Jade had become, somewhat unwillingly, an indoor person ever since she realised just how much horse dung and human filth lay uncollected on the streets - It wasn’t that she had been an outdoor person in her previous life, but there was a vast difference between choosing to stay indoor and being forced to do so by the environment. The street’s situation worsened with every drop in neighbourhood wealth; the poor could not afford to hire the night soil men unless circumstances became desperate.
And these areas were precisely where her students’ family lived.
Though Jade had drilled a basic sense of hygiene into her pupils, most residents cared little for such matters. After a full day of labour that barely earned them enough to survive, cleanliness was a concern few still had the strength to uphold.
Maybe I should make myself a mask, Jade mused as she followed Josh through the foul, stagnant air. Something like the ones people used during the COVID lockdown… at least it would filter some of the smell.
They stopped before a shop.
It was crowded with dead animals - freshly slaughtered, openly displayed - enough to shock any modern person who had never seen how meat reached the table. Jade was momentarily stunned the instant she stepped inside.
The shop was divided into two sections. The larger held carcasses hanging from iron hooks, with freshly cut meat laid out on heavy wooden tables. The smaller section housed an open fire: great bone-in cuts roasted above it, their fat slowly melting and dripping into a pan set beneath.
Watching the liquid fat slide along the slanted meat and fall, drop by drop, into the pan, Jade finally understood why it was called “drippings”.
Blood dripped everywhere as well.
Flies buzzed through the air, drawn by the metallic scent, only to be chased away by a ragged child wielding a broom-like tool - the child likely hired for that task alone. The butcher’s apprentice, busy dividing cuts, periodically abandoned his station to sweep the floor and scatter sawdust, absorbing the blood as best as he could.
The stench was overwhelming to Jade, who was accustomed to clean, air-conditioned shops and neatly packaged cuts. Yet when she looked around, every face - customers included - remained impassive. This was ordinary. Natural.
She held her breath, tried her best to maintain a neutral expression, not wanting anyone to misinterpret her discomfort as condescension or a sign that she was looking down on the butchers.
Josh led her toward a corner where the cheapest cuts were piled. Lowering his voice, he said, “Sensei, this is the cleanest butcher I know in the neighbourhood. I think he’s a good man.”
“Good?” Jade lifted her gaze from the offal to his face.
“He hired little Tommy.” Josh gestured toward the child shooing flies. “Many butchers wouldn’t bother.”
Then he nodded toward the pan beneath the roasting meat. “And his drippings are always fresh.”
Jade understood the hidden message at once.
Many butchers sold drippings regardless of its condition - if they even bothered to sell it at all. Most viewed it as a mere by-product to be discarded unless a customer, usually someone from the slums, offered a few coppers for it. Jade suspected that even when the dripping was clearly rancid, people bought it and ate it anyway. Here, where the struggle to survive was a daily battle, food safety was a luxury no one could afford to care about.
Jade let out a slow breath and turned back to the cheap cuts on the table.
Innards, or offal, were, of course, found in this section. Set beside them were thin scraps of meat clinging to massive chunks of bones. Jade understood immediately why they were priced so low - bone broth took too much fuel to make; the poor struggled to obtain fuel at all, while the wealthy had far better options than scrapping meat from boiled bones. Naturally, cuts like these appealed to no one.
Considering the time and fuel required, Jade decided to skip them for now. She could return once the iron oven project had secured enough funding - once her students’ meals could afford an upgrade. With that thought, her gaze shifted to the items beside the bones.
They were large slabs of animal fat she could not immediately identify - thick, pale yellow-white, with faint veins still threading through them. Judging by the sheer volume, she guessed they came from a pig or cattle; she could not imagine a sheep or goat carrying fat that occupied nearly a third of its body.
Before she could ask Josh, a voice called from behind.
“Miss Jade! A pleasure to see you.” The butcher, having just finished with another customer, approached with a genial smile. “What might you be looking for today?”
Jade blinked. “You know me?”
“Of course.” He laughed lightly. “The teacher with the iron oven project - the one selling sweet biscuits at such fair prices. My children are very fond of them.”
“Aww, thank you,” Jade replied with a polite smile. “I didn’t realise I was so well known. How should I address you, Mr.…?”
