[Sca-cooks] malt sugar

[Alec Story]

Malt sugar in a historical context is a mix of sugars actually, formed by
the action of amylase on starch.  Maltose is prominent, but so is glucose,
maltotriose and longer chain oligosaccharides, in proportion depending on
the quality of the mashing.

The recipes I mentioned are from the 544 CE Eastern Wei farm manual Qimin
Yaoshu, which I'm in the process of translating parts of, mostly for
brewing the rice and millet wines in it.  I find the malt recipe in it to
be interesting because we think that malting for alcohol production had
been phased out by around 200 BCE in favor of the fungal amylase method of
making grain wine, which is how sake and Chinese rice wines are made
today.  But malting was apparently preserved for food production.  I tried
to follow this recipe in my recreation of the 5000 BCE Mijiaya "beer" find,
although I had some process problems and it didn't work well.

The red text indicates that the text is an annotation added after the fact,
although they're unprovenanced.  The 1782 edition of Qimin Yaoshu printed
in the giant collection of most extant works at the time, Siku Quanshu
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siku_Quanshu> has the red text here in small
characters, which also indicates an annotation, but curiously the
modernly-annotated Chinese edition I work from, 齊民要術校釋 by 繆啟愉 doesn't
render the text as an annotation.  So that's unclear.  The annotations are
probably still period, although they could conceivably be as late as the
mid-1700s.

(apologies to those not using html-enabled email clients... I can't really
render this translation without html)
>From Chapter 68:
作糱法 Making Malt

〈八月中作。盆中浸小麥，即傾去水，日曝之。

〈Do this in the middle of the eighth month.  Soak wheat in a basin,
promptly pour out the water, and then put it in the sun.

一日一度著水，即去之。

Once a day, soak the wheat with water, and then take it out of the water.

腳生，布麥於席上，厚二寸許。

When a “foot” grows, spread the wheat on a mat, about two cun [1 cun = 2.3
cm, so 4.6 cm] thick.

一日一度，以水澆之，牙生便止。

Once a day, sprinkle water over the wheat, and when a “tusk/tooth” grows,
stop.

即散收，令乾，勿使餅；餅成則不復任用。

Break up and gather the wheat, so that it dries - do not make it into a[n
entangled] cake; if made into a cake, it will be unusable

此煮白餳糱。

Boil this down to a white malt sugar/syrup

若煮黑餳，即待芽生青，成餅，然後以刀𠠫取，乾之。

To make a dark sugar, wait for the sprouts to turn green and knot into a
cake, and then use a knife to divide it, and then dry the pieces.

欲令餳如琥珀色者，以大麥為其糱。〉

If you wish to make the sugar an amber color, use barley instead.〉

《孟子》曰：「雖有天下易生之物，一日曝之，十日寒之，未有能生者也。」

The Book of Mencius writes, “Even though there are many things that grow
easily on earth, there is none that will grow after one day in the sun and
ten days in the cold.”

There are additionally some other recipes in chapter 89 that I have not
translated yet, but have translated the titles of:

煮白餳法：To Boil White Syrup:

黑餳法：To Make Black Syrup:

琥珀餳法：To Make Amber Syrup:

煮餔法：To Boil a Meal:

《食經》作飴法：From *The Classic of Food*: To Make Syrup:

《食次》曰：More From *The Classic of Food*:

黃繭糖：Yellow Silk-Floss Candy:

If there is particular interest in any of these recipes I can translate
them, otherwise I'll get to them eventually but probably not for months.

I'll also cross-post this to the sca-china list so if one of them requests
a translation I'll update here as well.

On Sat, Feb 25, 2017 at 2:22 AM, Terry Decker <t.d.decker at att.net> wrote:

>
> Malt sugar is maltose, a disaccharide formed from two molecules.
>
> That should be "Malt sugar is maltose, a disaccharide formed from two
> joined molecules of glucose."
>
> Obviously, it's bedtime.
>
> Bear
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-- 
Alec Story