Literature. Drinking. 【文飲】

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...

This weekend was fairly busy, brew-wise; nothing is done yet but I'm still pretty excited. First, on Thursday I started a blackberry short mead kit (really a metheglin, since it includes some spices, interestingly steeped in boiling water), given to my by my mother, which she bought over the summer, using two pounds of blackberry honey from the same source.  The kits are pretty slick, but I didn't follow the directions entirely —I used boiled tap water rather than bottled, and I didn't trust the instructions to just cover the bottle with the supplied cloth, so I put a bubbler on instead. I'm using a new three-piece bubbler, which is easier to clean.  This recipe calls itself a "short mead" because it suggests that you only ferment for 7-14 days.  I'll have to see how it tastes—mead doesn't normally have a lot to cover up off flavors produced by short fermentation, but maybe the blackberry and spices will hide it. I also racked my existin...