[Sca-cooks] Ni Tsan's "Cloud Forest Hall Rules For Eating AndDrinking"...

Craig Jones drakey at internode.on.net
Tue Feb 20 03:35:25 PST 2007


> Those brewing recipes are badly garbled--Francoise and I agree
> on that!  They got scrambled in transmission, evidently when
> the book was just ms.  They might be reconstructable, but I
> wouldn't bother.

I kinda of figured that they were badly mangled.  Although when you have a
look at the rice wine recipe it (although still mangled) seems to hint at
methods of fermentation with Fungi (Aspergillius Oryzae mainly).  The Mung
bean wine pretty much took the ingredients as inspiration.

In the case of Mung Bean wine it was a mash using mung beans (with enough
barley to add sufficient Amylase) or cooked mung beans (infected with Koji
(Aspergillius Oryzae) - although I haven't got this to work) and then the
resultant liquor has various ingredients instilled (such as muskmelon,
cassia, smartweed, etc.)

> The Chinese make all kinds of tinctures of animals.  They soak
> mutton in hard liquor because the iron is good for anemia from
> malaria etc.  THey sometimes would add mutton or medicinal
> animals to the brewing.  But 99.9999% of the time, when you
> hear of "mutton wine" or "snake wine" it means hard liquor
> (NOT wine) with the animal soaked in it to make a tincture.
> Of course herbs were more often added in the actual brewing
> process, and still more often in the distilling, though again
> "herbal wine" usually means hard liquor with stuff soaked in
> it.  The liquor is raw whiskey or vodka made from millet or
> rice, or sometimes other starch feeds.  They get it by
> distilling Chinese "wine," which is really a still ale or
> beer.  Distilling was known by 900 or 1000 AD in China, and
> probably earlier, since what sure looks like a medicinal still
> has turned up in a 100-200 AD site.  

That's effectively the conclusion I've come to.  I currently have some wash
that I have to run though the still (not made from mung bean at this stage),
which I'm going to use to experiment again with the Mung Bean Wine recipe
(if the flavour is alight, I'll make a mash from Mung Beans) and some of the
'wine' recipes from YSCY.

If interested look up H.
> T. Huang's volume on fermentation in the SCIENCE AND
> CIVILIZATION IN CHINA series.  H. T. was an incredible guy.
> Lived to 100.  This book was his life work.  He retired from
> USDA and dedicated the rest of his life to it--it came out
> shortly before he passed on.  

Haven't found a copy yet. Now that I've changed states, I might hit Kinetica
and see if I can find a copy to inter-library loan...

Cheers and thanks,

Drakey.

Ps. Who needed the CFHR redactions again, brains all fuzzy???
Pps. Have recovered from the hospital trip and am feeling rather grand, if a
bit tired... Nighty night all...

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