As a race that lived in harmony with the forest, elves didn’t use fire for much of anything. Starting a fire in a forest always came with the risk of sparking a disaster. Of course, there were some situations in which fire was absolutely necessary for survival, and so for those cases, it was permitted within a highly restricted area.
After living in the elven village in Ha Forest for a few months, there was no doubt that I used that area more than anyone else. In fact, I was probably using it more than every other elf in the settlement combined. If I had been an ordinary elf, I would have faced no small amount of scolding for it, but my status as a high elf spared me from that fate.
For the record, I limited myself to using fire only once every two days at most...but I couldn’t bear anything more than that. I just really wanted to eat cooked food.
Even for something as simple as an apple, the difference between eating it raw or cooked was huge. It wasn’t that one was better than the other, but it would get tiring to only ever eat them the same way. On top of that, some foods like mushrooms and potatoes absolutely needed to be cooked.
The children in the village—and Shiez in particular—seemed quite interested in what I was doing, but if they copied me they’d get an angry earful from the adults. All of this resulted from my own selfishness, so I did feel bad about it. However, faced with the restraint they showed in not chastising me for my behavior, I was reminded of my first meeting with Airena, and how strange she had been for not showing anything similar. That weirdness of hers was something I had come to rely on, and quite liked about her.
But anyway.
“Lord Acer, what are you doing today?” Shiez asked, peering curiously at my hands. However, I answered only with a smile and continued my work.
I was doing something rather special for a forest settlement.
A little while ago, I had been out near a human city, using the wind spirits to listen in on the local rumors. On my way back, I found a carriage being attacked by monsters. As a carriage carrying food into the city from local villages, it didn’t have anything like an escort, leaving the drivers to fend for themselves using long wooden poles in place of spears.
The monsters harassing them were fairly weak—a kind of hyena not much stronger than any wild dog or wolf—so it was quite possible the villagers accompanying the carriage would have been able to drive them off. But there was always the possibility one of them would get killed, or one of the horses would get injured and so trap them here.
My intentions in Zieden were to avoid human settlements as much as possible, and thus avoid human contact, but I wasn’t about to let someone die right in front of me. I immediately drew my sword and dived into battle, slaying the monsters and quickly turning to first aid for those who were injured. They had been incredibly grateful for my help, and were quite apologetic that they didn’t really have anything to reward me with as thanks, only able to share with me a little of the wheat they were carrying.
The wheat had already been finely ground, and was ready for sale in town. Of course, I hadn’t really needed anything from them as thanks, and didn’t expect them to have the surplus to spare. If they had, they would have hired an escort. So if they had offered me any amount of money, no matter how small, I would have refused it. I wasn’t an adventurer. I didn’t kill monsters for the pay.
But they had decided to reward me with some of the goods they were carrying. I was still hesitant to accept such a gift, but in the end, it would make both of us feel better. After requesting that they tell no one of our meeting, I returned to Ha Forest, thinking all the while how I was going to use this rare gift of flour.
I guess bread made the most sense. With my poor culinary skills, there wasn’t much else I could do with the stuff. Either way, I hadn’t had bread for a while either, so I set about gathering some ingredients around the forest. And that brings me to today. Yes, the special task before me today was making bread.
That said, with no yeast available to me here in the forest, my only option was to make unleavened bread. Besides that, I also only had pans to work with, so I decided to make something like roti or chapati. I imagined something like that would still be plenty novel for the elves.
The flour I had been given was dark in color, indicating it had been ground with the shells and buds included. Calling it “whole wheat” made it sound nice, but realistically it just meant the village didn’t have the technology or equipment to produce white flour. Even so, a culture capable of grinding down grains to make them easier to eat was still plenty advanced in my eyes. I couldn’t say who had first come up with the idea, but it definitely wouldn’t have come from someone who was happy to live off the bounty of the forest.
Mixing ground wheat together with salt and a little warm water, and then kneading it, transformed it into dough. The oils in the wheat buds made it somewhat difficult to bring the mixture all together, but a bit of patience and persistence got the job done.
In the end, I was more of a consumer than a cook. My goal wasn’t perfection, but to enjoy the process and hopefully produce something reasonably edible.
After kneading the dough, I added some oil from the fruits found in the forest and let it sit for about an hour. While I waited, I started mixing some honey with milk...oh, by the way, it wasn’t like cow’s milk or goat’s milk. Elves didn’t keep livestock, so there were no sheep, goats, or cows around to obtain milk from. Instead, it was drawn from pressing the branches of a certain tree the elves called a “milk tree.”
Compared to humans, elves grew very slowly, so the amount of time when they needed to consume milk was much longer. But the amount of time an elven mother could produce her own milk varied widely, and in many cases, her body would stop producing it before the baby was weaned. That was the case for humans as well, of course, but the time frame was much longer for elves, and the chances of there being no other mothers who could produce milk in their stead was much higher. In such cases, the milk tree became necessary.
Though it was a tree, its branches were more like an ivy, being soft and pliable and hanging quite low. If you put a branch in your mouth and sucked on it, you’d get a fluid much like milk out of it. It wasn’t a Spirit Tree, but it still had rare and mysterious properties. Humans referred to them as Mother Trees, considering them a blessing from the harvest god.
Of course, the milk tree didn’t provide milk out of the kindness of its heart. The beasts of the forest were equally attracted by the tree’s bounty and would gather, fight, and kill each other over it. The blood shed and broken bodies fallen around the trees would then provide sustenance for them, allowing them to produce more milk.
So when elves hunted monsters in the forest, they would bury their remains around milk trees so that they could obtain milk from them if needed for their children. Or if they just wanted some for themselves, of course.
Mixing that milk with some honey created a softly sweet mixture, which I thought would be the perfect match for the bread I was making. After the dough had finished setting, I cut it into appropriate-sized pieces and added some powdered flour to it as I stretched it out. All that was left was to fry it up, and the bread would be done.
The whole process made me realize, though, that I was much happier to eat food made for me by someone else than to make it myself. I didn’t mind doing it myself from time to time, but it wasn’t something I’d like to do again the next day. I would probably be content with eating fruit like normal, or maybe I’d look for some meat.
The smell of cooking bread brought a number of curious elves around to look, both children and adults alike. Quite a few more than I had expected, actually. I had expected the children to come, so I had made quite a bit of dough, but maybe it still hadn’t been enough.
Above all, I’d make sure Shiez got some, since he had been watching me from start to finish. And of course I’d take some for myself next. I had made it because I wanted to eat it, after all. If I didn’t end up getting any, it would have all been pointless.
At any rate, I was curious how the elves living here would take to the taste of bread.