“Stonewell,” He inclined his head. “Do any of these cuts catch your eyes?”
“Yes… though before I decide, may I ask a few questions?” Jade said, her tone apologetic. “I don’t buy these cuts often, so I’m unfamiliar with many of them. If your apprentice could explain them to me… well, I wouldn’t wish to interrupt your other customers.”
“Think nothing of it.” Mr. Stonewell thumped his chest lightly, pleased. “You may take all the time you need. I’ll gladly explain whatever you wish to know.”
Jade thanked him and did not waste the opportunity. After a few minutes of questioning, she was surprised to learn something new. “Suet is specifically the fat found around the kidneys of cattle?”
She had never been particularly fond of beef. At best, she knew that rendered beef fat was called tallow, but that was the extent of her knowledge. She hadn’t realised a grass-fed animal could carry such a significant deposit of fat around its internal organs. Another fact caught her off guard: “And it’s really that cheap? Why is that?”
Suet could be rendered into tallow, and tallow was essential to the base of Chinese hot pot broth - rich, spicy, and beloved. It was an established fact that some business empires had been built on tallow hot pot broth. She had never known anyone to dislike it.
“Why, you ask?” Mr. Stonewell frowned. “First, it’s merely a scrap of the meat. Only the truly desperate would use it for food. Second, once rendered, it tastes dreadful. Only the candle-dippers and soap-makers have any use for it.”
“Tastes dreadful?” Jade turned to Josh.
The boy nodded with surprising enthusiasm. “Dripping is good. Suet is fine if diced and cooked with other food. But tallow?” He grimaced. “Unbearable, Sensei. Grassy… beefy in the worst way. It’s only slightly better than tallow rendered from mutton suet.”
“Yes, we hardly keep mutton fat at all,” Mr. Stonewell agreed. “Lard’s the best rendering fat here. And if drippings are available, no one wants beef suet for frying oil.”
Jade struggled to understand. In her previous life, tallow was prized by chefs for its aroma.
“Um, how do you usually render it?” she asked.
“Cut it up, throw it in a pot, heat it,” Mr. Stonewell said simply, his hands mimicking the rough motions. “Leave it long enough, then scoop out the browned bits.”
Crude, but acceptable, Jade mused. It sounds exactly like how my auntie used to render lard… so why does it taste so bad here? Her gaze drifted from the heavy suet to a nearby clump of caul fat - the lace-like membrane that once surrounded the animal’s organs.
She knew certain traditional Chinese pastries utilised it to achieve a specific, goosamer crispiness. But perhaps because the rendered yield was so small, or because people here simply didn’t value that texture, it had been relegated to the cheap cuts section as well. The poor seemed to find it unworthy of the price, leaving the unwanted fat to be hauled away to the candle and soap workshops.
Her eyes returned to the suet. It was a massive, cheap source of fat - ideal for her malnourished students. Yet Josh’s words echoed in her mind.
Grassy…
And suddenly, the answer struck her. “Animal feed.”
“Sensei?” Josh glanced at her, then hurriedly addressed the butcher. “She’s just thinking. She always does. Right, Sensei?”
“Yeah… I think I know why tallow tastes the way it does,” Jade said, rubbing her chin thoughtfully. “Well, at least I have a reasonable theory.”
Both Josh and Mr. Stonewell looked at her in surprise. The butcher leaned over the counter, his curiosity piqued. “And what would that reason be?”
“Cattle eat grass of wildly varying quality,” she explained. “We are what we eat. So are animals. Poor feed makes poor-tasting fat.”
Mr. Stonewell pursed his lips. “Aye. Nothing much to be done about that, then.”
“Yeah, not much,” Jade agreed with a casual shrug.
Without large-scale, industrialised agriculture, feeding cattle refined feed was unthinkable. Crops weren’t even plentiful enough for human consumption; who would waste them on livestock? The nobles might have the means, but they had no reason to care - they had butter and imported olive oil. Why bother fighting out how to make tallow taste better?
After finishing her questions, Jade bought offal and drippings as planned. But after a moment’s hesitation, she added the large chunk of suet.
“Miss Jade, I can round down the price on some lard if you’re truly in need of fat,” Mr. Stonewell said, his brows furrowing in disapproval. “Beef fat simply isn’t becoming for servants of the Light.”
“It’s alright, Mr. Stonewell,” Jade smiled. “I’ll test before using it. If it’s unusable, I’ll make soap instead.”
“Soap?” The butcher looked shocked. “That's dirty work, Miss Jade. Very dirty indeed.”
“Huh?” Jade blinked, genuinely confused. Her image of soap-making had always been neat and orderly - tidy, aesthetic handmade soaps from online videos. She had even gone through a phase of making them herself, producing a batch large enough to last her several years and saving a fair amount of money in the process.
“Um, could you explain how soap-making is dirty?” she asked.
Mr. Stonewell raised his brows, clearly puzzled by the question. “Why, everyone knows how foul soap factories are. Most of our waste ends up there - suet, bones, drippings. Some arrived already rancid, stinking to high heaven. Then there’s the boiling, the choking fumes from the lye. The soap sludge’s harsh enough to leave workers’ skin red and burning.”
“Oh, right…” I forgot - no hygiene standards, no work safety, no rubber gloves… Jade’s smile faltered for a fraction of a second. Plastic and silicone molds probably didn’t even exist yet.
She nodded thoughtfully, then reassured him with a smile. “Don’t worry. My method would be… much more delicate. Less like a factory, and more like a chemist working in a laboratory.”
“A laboratory?” Mr. Stonewell echoed, glancing at Josh, who could only shrug.
“I know how to make soap,” Jade continued calmly, “but I won’t be producing it for sale. It’s too time-consuming, and buying from grocers is more efficient. I only want to test the process - and demonstrate it to my students next semester. It’s basic chemistry, easier to show than many other subjects.”
“Chemistry…?” Mr. Stonewell’s confusion only seemed to deepen. He quickly gave his head a shake. “Well, as long as you know what you’re doing, Miss Jade… Hard to imagine anything delicate about soap-making, though. Just standing near a factory makes my stomach turn.”
“Thanks for explaining all this, Mr. Stonewell,” Jade said sincerely as she stepped outside. “As you may have heard, I have some trouble with my memory. I have to ask about many things others consider common knowledge sense. I appreciate your patience. I’ll certainly buy from you again.”
“You’re very welcome, Miss Jade,” Mr. Stonewell replied, waving them off. “It was a pleasure.”
Josh took the basket from her. “Sensei, I’ve seen the men who work the soap vats. I even thought about working there once. I can’t imagine soap-making being delicate either.”
“Well… I’ll do my best to make it something you wouldn’t expect.” Jade replied with a wink.
Making soap without gloves, purified sodium hydroxide, or refined oil The thought lingered, this will be new to me too.
“Let’s give it a try.” she continued aloud. “The cost of a small test is minimal. And if it works, I can show you guys some chemistry!”
She paused, already arranging the lessons in her mind. “Now that chemistry is settled, I still need a way to demonstrate physics and biology… I’m planning for the next semester to include science, alongside some literature, and maths.”
“Physics? Biology?” Josh repeated, utterly lost. Deciding that was too much to process, he returned to a safer topic. “So… what do we need to make soap? I can ask the factory workers where to buy lye.”
“No,” Jade said, “We’ll extract our own lye from wood ash.”
Josh stared.
“If we’re making soap from scratch,” she continued, “we might as well start from the very beginning. Wood ash costs nothing. It just takes time to boil and concentrate the solution - but that comes later.”
Josh asked. “Then what comes first?”
“First,” Jade said, glancing at the basket. “We test how to make better tallow. If we can improve its taste, the domus can finally enjoy proper meals without worrying about fat!”
She had already done what she could for the domus kitchen, using every ounce of her cooking skill and whatever ingredients were available. Father Rochester and Sister Geenia had generously allowed her to take charge - but limited funds still held her back. Ingredients cheap and plentiful in her previous life were luxuries here.
With enough fat, she could fry and saute - not just stew and boil porridge every single day!
Jade nodded to herself, hopeful. “Josh, pray for our success tonight. If this works, it will change what’s on our plates in the future.”
“...?” Josh still sometimes had no idea what his Sensei was talking about.