"Little brother stole some soybeans!" At this moment, the oldest girl named Grace spoke up to explain. She looked only eleven or twelve years old, but in Henry Thompson's memory, Grace seemed to be already thirteen or fourteen. According to the customs of the Tang Dynasty, she was about to get married soon. However, due to years of malnutrition, she appeared very thin and small, her flat figure not at all looking like she was developing.

"Worthless brat, give him a good beating!" William Foster Sr. was so angry upon hearing this that he pointed at his son and cursed loudly.

"Uncle Foster, it's just a few soybeans. If the child ate them, so be it. Please don't be angry!" Henry Thompson hurriedly tried to mediate. As he spoke, he picked up his own bowl of porridge, added a few pieces of fish on top, and handed it to the crying child. The little fellow immediately stopped crying, grabbed the bowl—which was bigger than his face—with his two dirty little hands, and started eating ravenously.

Henry Thompson still had to be given face, so William Foster Sr. glared at his youngest son a few more times, then helplessly said to Henry Thompson, "Master, you don't know, these soybeans aren't just from my family, but are what the five tenant families managed to save up with great difficulty. And they're not for people to eat, they're mainly for fattening up the only plow ox in the village. Only if the ox is well-fed in autumn will it have the strength to work next year. The other tenants trust me, so they handed all the beans to me for safekeeping. If people find out my son stole the beans, it would be a huge disgrace!"

Hearing William Foster Sr.'s words, Henry Thompson remembered that there was still an ox in the village. For tenant families, the life of a plow ox was even more precious than a human's. Even if people went hungry, the ox could not be starved, because everyone in the village relied on this ox to work the fields. So the ox's food standards were higher than people's. Besides eating grass, it also needed beans to supplement its strength, and when working, it even ate eggs and other high-protein foods.

"Huh? Beans? I've got an idea!" At this moment, Henry Thompson suddenly had a flash of inspiration and thought of a feasible way to make money. He couldn't help but beam with joy, almost jumping up in excitement!

Chapter 5: Growing Bean Sprouts

In Henry Thompson's kitchen, a stove was burning vigorously, making the room warm and cozy. Henry Thompson struggled to carry in a large wooden basin, half-filled with well water. Then he took the kettle from the stove, poured the hot water into the basin, and stirred it with his hand from time to time. When the water temperature felt about the same as the room temperature, he put down the kettle, picked up a ladle, and carefully poured the warm water from the basin into a water jar on the floor.

Having a water jar in the kitchen was quite normal, but the one in Henry Thompson's kitchen was a bit special. First, there was no water in the jar; instead, it was filled entirely with sand. There seemed to be something under the sand, but it couldn't be seen for now. The whole jar was propped up on two long benches, with a basin placed underneath. When Henry Thompson poured water on top, it seeped through the layers of sand to the bottom of the jar, then flowed out through a hole at the base into the basin below.

Henry Thompson was very careful when pouring the water, trying to moisten every part of the jar. After finishing a basin of water, he emptied the water from the basin below, then carefully checked both the jar and the stove before leaving with peace of mind. Over the next few days, Henry Thompson would come in from time to time to add fuel to the stove, keeping the room at a relatively high temperature.

After four days, the surface of the sand in the jar had bulged up in little mounds. When he brushed away the sand, he revealed the tender white sprouts underneath, their yellowish cotyledons still wrapped in green seed coats—these were the mung bean sprouts so common in later generations.

"Haha, it really worked!" Henry Thompson looked at the bean sprouts under the sand and couldn't help but laugh out loud. A few days ago at William Foster Sr.'s house, when he saw the soybeans scattered on the ground, he suddenly thought of a quick and low-investment way to make money: growing bean sprouts. He had worried that bean sprouts might already exist in the Tang Dynasty, but after asking William Foster Sr., he learned that there were no bean sprouts in the winter markets, at least not in Chang'an. This made Henry Thompson even more determined.

In fact, what Henry Thompson didn't know was that bean sprouts had a long history, but like many foods, they were initially used as medicine. It wasn't until the Song Dynasty that they began to be used as food, especially as winter vegetables in the markets. In the early Tang period, no one had thought of using bean sprouts as a dish.

Growing bean sprouts wasn't difficult; the key was to maintain the temperature and water them regularly. In his previous life, because of the "toxic bean sprout" incident, Henry Thompson's wife worried that the bean sprouts bought at the market weren't safe, so she grew them at home. With the heating in winter, there was no need to worry about temperature, and all that was needed was to water them every four or five hours. Henry Thompson had seen it done a few times and remembered the process.

Now, Henry Thompson took the bean sprouts out of the sand. When he made the sprouts, he would spread a layer of beans and cover it with a layer of sand, so the yield in the jar was very high, filling several large bamboo baskets in the end. However, he found that the jar wasn't the best container for taking out the sprouts. If he used a wooden bucket with a removable bottom, it would be much easier. This was something he could improve on in the future.