A Nineteenth-Century Aristocrat's Kitchen (Gourmet)

[50+ chapters drafted, updates daily at 9 p.m. Feel free to add this to your reading list and follow along!] [80% advance reader lock. If you only want to read about the heroine working at the estate, you can start at Chapter 6 and skip the carnival arc.] [This novel has undergone major revisions. Please support the official version, thank you!] What would it be like to wake up and discover you’d transmigrated to nineteenth-century England? Worse still, Marty’s mother has just died, and the family is drowning in debt. Just when things seem hopeless, news comes from Berkshire that the Earl’s household is hiring servants. In the long winter months, food and work mean hope for survival. Looking at the few shriveled wheat cakes left at home, Marty does everything she can to land a job as a kitchen assistant at the Earl’s estate. The estate kitchen is the busiest place Marty has ever seen. Every day, she keeps busy stirring and kneading rising wheat dough, scraping the rinds off hard cheese, and helping cure the salted meat that will last through the winter. Sometimes she even catches a glimpse of the delicacies served to the nobility at the high table: goose liver pie, roast veal kidneys dressed with Burgundy sauce, and sweet wine pudding made with honey and cream… Life is hard, but with her modern cooking skills and knack for combining ingredients, Marty manages to make the most of it. She improves the bread recipe and experiments with soaking dried fruit. The stew she makes with her own special blend of spices even earns rave reviews from the Earl’s most particular old lady. From a poor village to the kitchen of a great aristocratic household, Marty’s rise through the ranks is only just beginning. Reader’s Guide: 1. The author is terrible at writing blurbs, so if this premise interests you, please give Chapter 1 a try. 2. The heroine focuses on her career in the early chapters. The romance only begins to develop in the middle and later parts of the story. The male lead is not the earl. 3. This is a loosely fictionalized version of nineteenth-century England. I’ve researched plenty of relevant books and documents, but there are still many invented details, so please don’t scrutinize it too closely. 4. This is a cozy farming and food story. Although it’s set in nineteenth-century England, the chef comes from Southern Europe, and Western recipes feature prominently in the early and middle parts. 5. This novel has a Western setting. To make names easier to remember and the story easier to read, most characters have short names of two or three syllables, with no uncommon characters. 6. You can now leave comments on individual chapters. Feel free to check the chapter comments and author’s notes, where I’ll occasionally share extra details, food facts, and little bonus scenes. References: A big thank-you to the Italian cookbook Silver Spoon, this novel’s MVP. Without it, British cookbooks alone would never have given me enough material to write this book, orz. Here’s another upcoming novel in a similar genre: Parisian Dessert Tycoon of the Nineteenth Century [Business] Emily wakes up to discover she has transmigrated into the body of a girl with the same name in nineteenth-century Paris. At the time, the banks of the Seine sparkle with lights, opera houses and department stores are on the rise, and the romance of France can be felt everywhere. But Emily’s family lives in a damp old house on Rue Saint-Denis. They rent a small bakery and scrape by making bread, getting up before dawn to knead, proof, and bake it, then delivering the finished loaves to the bakery run by her aunt’s family to sell. The two families have worked together for years, until Emily’s parents are falsely accused of arson and taken to prison by the gendarmes. “Emily, your family has a bad reputation now. The shop can’t afford to be dragged into it.” Her aunt clutches a handkerchief, sounding sympathetic, though her eyes give away her calculations. “We have no choice but to end our partnership early. I’m sure you understand how difficult this is for us.” As it turns out, her aunt had already secretly signed a contract with a bigger bakery. Looking at the little bakery on the verge of bankruptcy, Emily, who spent years studying desserts in France in her previous life and earned the title of MOF pastry chef, makes a list of the three most urgent things she needs 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 that era, ordinary families had little access to sweets beyond rice pudding made with leftover rice, milk, and cheap sugar, or coarse flour cakes dusted with sugar. Fine desserts were reserved for aristocratic salons, and most people could hardly ever even see one. Then, an unassuming dessert shop quietly opened on a street corner in Paris. There were the classic French treats, of course: canelés, eclairs, colorful macarons, and mille-feuille. But what really made Parisians stare in amazement were all the novelties they had never seen before: jiggly cheesecake that melted in your mouth, Sicilian cannoli packed with sweet cream, Viennese Sachertorte drenched in rich chocolate sauce, Portuguese egg tarts that oozed hot filling when you bit into them, lotus pastries shaped like flowers blooming on the plate, and Turkish baklava with layer upon layer of delicate pastry wrapped around crushed pistachios… Long queues formed outside the shop every day. Whenever a new item went on sale, it was often sold out in less than half a day. Even wealthy ladies hired people to wait in line for them, just to get their hands on a box of limited-edition sweets. Before long, branches bearing the same sign began opening all over Paris. From a destitute girl trapped in a cramped old house to a dessert tycoon who shook Europe’s upper class, Emily’s legendary life is only just beginning. Theme: Cook well and keep improving every day.