conversations.from: human
conversations.value:  The meat wasn’t tender lamb but gamey mutton. While I generally enjoyed well-seasoned food, this soup was overpowering, as though they’d tried to drown the gamey taste with spice. The vegetables were cooked to a mush. It just wasn’t especially good. The sauerkraut was sauerkraut, nothing more. There wasn’t much to critique about what was literally just fermented cabbage. The one saving grace was the sausage. It was edible. Enjoyable, even. But as the main protein of the meal was mutton, the sausage was small—nothing but a side dish. I wished they’d used it for the soup instead. In conclusion, the empire’s cuisine was pretty disappointing. This was already a well-known fact in this world, much like the infamy of English cuisine in my old world. But unlike English cuisine, this world’s cuisine was very much real and very much in front of me. To give you some perspective, I could see Claire—who never complained about the food she was given—struggling to finish her lunch. Yeah, it was that bad. Of course, there were a few reasons for this. One lay in the food culture of the empire. The upper-class citizens of the empire traditionally ate simple rather than extravagant meals, which led to public establishments following suit—similar to how the English gentry’s love of simple foods had influenced their country’s cuisine. Another reason was the empire’s social system. Many people left their family homes early in life to work as live-in apprentices, leaving them little time to learn proper home cooking. Poor cooking skills meant poor cuisine, further feeding into the vicious cycle of a mediocre food culture. The low social status of chefs and pâtissiers likely contributed too. With the empire having been at war for such a long time, the most respected profession was that of a soldier. Chefs, pâtissiers, and other non-combat related occupations were the victims of implicit prejudice—despite both military cooks and army rations being an integral part of warfare. Just to be clear, everything I’ve described so far only applied to the Nur Empire’s formally recognized traditional cuisine. We’d already seen just how many foreign ingredients we could buy in the central market, and the empire was brimming with exchange students and immigrants from other countries. Naturally, this meant many citizens preferred foreign cuisine over their own, so the people of the empire actually ate quite well. It was only the imperial family and the nobility who obstinately refused to change. You could see this reflected in Philine’s lunch, no better than our own. No wonder she’d been so taken with the chocolate and rakugan we offered her. As an imperial princess, she had likely never before had an opportunity to taste such sweetness.
conversations.prefix: Rae:
conversations.from: gpt
conversations.value:  "Rae, your displeasure is showing on your face." Claire warned.
conversations.prefix: Claire:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value:  "I’m sorry, but this food is far worse than I even imagined. It should be blasphemy to use ingredients this way." Rae fumed.
conversations.prefix: Rae:
conversations.from: gpt
conversations.value:  "I-I’m sorry…"
conversations.prefix: Philine:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value:  "It’s nothing you need to apologize for, Lady Philine."
conversations.prefix: Claire: