After a tasty dinner of a pork and beer stew, Esme sought out the cook, dragging Rick with her to interpret. She meant to coax the recipe from her but didn’t need to overcome any resistance since her reputation as the saviour of her namesake went before her. Thus, she discovered that her assumption that the pork fat would have finished in the midden wasn’t exact. The Saxons used it to make lard – one of the essential ingredients of the stew she so admired. The motherly cook explained how she diced pork into cubes, cored and peeled crab apples and sliced chives and leeks, put in peas and dark ale and completed the whole stew by adding Bulgur wheat. Esme delighted the woman by saying that the proportions the cook had to cope with were much greater than those she ever hoped to prepare. She wo
