Literature. Drinking. 【文飲】

Back in March, I competed in the Crown's Arts and Sciences Championship, and with the assistance of  my dazzling outfit  managed to charm the judges into giving me one of the two winning spots!  I'm honored to have won: the competition was very strong. I've been a little remiss in updating the blog because the world is falling apart, but I'm back!  And I want to share both what I put together for the competition, and my actual documentation so that others can see at least one approach that seems to work ok. Documentation . I wanted to brew a selection of thirst-waters / sharbats as my entry.  The competition judges one entry or several as a single body of work, so it wasn't strictly necessary, but part of the story that I wanted to tell was the spread of sharbats out of Central Asia and establishing them as a drink shared across 8,000 miles, from Andalusia to China. It turns out that it's a little hard to draw a direct linguistic line between sekenja

With the success of my first two thirst-waters, I wanted to follow up on the rest of them from  The Compendium of Essential Arts for Family Living .  I made the first one, which was really a short mead (and reused the spices and yeast to make a very nice plausibly-historical metheglin), but that leaves six thirst-waters to try: Malus asiatica , Chinese strawberry, Chinese quince, five-flavor [berry], grape, and fragrant sugar. Chinese quinces are pretty hard to get, and the fragrant sugar one has some pretty unclear bits.  I can get grape juice, but getting Vitis vinifera , the European grape, is rough in the summer: American grapes make up most commercial grape juice, and they have a really distinctive flavor that wouldn't be appropriate for Chinese grapes, which would be vinifera . When I was looking through Manhattan Chinatown grocery stores, I came across a bag of five flavor berries: Meanwhile, I remembered that I had picked a quantity of young ornamental crabapp

Based primarily off of the poem I discussed earlier , and cross-referencing other sherbet recipes, I made a caramelized honey lemonade, similar to bochet , which is mead made from caramelized honey. What I drew from that poem is: a hundred flowers brewed into a sweet dew syrup A primarily honey-based syrup In the southern garden, boiled to red dragon marrow The honey should be boiled until red.  This is a little conjectural, but I think fairly convincing.  Other sherbets cook their syrups pretty severely:   Compendium of Essential Arts for Family Living 's Chinese Quince sherbet has you cook the quince slices in honey until it forms "flexible strands," which is pretty cooked.  I got a similar effect after the syrup I made had cooled fully.  heaven's winds, summer heat, good-for-"meng" fruit And then we add lemon juice. Sherbets typically have a fruit juice and an optional sweetener added, and this fruit is definitely it.   Is it lemon? I&#