A Nineteenth-Century Aristocrat's Kitchen (Gourmet)

[70% anti-theft. If you only want to read about the heroine working at the estate, you can start from Chapter 6 and skip the carnival arc.]

[This story has undergone major revisions. I take no responsibility for pirated versions of the plot.

What would it be like to wake up one morning and discover you had transmigrated to nineteenth-century England?

To make matters worse, the original Maddie's mother had just died of illness, and the family was drowning in debt.

Just when she had nowhere else to turn, news came from Berkshire that an earl's estate was hiring servants.

Determined not to depend on anyone for a roof over her head, Maddie tried everything she could and landed a job as a kitchen assistant at the earl's estate.

The estate kitchen was the busiest place Maddie had ever seen.

Every day, she was busy stirring rising dough, scraping hard cheese, and helping salt enough pork to last through the entire winter.

Every now and then, she caught sight of the lavish delicacies served to the aristocrats at the high table: stuffed goose liver pie, roasted veal kidneys in Burgundy sauce, and sweet wine pudding made with honey and fresh cream...

The work was hard, but with her modern cooking skills and knack for combining ingredients, Maddie's life was still quite satisfying.

She improved the bread recipe and experimented with soaking dried fruit. Her stew, made with a special blend of spices, even won praise from the earl's most fastidious mother.

From a poor village to the kitchen of a great noble house, Maddie's climb up the career ladder was only just beginning.

Reader's Guide:

1. I'm terrible at writing blurbs, so if this subject interests you, feel free to click through and try the first chapter.

2. The heroine focuses on her career in the early part of the story. The romance only develops in the middle and later parts. The male lead is not the earl.

3. This is an alternate version of nineteenth-century England. I have read plenty of books and sources on the subject, but there are still lots of invented details, so please don't scrutinize it too closely.

4. This is a cozy, food-focused farming story. Although it is set in nineteenth-century England, the cook is from Southern Europe, and Western recipes take center stage in the early and middle parts.

5. This story has a Western setting. To make the plot easier to remember and follow, most names are two or three syllables, and none use obscure characters.

6. You can now leave comments on individual chapters as well as author's notes. Feel free to open them up: every so often, the author's notes will include extra worldbuilding, food facts, and little bonus scenes.

References: My thanks to the Italian cookbook Silver Spoon, the MVP of this story's research. Without it, the sheer lack of detail in British cookbooks would never have been enough to support this book, orz.

Here's another story in a similar vein, available to preorder:

The Nineteenth-Century Parisian Dessert Mogul [Business]

Emily woke up one day to find she had transmigrated into the body of a girl in nineteenth-century Paris who shared her name.

At the time, the banks of the Seine sparkled with lights. Opera houses and department stores were springing up, and the romantic spirit of France was everywhere.

But Emily's family lived in a damp old house on Rue Saint-Denis. They rented a small bakery and barely scraped by selling bread. They had to get up before dawn every day to knead the dough, let it rise, bake the loaves, and then deliver the finished goods to the bakery run by her aunt's family.

The two families had worked together for years, until Emily's parents were falsely accused of arson and taken away by the gendarmes to prison.

"Emily, your family's reputation is in tatters now. We can't let the shop get dragged down with you." Her aunt clutched her handkerchief, sounding sympathetic, though her eyes gave away her calculation. "We have no choice but to end our partnership early. I'm sure you understand our predicament."

It turned out her aunt had already secretly signed a contract with a much larger bakery.

Looking at the little bakery on the verge of bankruptcy, Emily, who had spent years studying desserts in France in her previous life and earned the title of French MOF pastry chef, drew up a list of the three most urgent things she needed to do:

First, make her aunt's family pay the penalty for breaking their contract.

Second, get her parents out of prison.

Third, Make the little bakery great again!!

In those days, ordinary families had little access to sweets beyond rice pudding made with leftover rice, milk, and cheap sugar, or coarse flour cakes sprinkled with powdered sugar. Fine desserts were reserved for aristocratic salons, and ordinary people could hardly hope to see one.

Until an unassuming dessert shop quietly opened on a street corner in Paris.

There were the French classics, of course: canelés, eclairs, colorful macarons, and mille-feuille. But what really made Parisians stare in amazement were the novel treats they had never seen before: melt-in-your-mouth baked cheesecake, Sicilian cannoli stuffed with sweet cream, Viennese Sachertorte drizzled with rich chocolate sauce, Portuguese egg tarts that spilled hot filling when you bit into them, lotus pastries blooming like real flowers on the plate, and Turkish baklava wrapped in layer upon layer of delicate pastry and chopped pistachios...

Long lines formed outside the shop every day. Whenever a new item was released, it was usually sold out in less than half a day. Even noblewomen hired people to queue for them, all to get their hands on a box of limited-edition desserts. Before long, branch after branch bearing the same sign opened across Paris.

From a down-on-her-luck girl trapped in a cramped old house to a dessert mogul who shook Europe's upper class, Emily's legendary life was only just beginning.

Theme: Cook well and keep striving every day