New Recipes: Exceptional Yeast Cakes
I enjoy going back to my old alma mater for a number of reasons. I went up in October to interview some undergrads for work, and also to celebrate homecoming, but I had enough time to sneak into the library and snag some books. I was hoping to find some of the source texts that I couldn't find online, and I did, but what I found just looking around the library at random near the books I had identified turned out to be extremely valuable as well: 齐民要术校释 That book is " The Annotated Qimin Yaoshu ," and I bought a copy from amazon.cn to have for myself. Sort of like how you might have read annotated editions of Shakespeare in high school, it has a ton of footnotes explaining character issues, typos, and more importantly, interpreting and explaining hard to understand passages: 足 手熟揉為佳 does not mean, "roll the cooked grain using your feet and hands until done," it means "roll more grain into the cakes using your hands until they are done."