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 ...

On the outskirts of Xi'an, the Chan River flows.  It eventually meets the Wei River, which flows into the Yellow river.  On a dusty terrace above the river is a site called Mijiaya , where excavations in the 2000s uncovered pottery dating from 3400 BCE to 2000 BCE. Some of the earliest potter, from 3400 BCE to 2900 BCE, the late Yangshao period , includes parts of an amphora, an urn and a funnel.  This May, some archaeologists at Stanford published an analysis of residue on the pottery: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/05/18/1601465113 It's malted barley, along with millet, something called Job's tears, and some other starches. I think this is awesome!  We know that alcohol production in China predates writing.   The Records of the Grand Historian  ( 史記 ) from 50 BCE discusses King Zhou, the last king of the Shang dynasty, who reigned 1075–1046 BCE: [He] made a pond of wine, hung the trees with meat, made men and women chase each other ab...

I posted about rice cooking methods a little while ago, with mixed success, but I think I've got it down now.  The secret? Soak the rice overnight . Delicious and sticky after steaming for 20 minutes I had initially thought that I could measure hydration of the rice by how much it expanded, and since it's done expanding after about an hour or so I stopped soaking there.  But what a difference soaking overnight makes! Soaking didn't seem to affect the millet much, which might be why Qimin Yaoshu  says to steam it twice.  It's also probably why I didn't have as much trouble with millet wines. Note how some grains are fluffy and some are still dark I tried steaming a second time since I was steaming the millet anyway, and  poured a little bit of cool water over the rice and millet before returning it to the steamer.  The rice was 100% cooked throughout, as was the millet, although the millet feels a bit dry to the touch. This work is lic...

I'm trying to get a short wine recipe to work, but it's tricky. One of the problems is how long to incubate the yeast cakes before using them.  The recipe says: 浸麴發如魚眼湯。 Soak the yeast cakes until they bubble with bubbles the size of fish eyes. And so I waited for bubbles.  They never came, and one day when I checked on the brew... Sadness.  It's covered in a slick of fungus. This work is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License .