."
Penelope understood.
There was still room left to fight.
***
Kaylun and Ellara, the escort knights of Fifth Princess Luiza.
Of the two, Ellara found herself feeling rather bewildered looking back on this Royal Culinary Competition.
"The Princess returned safely……. And the competition was held, so there shouldn't be any repercussions."
For Ellara, who had walked an elite path her whole life, it had been the most frightening incident imaginable.
So much so that she could hardly believe it had been resolved this cleanly.
Kaylun and Ellara had done nothing more than submit a single report, yet the situation had flowed exactly as Y&P Trading Company had intended, as if by some uncanny design.
With this, the unprecedented and dreadful scandal of 'two Royal Guards losing track of the Princess in the North!' was neatly sealed away.
"We were lucky. Don't you think?"
But Kaylun maintained a silence with an uncomfortable expression.
"Is there something bothering you?"
"A little."
"What part? The competition was held in the end, wasn't it. It's debatable whether Y&P Trading Company will receive the Royal Warrant, but…… even if they don't, we have their pledge of silence."
"Ah, it's not that side of things I'm concerned about."
What Kaylun was concerned about was the man he had met in the reception room that day — Jurgen, who had introduced himself as the co-representative of Y&P Trading Company.
Since that day, the image of that man had been circling in his mind nonstop.
"Hmm…… Could that be love? Quite a lot of time has passed since then."
"Silence yourself. Sir Ellara."
'Kaylun Hawthorne' was a Royal Guard and a senior knight.
He possessed both the force and the rank that would make an ordinary person feel overwhelmed simply by being in his presence.
And yet.
'How coercive of you. And to my knowledge, Royal Guards do not have the authority for summary execution.'
Even in the face of Kaylun's threat, deployed to smooth over the situation, Jurgen had been relaxed and composed.
It was no ordinary bravado.
It was the gaze of someone who had finished calculating in an instant and was certain that Kaylun could not lay a hand on him.
If that were all there was to it, it would have been enough to think quite the bold one, and leave it at that, but……
The manner in which he had sealed the deal was remarkably refined.
Let us go back to that standoff of a few days prior.
If Kaylun had simply issued his threat and withdrawn, he would have been left feeling unsettled afterward.
But by Jurgen accepting the deal, a safeguard had been established.
If Y&P were to pocket only the favor and then whisper from behind 'did you hear? The Royal Guards lost the Princess in the North!', then —
'Those insolent wretches of Y&P colluded with some commoner businessman and tried to leverage the safety of a lost Princess to secure themselves a Royal Warrant!' — that was now a thing that could be said.
He had pressed the mutually assured destruction button into their hands, and in doing so had naturally aligned their interests.
All of this had flowed so naturally in the moment that it wasn't even possible to notice.
And that wasn't all —
'Please record in the report that Princess Luiza was very fond of the Seasoned Chicken' — with a request so simple it was almost incomprehensible, he had constructed the exact board Y&P Trading Company wanted.
A grand design that could only be grasped after several days had passed and it had been turned over in the mind multiple times.
A meticulous move of the kind only the most seasoned political nobles of the court would have deployed.
It was certain he was no ordinary figure.
"I'll need to look into his background a little."
"Oh my."
"Good grief, I told you to be quiet."
There was a need to learn more about Jurgen.