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A Few Cooking Recipes

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I was asked by to translate some of the food recipes in Qimin Yaoshu by some SCA colleagues, so I thought I'd share them.  I'm hoping they'll give me cooking and tasting notes, which of course I'll share here. It's worth pointing out that this book is from northern China, and probably has a fair amount of barbarian influence on the cooking, hence all the sheep (or goat, they're the same word) meat. There are quantities here that I should explain before we dive in. Weight 1 jin  = 16 liang A reasonable guess of the weight in this period and locality in modern units is that 1 jin  is 440 grams. Volume 1 dan  = 10 dou 1 dou  = 10 sheng 1 sheng = 10 ge A reasonable estimate of the volume in this period in modern units is that 1 dou  is 3 liters. 羹臛法第七十六 Chapter 76: Methods for Stew and Broth. 《食經》作芋子酸臛法：To Make Taro Seed Sour Broth From the Classic of Food: 「豬羊肉各一斤，水一斗，煮令熟。 “One jin each of pork and sheep meat, one dou of water,
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Chinese Mead?

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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 grape ferme
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Imperial-Style Thirst Water

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I was trawling through a really large Yuan Dynasty cookbook The Compendium of Essential Arts for Family Living when I came across a section of recipes titled "thirst-waters."  Curious, I read more. The book says that these recipes are called, in foreign lands, 攝里白 which in reconstructed Middle Chinese is something like "syep li baek."  A similar recipe I found in an anecdote in the 18th century Corrections to the Bencao Gangmu , relating a 14th century orchard of lemon trees planted by the Khan, says that the mongols call these drinks 舍里別 “syae li pjet.” There's a category of Central- and West-Asian drinks that are fruit syrups dissolved into water called " sherbets ," and that's indeed what these recipes are for.  The earliest references I've found to thirst-waters in China date to the 12th century, where the Old Stuff from the Martial Forest  lists, but does not give recipes for seventeen drinks named "cool waters": Sweet b
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