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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 wa...
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Medicinal Cinnamon "Syrups" from Jujia Biyong

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The blog, long updated, must fall silent; long silent, must update. Thus it has ever been. It's been a year.  I've worked on some small brewing projects but mostly my 2020 and early 2021 have been focused on surviving The Plague. I was delighted to find a challenge to recreate non-alcoholic beverages as part of the East Kingdom's Laurel Challenge event , so I went back to the ~1400 CE household manual The Complete Collection of Important Household Skills  (Jūjiā Bìyòng 居家必用) and surveyed it for recipes that matched the brief. While it is common to find medieval food at our feasts and dayboards, medieval beverages tend to be somewhat more limited. Aside from water and alcohol, what might be found and recreated? This challenge asks you to find examples of drinks – with recipes, if possible, and to recreate them, if you are able. As you do, consider whether they can be offered as options for events. Are ingredients a limitation in terms of availability or safety? How would the...
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Two Thirst-Waters for Pennsic

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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 ornament...
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