After finishing the cooking, Kurt brought over a plate stacked with pancakes, as if building a tower.
It was a scene as familiar as everyday life to Kurt’s party.
However, there was one person who couldn’t understand Kurt’s actions.
“Pa… pancakes? Why pancakes?!”
It was understandable to prepare dinner in the middle of the forest.
Hans was just surprised because the dinner preparation happened suddenly without any warning, but he too would find a suitable stump to have lunch when he got hungry while chopping wood.
However, the food he usually ate during those times was either the hard rye bread or steamed potatoes lovingly packed by his wife, Luri.
Occasionally, during better times, there would be a less hard rye bread with some vegetables and pork in between.
This was partly due to Hans’s poor household situation, but also because it was difficult to prepare proper meals in the forest environment.
But suddenly, creating an open space in the middle of the forest, taking out a pot, and starting serious cooking?
“Fine, I can understand cooking. Anyone would want to eat more delicious food if they could. But why pancakes?!”
What was even more incomprehensible was why pancakes were being cooked in the forest where monsters roamed, even if it was due to the confidence of a strong adventurer.
Did he carry a pot, pan, flour, butter, eggs, etc., in his bag just to make pancakes?
“What’s this? Do adventurers usually eat like this? Are they so strong that they can take down monsters even if attacked?!”
While Hans, who didn’t know much about the life of adventurers, was confused looking at the pancakes Kurt brought, Kurt’s companions finished setting the table as if it were the most natural thing.
As soon as everything on the table was ready, Kurt’s party picked up their forks and knives without hesitation.
“Let’s eat!”
“Thank you for the meal, Mr. Kurt.”
“I’ll enjoy it today too!”
“Sure. Eat to your heart’s content. There’s still more batter left. Don’t hesitate, lumberjack.”
“Ah, ah. Yes……”
Hans, swept up in the atmosphere, also unknowingly accepted a plate of pancakes.
Although he took the plate in a daze, once he had it in his hands, he felt his hunger surge.
Thinking about it, he had gone deep into the forest to chop more wood than usual, worked late, and had been chased by a Trent, exhausting his stamina.
At that moment, the savory smell of butter and the freshly made, warm pancakes were irresistible.
Hans stared at the pancakes as if entranced.
Gulp.
“What a delicious aroma… Is this really a pancake?”
Pancakes were basically cheap food that commoners could easily access, not something the upper class enjoyed.
Hans too had made pancakes by thinning the batter to stretch the amount when there wasn’t enough grain to make bread at home.
Perhaps no one in this group was as familiar with pancakes as Hans.
But now, at this moment,
Hans couldn’t help but feel unfamiliar with the pancake before him.
He had guessed from the use of butter and eggs in the cooking process, but upon receiving the pancake, the aroma emanating from it was on a completely different level from the pancakes he had grown tired of eating.
Compared to this, the pancakes he had eaten before were more like pancakes mixed with endless grains.
Feeling his stomach churn, Hans felt the urge to grab a pancake and shove it into his mouth immediately.
Hesitating, Hans opened his mouth, which was watering in real-time.
“Um, is it really okay for me to eat this?”
But what came out of Hans’s mouth was a timid, uncertain voice.
Just from watching the cooking, the ingredients in the pancake included eggs and butter.
Eggs aside, butter was clearly an expensive ingredient, and even the grain used seemed to be high-quality wheat flour.
These were ingredients that Hans, with his poor household, couldn’t easily consume.
He had never thought he would feel this way about pancakes, but now that he was about to eat it, he wasn’t sure if he should.
“Don’t worry about it. Consider it a reward for the firewood. We saved time thanks to the good firewood.”
Kurt laughed at Hans’s cautious words and told him not to worry.
Hans still couldn’t feel at ease and hesitated to eat the pancake, but seeing this, Kurt’s companions joined in and urged him to eat.
“Well, then, it wouldn’t be polite to keep refusing…”
So Hans carefully cut a piece of the pancake as if handling a precious artifact.
Bringing it to his mouth, the subtle, savory aroma of the eggs and the rich, buttery scent became several times more vivid.
After savoring the aroma for a moment, Hans put the piece of pancake into his mouth.
Gulp.
Hap.
“Mmm…!”
And as he actually put the pancake in his mouth, he felt the stable balance created by the eggs and butter gently pressing his tongue, just as he had sensed with his nose.
It was a more delightful taste than any bread he had ever eaten.
Occasionally, on days worth celebrating, he would buy a bag of flour, make dough, and share white bread with his wife, Luri.
It wasn’t particularly dazzling, but it was a beautiful memory that remained in his heart.
Until now, the most delicious bread in his memory was the white bread he shared with Luri.
But now, at this moment, Hans felt that the white bread was bland and dry compared to the taste shock he was experiencing.
Even without a long fermentation time, the texture and structure of the pancake, made by mixing eggs into the batter, were several times softer than those made with just grains, and the interior of the bread was moist and rich with the flavor of butter.
‘I thought the grain flour in the pancake was unusually white, but who knew it was 100% pure wheat flour…!’
Wheat flour was a somewhat high-end ingredient not only for Hans, who was poor, but also for others.
No wonder people’s staple food was the dry and easily hardened rye bread or mixed grain bread.
But to think that such precious wheat flour was being used so lavishly in the forest, without proper cooking tools, just to make a meal.
If it were Hans before eating the pancake, he would have felt burdened by the idea of consuming such luxury ingredients for a single meal.
But now that he had taken a bite, stopping wasn’t an option for Hans.
So Hans forgot the burden of eating expensive food and focused on eating the pancake.
“Ohh… delicious! Delicious!”
“Good. I’m glad you’re enjoying it. But don’t you like sweet things? You’re not dipping the pancake in syrup.”
“Sweet… things?”
“Yeah. I’ve removed all the monster’s toxicity, so you can eat it safely.”
At those words, Hans stopped eating like a golem whose power had been cut off.
Soon, his gaze fell on the pancake Kurt pointed to, more precisely, the translucent yellow liquid sprinkled on it.
It was a natural syrup made by boiling down the sap of an Imitator Trent.
In fact, Hans had been deliberately avoiding the syrup while eating the pancake.
It was only natural.
Even if the syrup was made from the sap of a monster that had just tried to kill him, in his common sense, tree sap wasn’t something to eat.
Basically, sap was a bitter and unpleasant-tasting liquid that only insects without taste buds would consume.
‘This sap… is sweet?’
That’s ridiculous.
Even if the sap was boiled down to the consistency of honey, it couldn’t possibly taste as sweet as honey.
If sap really became sweet when boiled, people wouldn’t spend so much money trading sugar for sweetness.
Feeling the mismatch between his common sense and Kurt’s words, Hans was confused.
Then, a certain knowledge popped into Hans’s head.
‘Gasp…! Now that I think about it, I’ve heard about it. Lizardmen have almost no sense of taste, so they eat meat dripping with blood and grass straight from the ground without washing it…!’
Then everything makes sense.
Because their sense of taste is almost degenerated, they can’t distinguish between honey and sap, thinking that boiling it down would make it taste similar…
“Well, if you don’t like sweet things, you don’t have to eat it.”
“Ah, no. No! I’ll enjoy it!”
But even so, the other person was his life’s savior.
It’s not like he could refuse the kindness shown by his life’s savior just because he didn’t want to eat some disgusting sap.
No, considering the delicious pancake he had just eaten, drinking a cup or two of sap was actually a good deal.
Thinking so, Hans quickly scooped a large spoonful of the pancake’s syrup and brought it to his mouth before Kurt could look disappointed.
And then,
Hans felt a shock as if his mind went blank for a moment.