Soda was [Sca-cooks] steam-baking

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Also sprach Susan Fox-Davis:
>  > Also sprach Decker, Terry D.:
>>  >There is a little difference between sodium carbonate (Na2CO3) and washing
>>  >soda (Na2CO3.10H2O).  Washing soda is sodium carbonate decahydrate, or
>>  >sodium carbonate with ten water molecules bonded to it.  Sodium
>>carbonate is
>>  >a white powder.  Washing soda is transparent and crystalline.  The modern
>>  >process for manufacturing sodium carbonate first produces sodium carbonate
>>  >decahydrate which is then heated to release the water molecules.  For our
>>  >purposes, they are interchangeable.
>>
>>  Okay, I'll go with this. I believe my idea that washing soda and
>>  sodium carbonate were the same thing comes from Flower and Rosenbaum.
>>  The point would seem to hinge on whether you can use washing soda in
>>  this way without it being more poisonous than, say, baking soda, and
>>  whether there's any reason to believe it's more what this Yuan recipe
>>  had in mind by saying "soda".
>>
>>  Adamantius
>
>My question is:  where did the Chinese get soda in the Qan's time?  Is this a
>period ingredient, or some redactor's addition to appeal to modern tastes?

The short, simple answer? I don't know. The smartarse but true
answer? Probably the same place the Romans got it from hundreds of
years before the Yuan dynasty. Wherever that was... some mineral
deposit, maybe?

These people did have a fairly sophisticated science of chemistry,
and it seems reasonable if they could make gunpowder, they could
prepare sodium compounds from naturally occurring salts. Grind up
enough rocks and you can do all kinds of cool stuff.

Adamantius