"Haaha! The Main God blesses us! Spicy, fragrant roast meat—now this is food fit for warriors and Priests! If only we added vanilla, cacao, pineapple, and tomatl, that would be the true taste of home!..."
"What? Great-ship chief, you say spices this expensive are wasted on roast meat? That they should be used to cook porridge? That drinking a good bowl of porridge is the real taste of home?..."
Night lay deep, and the bonfire blazed. Venison glistening with oil roasted over the flames, the meat sprinkled with many fragrant powders—spices exceedingly rare and costly in temperate Wagoku.
The monk-soldier Watanabe Masumi swallowed his uncontrollable drool and, breathing in that tempting aroma, ate shriveled pickled radish and drank a light mixed-vegetable soup, like a true eminent monk from Tang Land. Beside him, however, Zuwaro was tearing into great chunks of roast meat and gulping rice wine, occasionally exchanging written words with Watanabe and talking about the foods of his homeland in the Lake Kingdom.
Only, Mesoamerica's vanilla, cacao, pineapple, and Tomato were naturally beyond the imagination of Old Continent peoples in this era. To the monk-soldier Watanabe, the delicacies he knew were rice, pickles, and fish, along with all sorts of porridges with vegetables and meat added. And after drinking two bowls of vegetable soup as thin as water, he finally could not hold back and boldly raised the idea of eating porridge—even a single bowl of watery millet porridge would be a taste of home!
"The heavens are frozen, the earth is cold, and men are weary and worn... Since your honored envoy eats meat and drinks wine, might you allow us to drink a little porridge? One bowl would suffice..."
"Mm? Porridge? What does porridge mean? Oh! From the shape of these characters, it's rice boiled in soup?...