Civilization Chronicles: Rise of the Divine Creator

Suffice-it-to-say, Lucas and Christina had both invented a few new types of dishes over the past few months.

For Lucas, it had hit him one day after he received a shipment of cream-of-tartar from the wineries in Crystal Lake.

He realized that during the wine-making process, another important byproduct was created, grapeseed.

For most of the wineries, the grapeseed which was left-over after they finished pressing the fruit into juice was mostly just waste. Some of it might be left in certain barrels during the fermentation process to add a slightly different taste or mouthfeel to the end product, but that vast majority of the seeds were simply strained out.

Unlike with the cream-of-tartar, though, these excess seeds weren’t treated purely as garbage. Many farmers found that this byproduct made for decent fertilizer or animal feed, but if you asked most of them if they found the grapeseed valuable or not, most would answer ’not’.

Lucas, however, knew that these seemingly unimpressive seeds actually contained a very valuable cooking ingredient, oil.

The boy didn’t know if this kind of oil was any good for making soap with, but he did know you could fry food with it; more specifically, he knew you could deep fry food with it.

Thinking so, once the sugar harvest was basically finished for the year, and Project Maple moved into a phase much more focused on building up infrastructure, Lucas had tasked his trusty Head Manager to head to the Royal Province with a team of competent negotiators and visit to all the vineyards they could to buy up as much grapeseed as possible.

Lucas thought about processes the oil in Crystal Lake, but he eventually decided against that as he didn’t have enough personnel to set up another foreign manufacturing base just yet.

Instead, he decided to split up the process.

The grapeseed would be thoroughly rinsed and dried at the vineyards themselves, a process the boy was willing to pay a bit extra for in order to save himself some effort, then the hard seeds were packed into barrels and shipped to Misty City where they were crushed using giant waterwheels and then pressed for oil.

Since it wasn’t the typical harvest season for grapes when he first realized this possibility, Lucas wasn’t able to acquire many seeds right away, but he got enough to run some tests, and they were all delicious.

Pan-fried vegetables, seared duck breast, deep-fried pheasant, deep-fried breaded pork cutlet, stir-fried beef, deep-friend fish, doughnuts, all kinds of vinaigrettes, etc etc...

Lucas’ biggest regret in all this was that there were no potatoes or potato equivalents in the Rockwell Kingdom.

According to Celestina, there was apparently something similar in the Rising Sun Empire, but it wasn’t widely cultivated there either as the staple grains were still wheat, barley, and oats.

As such, there was no way to make french-fries or any other potato dishes for that matter, which was a sad, sad reality for the boy... for now.

In any case, many of the new dishes that made use of grapeseed oil became instant hits in the Manor, though Lucas did his best to limit how often the deep-fried ones were made understanding the dangers of having too much of this type of food around.

Still, once in a while they were a delectable treat, so a few deep-fried items had made their way onto tonight’s menu in both the appetizer and main courses.

As for Christina’s big invention, it was a fizzy type of fruit juice that when he first saw it, Lucas immediately called ’soda’.

Jake, Jenny, and Jessie had been incredibly busy since the first Princess Bakery opened, as had Tess, though her work was more in the office rather than the kitchen.

That said, the bakery siblings had spent most of their time teaching others how to make bread rather than actually making it themselves; the demand for Redwood-Style Bread was so enormous that there was simply no way they could keep up on their own or with just temporary workers.

Understanding this, they had turned to the Rising Phoenix Guild, where Jake, Jenny, and Jessie continuously recruited workers by offering high wages and stable employment, tricks they had picked up by following Lucas’ example.

Lucas had also helped them break down the actual bread-making process enough that keeping the recipe a secret was no longer a problem.

Specialization and compartmentalization, he called it, whatever that meant.

Tina’s role had also evolved somewhat. She, along with Tess and a few others she had hired with the help of her Senior Brother’s competent Head Manager were now mostly responsible for managing the business and research and development.

Christina had even set up something similar to Lucas’ laboratory, where she was working on new and better methods of fermentation, yeast preparation, recipes, and a whole host of other projects all related to breads, pastries, cakes and much, much more.

The creation of soda was a freak accident related to those pursuits.

During one of her experiments to determine just how much yeast she could grow from a single batch of fruit juice, Christina had poured a huge amount of sugar into a jar of grape juice and then let it sit out to ferment.

For some reason, perhaps because she was in a rush that day, while Christina had labeled it appropriately, she had left the jar in a different spot than normal, so when one of her recent hires to the ’Food Lab’ saw this out-of-place item, they mistakenly assumed it was just regular juice and thus stored it inside the fridge so it wouldn’t go bad.

When she went looking for the jar a few days later, Christina found it in the fridge and was quite frustrated, thinking she would need to start the experiment again; however, when she opened the jar and poured it out, something interesting happened.

The cold juice, when poured through a strainer and into a bowl, actually began foaming up, like lathered soap. It also gave off a pleasant, sweet aroma.

Clearly fermentation had occurred and gas had been created as a byproduct, but not all the sugar had been used up yet, which made sense seeing how she had added much more than normal.

Christina didn’t know what possessed her to do so, but when she saw and smelled this fizzing, sweet grape juice, she decided to take a sip, and to her great surprise, unlike with regular fruit-yeast-juice which tasted somewhat bitter, this one was deliciously refreshing.

That led to her showing Lucas, Lucas calling it soda, and a whole new set of experiments into carbonating different kinds of beverages.

There may have also been some explosions along the way... but such was the cost of progress!