Literature. Drinking. 【文飲】

While reading Science and Civilisation  about mead, I found this passage talking about the medicated wines in The Wine Canon of North Hill  (北山酒經): Two wines with animal components are included, the venerable tiger-bone wine and the estimable mutton wine.  The tiger-bone is still going strong, but the lamb appears to have lost its appeal. (page 237) For a brief moment I felt safe in knowing that I didn't have a copy of the source text.  These were simpler times, full of innocence and happiness.  Then I though, "well, I should really make sure it hasn't been digitized yet" and lo and behold, ctext.org has it .  Ugh.  It's in the third chapter ("下") 44 〔白羊酒〕 White Mutton Wine 45 臘月取絕嫩羯羊肉三十斤， In the twelfth month take thirty jin of the meat of a particularly tender wether . 肉三十廳內要肥膘十斤， Within the thirty [ jin ?] should be ten jin of fat. 連骨使水六斗已來， Add six dou of water to the bones, 入鍋煮肉，令極軟。 Put it in a wok an...

Carolingia, the Boston-area SCA group is planning an event in March called the Laurels Prize Tourney , where laurels (people who are Officially Very Good At Arts and Sciences) put out challenges and people try to meet them. One of the challenges calls for well-researched mead, and I wondered if I could find any Chinese mead recipes.  I know that grain wines were far and away the dominant thing, but there's got to be something out there, right? Well, I read through 46 pages of search results  for every mention of "honey" after the Han dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE) in the big online repository of Chinese texts  and came up with nothing.  Rats.  I did learn that they preserved plums in honey, which is kind of cool I guess. ctext.org doesn't have everything though.  And while I was taking a break around page 20, I decided to see what Google could turn up. English wikipedia mentions this paper about a 1000-2000 BCE find supporting a mixed honey, rice and ...

I took a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in late September because I thought there was an exhibit on Chinese laquer ware that was going to close soon. I had the year wrong, it's opening and closing in 2017.  Whoops. Instead, I took a stroll through the Chinese collection, on the lookout for drinking cups I could replicate, and took a ton of photos for my friends with research interests.  There was a lot of debate about what exactly this woman is holding happening in the SCA China facebook group , and I happened to be walking past  the statue at the time so I took some video and helped answer the question. I also took a look at the scrolls section since I have friends who do beautiful calligraphy and are always looking for ideas. I came across this beautiful scroll : Which is titled, politely, "Drinking and composing poetry."  Except it isn't.  Here's the title colophon Read right-to-left, these are foot-high characters that read LITERAT...

Pennsic was a whirlwind of activity, and despite me promising to update this blog "real soon I promise" life got in the way. I think this is a good time to take inventory of what I've figured out over the past year or so.  There are a lot of unanswered questions, but I've made a ton of progress nailing down this process. Yeast Cakes I've got a recipe for "exceptional" yeast cakes that worked once, last year. I tried to make it a month ago and it rotted 😑 But hey, it worked once. I also learned that the warning about "don't store this in a sealed container or it'll turn black and get gross" wasn't kidding, since my cakes did just that.  Mr. Jia wasn't joking, apparently. The recipe as I handed it out at Pennsic is posted at the bottom. Brewing I made one rice wine for Pennsic that was delightful.  Sweet, dark, saucy, it was great.  I didn't get to panel it, sadly.  I made one short-wine a while ago ...