I watched this anime about 15 years ago. At the time I didn’t even know what an anime was, though I remember enjoying it.
I’ve tried to find it online but to no avail. I’ll try to give as much detail as I can:
• It’s a cooking-related anime with a young female protagonist.
• The animation style is old, so there’s a good chance it’s a 1980s-1990s anime (although it could be earlier or later, not very sure).
• The time period in the anime is historic Japanese, and so the buildings have those curved roofs, for example.
• The protagonist is some sort of a student. With her classmates, each episode they’re faced with some sort of a task which involves cooking. This sometimes includes going out to forage for certain materials, so there’s an adventure aspect to the genre to some extent.
• A key moment I clearly remember is an exam at the cooking school. I’m not sure if it’s the entrance exam, but I’m guessing it might be because it’s a very important exam to our protagonist. One of the tasks in the exam is cooking rice in large pots. The students place big rocks on top of them to seal the pots. Our protagonist has an accident where she cooks with too much pressure so the pot explodes. The teacher almost fails the protagonist but then realizes that the rice left in the broken pot is actually really tasty so she gets to pass.
I don’t know much more, but I’ll list some small fragmets of what I remember (some of these may be inaccurate):
• There is an episode where they go to collect honey from a large beehive inside a cliff.
• There is some sort of a leader at their village (the shogun (?)) and he has samurai/ninja (?) subordinates.
• There is a special pond (?) with a nearby flower field. I think there is a scene where a character counts loves me-loves me not on the flowers.
View Reddit by MrPillow01 – View Source