“Right,” she said to herself, trying to project the confidence of someone who hadn’t just realized she was about to attempt cooking with the medieval equivalent of sticks and stones. “This is fine. Cooking is just controlled chemistry, right? Fire plus ingredients equals food. Basic science that hasn’t changed since the dawn of time.”
The cook, a round woman named Marta who looked like she could bench press a cow and had probably done so on multiple occasions, watched her with the expression of someone observing a particularly entertaining form of insanity. “What would ye have me prepare, mistress?”
“Something simple to start. Just... what do you normally make for the noon meal?”
“Pottage, mostly. Some bread, if the grain holds. Ale.”
Rachel blinked, her brain trying to process what she’d just heard. “That’s it? No vegetables? No meat? No... flavor?”
Marta’s eyebrows climbed toward her hairline like they were trying to escape her face entirely. “Flavor?”
“You know, herbs, spices, things that make food taste like something other than sadness and medieval despair?”
The cook looked genuinely confused, as if Rachel had just asked her to explain quantum physics using only interpretive dance. “We have salt. And sometimes onions.”
Oh, sweet Taylor on a cracker. Rachel was dealing with medieval cuisine at its most basic level—which was to say, barely cuisine at all. It was like trying to run a five-star restaurant with only saltines and desperation. No wonder everyone looked half-starved and wholly miserable.
“Okay, new plan,” she said, tucking in her shirt with the determination of someone about to perform culinary surgery.
“Show me what you have to work with and please tell me it’s more inspiring than salt and the occasional onion.”
The tour of the larder was like opening a time capsule filled with disappointment. Dried beans that looked older than some of the castle’s stonework. Barley that might have been fresh sometime during the previous reign. Some questionable-looking grain that might have been wheat if you squinted and had very low standards. Salt pork that had seen better decades and was probably being held together by sheer willpower and possibly small amounts of prayer.
It was like being asked to create a gourmet meal using only the contents of a post-apocalyptic survival bunker.
But in the corner, tucked away like treasure, she found something that made her heart skip. A small collection of clay pots with tight-fitting lids.
“What’s in these?” She asked, lifting one carefully like she was handling the Holy Grail.
“The master’s spices,” Marta said, and her voice carried the kind of reverence usually reserved for religious relics or particularly good wine. “He brought them from his travels. We’re not to touch them.”
Rachel opened the first pot and nearly swooned like a Victorian lady confronted with an ankle. Cinnamon bark, real cinnamon, not the cassia they passed off as cinnamon in modern grocery stores. This was the good stuff, the kind that cost more per ounce than some people’s monthly salary. The second pot held what looked like whole peppercorns, black and fragrant, while the third contained something golden and aromatic that made her mouth water just from the scent.
“Okay,” she breathed, feeling like an archaeologist who’d just discovered the lost recipe for ambrosia. “Now we’re talking. Now we’re cooking with gas. Metaphorically speaking.”
She straightened her spine and got to work, trying to ignore the growing crowd of servants who’d gathered to watch the strange foreign woman attempt to work what they clearly considered dark magic. No pressure at all. Just casual witchcraft accusations hanging in the balance.
The first challenge was the fire, which turned out to be less like cooking and more like negotiating with a particularly temperamental dragon. Rachel was used to gas burners with precise temperature control, or at least electric ranges with numbered settings that didn’t require a degree in medieval engineering to operate. This was just... fire. Big, hot, unpredictable fire that seemed to have moods and opinions about what she was trying to accomplish, like a celebrity chef having a very public breakdown.
She started with the pottage because that seemed safest. Barley, water, salt. Basic. Simple. Foolproof.
Except the pot was enormous, easily big enough to feed twenty people, and she had no idea how much barley to use. A cup? A pound? What was a medieval serving size? In her world, she’d Google it or check a recipe app. Here, she was flying blind, like a food blogger trying to review a restaurant in complete darkness.
She eyeballed it, dumped in what looked like a reasonable amount, and added water, feeling like she was performing some sort of primitive ritual to the gods of carbohydrates.
Then came the moment of truth—hanging the pot over the fire.
“Sweet mother of—” The pot was heavier than it looked, and the chain system for adjusting height over the flames was like trying to operate some sort of medieval crane designed by someone who’d never heard of user-friendly design. She managed to get it positioned, more or less, sweat beading on her forehead from the heat of the flames.
“So far, so good,” she announced to her audience of fascinated servants with false confidence that would have made a politician proud.
The pottage began to bubble, filling the kitchen with the scent of cooking grain and wood smoke that was actually kind of pleasant, in a rustic, “Little House on the Prairie meets Game of Thrones” sort of way. Not terrible, actually. Kind of homey if you ignored the fact that it looked like wallpaper paste and had about as much flavor.
“Now for some real magic,” she muttered, reaching for the cinnamon with the reverence of someone handling the crown jewels.
“Mistress,” Marta said nervously, wringing her hands like she was watching someone juggle flaming torches near a powder keg. “Perhaps ye shouldn’t?—”
“Trust me,” Rachel said, sprinkling the precious spice into the pot like fairy dust. “I know what I’m doing. This is going to be like the difference between eating cardboard and actually tasting food that makes you remember why humans invented cooking in the first place.”
