[Sca-cooks] Chinese Honey was malt sugar

[Alec Story]

Solveig,

In Chinese, ancient and modern, 蜜 "mi" means honey.  Note the "bug" radical
虫 inside it.

For malt sugar Qimin Yaoshu uses 糱 "nice" to mean malted grain, and 餳
"xing" to mean syrupy reductions like molasses.  I misspoke when I
translated it as "sugar," as xing implies an ability to flow, although it
does occasionally mean solid sugar for some authors.  The word I expect for
"sugar" is 糖 "tang."

The lack of a crystalization step in the recipes I have means that either
it was intended to be syrup, or the author thought that crystalization was
obvious and needed no description.  I lean towards the former.

The mei plum references were not in Qimin Yaoshu so it will take me some
time to find them again.  I'll go looking though.

Please cite me in the society as Þórfinnr Hróðgeirsson (Thorfinnr
Hrothgeirsson) and in the mundane world as Alec Story.

YIS,
Thorfinnr Hrothgeirsson

On Mar 2, 2017 2:40 PM, "Solveig Throndardottir" <nostrand at acm.org> wrote:

Lord Thorfinnr!

Greetings from Sólveig!

> I recently was doing some digging to support a Chinese mead (I was going
to
> enter the Laurel Challenge Tourney in Carolingia, but alas it conflicts
> with a local event).  I read through every mention of the word for honey (
> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%9C%9C)* on ctext.org, looking for
> references.

Funky things appear to happen with URLs, but ordinary unicode appears to
pass through the list sever with no problems. The recipient may not have
the necessary fonts installed on their computer. Also, some people may
still be using inferior operating systems or email clients which can not
handle unicode.

> Most were things like "honey-sweet" or "as sweet as honey," but there were
> a few interesting other ones.

Out of curiosity, is 蜜 the hanzi that you are referring to? Japanese uses
an entirely different character for malt sugar. And, yet another for
writing sucrose.

> Apparently mei-plums (*Prunus mume*) were preserved in honey during our
> period.  If someone is interested I can try to dig up the actual lines
that
> this involved, although I don't recall coming across more than just
> references to the practice.

Of course, I am interested. If you already have it translated, then send
that. If not, just send a reference. I have a copy of the original with
Japanese translation.

Finally, if I happen to cite you someplace, do you prefer to be cited as
Alec Story? Does this apply to both inside and outside the Society?

Your Humble Servant
Sólveig Þróndardóttir
Amateur Scholar

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