[Sca-cooks] "An Arab Mead" !!!

[Peters, Rise J.]

I'm surprised, reading the article, that it doesn't appear the gentleman
confirmed his counterintuitive reading of the recipe by making some
according to the directions and seeing if it fermented.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: david friedman [mailto:ddfr at best.com]
> Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2001 10:05 PM
> To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
> Subject: [Sca-cooks] "An Arab Mead" !!!
>
>
> The latest T.I. has an article describing a recipe from an Arabic
> medicinal formulary which the author thinks is a mead or, more
> precisely, pyment. I have sent off the following letter to T.I..
> Comments?
> -----
> The article "An Arab Mead" in T.I. 140 describes its recipe as
> "clearly a variety of mead (or, more properly, a sort of sack
> pyment)." I would have said that, on the evidence provided, it is
> clearly nothing of the sort. Consider:
>
> 1. The recipe specifies boiling the liquid until it is reduced by
> half. That is a very long boil, and one could not reasonably expect
> any yeast in the original grape pulp to survive it. Nothing is said
> about adding any additional source of yeast after the liquid has
> cooled.
>
> 2. The liquid contains grape juice at about twice its natural
> concentration, plus about three pounds  of honey per gallon. The
> combination comes to roughly three times the sugar concentration
> normally used to make wine or mead.
>
> 3. The recipe says to put the liquid into flasks and stopper them.
> There is no intermediate fermentation and nothing is said about
> leaving the stoppers loose. Failing to do so, as the author of the
> article points out, leads to problems.
>
> Each of those points by itself is evidence that what is being
> described is not a fermented drink. Combining them and  adding the
> religious prohibition against drinking fermented gape juice makes the
> article's interpretation highly implausible.
> ---
> Those of you who have not received you T.I. yet will find the article
> webbed by the author at:
>
> http://web.raex.com/~obsidian/arabmead.html
> --
> David/Cariadoc
> http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
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