Chapter 7

“Damn it! Every last one of them!”

Georges threw his chef’s hat aside and scratched frantically at his short, neatly trimmed auburn hair.

At the sound of his raspy Montaigne-style cursing, several chickens that had been pecking at feed flapped their wings and scurried away.

Unlike his homeland, the Luten Kingdom kept lunch simple.

Once the frantic breakfast service was over, even the head chef was allowed some leisure time before preparation for dinner began; this was why Georges was currently loafing around the chicken coop.

And why he had ended up eavesdropping on his subordinates talking behind his back.

“Who’s acting high and mighty? You lot just have a pathetic skill level! An old fossil? Don’t make me laugh—I’m in my forties, a man in his prime!”

He slammed his arm—toughened from shaking frying pans for over ten hours a day—against a wooden pillar.

His well-groomed beard and lean physique, staples of a Montaigne man, had helped him make a name for himself back in his home country. But in the somewhat clumsy Luten Kingdom, such things seemed meaningless.

Georges Ramadier.

The head chef personally scouted and invited from Montaigne—the land of love and gourmet—by the First Prince, Felix.

That was him.

However, in reality, everyone suspected that he had merely “fled to the provinces” after losing a power struggle in the kitchens of his homeland.

Otherwise, no matter how much of a leading power Luten was on the continent, a chef would never leave Montaigne, the capital of gastronomy, to go abroad.

Luten was a sturdy nation that excelled in martial arts.

In exchange, it was safe to say they were an underdeveloped nation when it came to culinary culture.

Even so, the only reason he had swallowed his bitterness and accepted the scout was to protect his pride and maintain the title of “Court Head Chef.”

He had also calculated that since the languages of the two countries only differed by the degree of a dialect, he could manage to communicate even if he only spoke Montaigne.

But since entering the royal castle last month, Georges’s pride and calculations had been torn to shreds multiple times.

First, the job description was far too different.

In his homeland, the role of Court Head Chef was to provide gourmet delicacies for the nobility.

But here, he was expected to oversee not just the royal meals, but even the preparation of the staff’s rations.

The facilities were inadequate.

The manpower was insufficient.

The freshness of the ingredients was decent, but in exchange, the cooking techniques seemed to have stopped in the Stone Age.

To Georges, people who calmly ate steamed potatoes with salt or overly salty sausages wedged between rock-hard bread and called it a “meal” were committing an act of reckless violence.

The tea culture was slightly better, likely because the side-consort had brought it over from Rutland.

To top it off, Prince Felix, the man who had scouted him, was known locally in Luten as the “Mediocre Prince.”

Because of this, no matter how much Georges scraped together his meager motivation to start a revolution in the kitchen, no one would follow him.

“They say the maid’s rations are better than my cooking…!?”

He was seething.

In principle, the status of a head chef was equal to that of a nobleman.

Setting aside that difference in social standing, he had gone out of his way to prepare delicious meals even for the lowliest laborers, intending to make them understand his greatness.

Georges, the head chef himself, had taken up the knife and prepared over three hundred portions, intending to educate them on the true meaning of food culture.

And yet, despite the delicate gourmet dishes he had poured his heart into, they had gulped them down without any particular sense of gratitude or emotion. Instead, they had begun to say things like, “Is this it?” or “If this is the case, the food the new maid made tastes better.”

It was a situation he utterly could not accept.

“A maid… the new maid… Elma, I believe her name was.”

Georges was aware that a dowdy Luten woman wearing thick glasses had been slipping in and out of the kitchen several times while he was away.

If this were his homeland, he would have thundered at her for the insolence of a woman setting foot in a kitchen.

A woman, considered “unclean” in such contexts, must not approach the hearth where the sacred fire is handled.

The culture of adoring women and the spirit of demeaning them existed within Georges without the slightest contradiction.

From what he had heard, this girl Elma was on good terms with the Head Maid—a Viscountess—and since that woman had served as the Second Prince’s wet nurse, Elma was apparently close with the Second Prince himself, a man famous for his good looks.

Supposedly, at the request of the Prince or his mother, the former Consort Juliana, she would occasionally serve light meals and sweets.

A vital role in filling the stomachs of the nobility. A sacred workplace.

And she was the brat who didn’t know her place, trampling all over it with muddy boots.

Georges had no intention of overlooking her just because she was a woman or a child.

Rather, precisely because she was an inferior being, he felt that he, as a grown man and head chef, had to properly instruct her and correct her errors.

“Time to put her in her place…”

Georges glared at a chicken that let out a mocking cluck and grabbed it roughly by the scruff of its neck, intending to turn it into stock for a soup.