Literature. Drinking. 【文飲】

A few days ago I was shopping for glutinous rice and it occurred to me that I didn't know whether I should get polished (white) glutinous rice or brown/black/purple glutinous rice.   So I asked http://reddit.com/r/askhistorians . I got an answer!  It's white rice. But the historian who answered me cited two works: Bray, Francesca.  Science and Civilisation in China Volume 6, Part 2: Agriculture . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. 381-86. Shi, Sheng-han.  A Preliminary Survey of the Book Ch’i Min Yao Shu: An Agricultural Encyclopedia of the 6th Century. Peking: Science, 1974. 53-54 (an annotated English-language translation of  Qimin Yao Shu ). The first book is one I knew existed but costs something like $300 on Amazon .  So its contents are a mystery.  But the second one is the same book I've been working on translating... and there's apparently an English translation already floating around. In my defense, I didn't find it becau...

I wanted to find a recipe that didn't require seven batches of grain, so I started on another short recipe elsewhere in scroll seven. I didn't translate the process for making the yeast cakes because I'm not going to make them, although it seems to be similar to the process for the lumpy yeast cakes I translated earlier, using the same grain mixture. As usual, each sentence in Chinese is followed by my translation in English. 釀白醪法：取糯米一石，冷水淨淘，漉出著甕中，作魚眼沸湯浸之。To make white young wine: take one dan of glutinous rice (Oryza sativa var. glutinosa) , rinse it in cold water until clean, strain it and put it in a weng, and soak it in water boiling with bubbles like fish eyes. 經一宿，米欲絕酢，炊作一餾飯，攤令絕冷。Pass one night, and the rice should be decidedly sour; steam it, and once it’s cooked spread it out to cool. 取魚眼湯沃浸米泔二斗，煎取六升，著甕中，以竹掃衝之，如茗渤。Take two dou of the water from rinsing the rice, and boil it with bubbles like fish eyes down to six sheng (0.6 dou), put it in the weng, then t...

I spent last week attending Pennsic , and brought my lumpy yeast cake wine to the Arts and Sciences display, as well as the inter-kingdom brewing competition and the East kingdom brewers' guild panel.  What a blast!  Getting to share this weird beverage with so many people was really fun, especially since some people actually liked it, and some people really hated it. About 60 people came by my booth at the A&S display and tried the millet wine, consuming a little over half a gallon.  What I didn't know at the beginning is that the wine settles out very quickly, so by the end of the display, I was pouring something the consistency of pancake batter.  The flavor didn't change much, so I suspect that the heavy notes of bread are coming from the suspended yeast.  More study is needed to figure out what the flavor is like after letting it settle for a few weeks. I got a lot of great feedback at the brewing competitions.  Of course, I'd really love t...

I've actually made some lumpy yeast cake wine !  It doesn't even taste bad: In the jug. The texture is pretty interesting, with a few distinct layers. Spread on a cheesecloth - I had doubled it but had to take out the second layer because it wasn't draining. Draining.  After draining. Bottled! And poured.  It's quite opaque. When I was straining it, it had a pretty strong rubbing alcohol aroma, but after straining it's mostly gone, and what's left is a mostly clean aroma with a hint of soy sauce. It has a very full mouthfeel (maybe it's too thick and I should have added less grain), with both some residual sweetness and a sharp acidity.  After swallowing, it leaves some yeasty notes, and some estery aroma that I associate with alcohol that needs to be aged more.  It seems fairly alcoholic because it leaves a little bit of a burn in my throat, but I don't really care to dig out all the equipment I'd need to measur...

In the recipes so far, I've been working on the assumption that 10 sheng  is one dou , and ten dou  is one dan , based on the entries for those characters in A Student's Dictionary . I'm writing up the lesson plan for the class I'm teaching at Pennsic ( Zidian and Cidian : Chinese Dictionaries ) and as I was paging through Wang Li's Classical Chinese Dictionary , I noticed that one of the appendixes has unit conversions.  What's more, it has dated  unit conversions, with a list of textual and archaeological evidence to back them up. This doesn't really change the recipes since they scale, but it's interesting.  What volumes are the recipes actually calling for? According to Wikipedia , the Qiming Yaoshu  was finished in year 544 CE and took perhaps ten years to write.  This places it during the Eastern Wei dynasty.  Unfortunately, there is no entry for the Wei dynasty at all, but it's one of the  Southern and Northern Dynasties ...

The past two posts  are my pretty literal translations of the recipe for lumpy yeast cake wine.  I'm going to try to make this, and it's convenient to have a plain English recipe to follow. I haven't tried it yet, although I have purchased some millet and some commercial yeast balls to give it a try, and I've signed up for the arts and sciences display at Pennsic , so I'd better have something to show! I'm assuming that one dan ( 石) is 100L, one dou ( 斗) is 10L, and that one hu ( 斛) is 50L. Lumpy Yeast Cake Wine A dry, strong millet wine. For vessels totalling 7000L.  Scale down (or up, for the adventurous) as appropriate. Ingredients: 900L of Proso millet ( Panicum miliaceum ) , divided as follows into seven charges: 200L 170L 140L 110L 100L 90L 90L Additional perhaps 100L millet on standby to adjust quantities during brewing. 130L of lumpy yeast cakes (1/7 the amount of grain) 400L water (this might actually be seven t...

I've finished a draft of an actual recipe!  Haven't tried making it of course, but this one goes all the way from raw grain, specifically broomtail millet , through to a finished product. The "lumpy" part of the title is because I can't find any better translation of 笨 - in modern Chinese, it means "stupid" but that seems like not the right translation.  A commentator leaves a cryptic note about the pronunciation of it, so maybe it's an odd usage, or a variant character. I'm breaking this recipe into two sections: one for the yeast cakes, and one for the wine.  It seems to be the case that most medieval Chinese fermented grain products, and indeed many traditional alcohols today, use a combined yeast and as pergillus starter called 酒麴 jiǔqū, which I'm translating as "yeast cakes."  They're solid balls or blocks of grain which the yeast and fungi needed to break down the starches in the target grains and then ferment the...