[Sca-cooks] Concerning Ryori Monogatari

[Alec Story]

I don't have plans for what to do once I'm done translating.  My primary
purpose is to support my own and others' historical brewing attempts at
recreation, and that's what my blog is for.  Translations need to be
informed by practice, so it's taking some time.  The recipes I've posted
are (or should be - I've forgotten to mark some of them) released under
CC-BY which means you can use them freely as long as you credit me, but I'm
intentionally holding back some recipes because I don't want to sink my
ability to publish a book for money later.

I don't plan to translate the entire book either - it's an agricultural
manual, and the first several scrolls are devoted to planting crops,
rearing livestock and managing your orchard.  I'm primarily interested in
the rice and millet wines, and secondarily in the other foods.

About grain wines:

Around 500 BCE, in China, it was discovered that letting wheat get moldy in
the right way produces a substance that can turn grain into alcohol.
What's really going on here is that a fungus (*Aspergillus* or *Rhizopus*)
is present, which converts the starch to sugar just as malting does, and
then conventional yeasts ferment that sugar to alcohol.

By 544, when Jia Sixie published Qimin Yaoshu, this was *the* way to
produce alcohol in China.  The older malt beverages had been completely
discarded, although as we see in the recipe for malt syrup, malting was
very much a thing they still did, but only for food.

Qimin Yaoshu describes a process that persists to today in China.  Wheat,
sometimes with herbs, and sometimes other grains such as millet, are
ground, formed into cakes of varying size by mixing with water, and left to
sit in a dark humid place for some weeks.  This process is controlled to
foster the growth of the right fungi and not the wrong ones - I screwed
this up once and boy did it stink.

These are what I call "yeast cakes" - there's a dedicated word for it in
Chinese, so I have to invent something more descriptive since I don't like
burdening my readers with having to remember too many untranslated
technical terms, and with Chinese in particular, transliterating terms can
be frustrating for more knowledgeable readers because many words are
homophonic and transliterate the same.  These yeast cakes are available
modernly in Asian grocery stores, and are what I used to start my culture
when I made the period cakes.  Remember that these are cakes in the sense
of a wad of grain product, not in the sense of tea cakes.  They taste
really really bad.

The brewing process crushes up the yeast cakes, incubates them in water for
a few days, and then mixes them with cooked grain and some more water.  By
controlling the rate and quantity of further additions of grain, the
skilled brewer can control how strong and how sweet the final product is.
Very sweet and strong wines can be made, as can dry and strong, or dry and
weak.

These yeast cakes were also used in the production of vinegar, soy sauce, a
variety of fermented meat sauces and some other kinds of fermented products.

My understanding of sake is less deep, but my understanding is that modern
"koji" is a culture of *Aspergillus oryzae*, one of the fungi in Chinese
yeast cakes.  Sake producers spread it on a portion of the cooked rice to
culture it up in preparation for sake making, and then mix that with the
rest of the rice in a process similar to the Chinese one, but without the
staggered additions of more grain.  Because they use a rice base, and a
pure culture, sake doesn't get a lot of the dark "saucy" flavors from the
yeast cakes.

I don't have much information on when this fermentation method reached
Japan.  Wikipedia's article on sake discusses the evidence for timing
fairly well and I think convinces me that it's definitely period but you
should read it yourself.

On Fri, Mar 3, 2017 at 12:06 AM, Stefan li Rous <stefanlirous at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Thorfinnr Hrothgeirsson commented:
> <<< Hello, I'm the fellow translating ???? (Qimin Yaoshu).  You can follow
> along at brewing.alecstory.org. >>>
>
> What are you planning on doing with it, after you finish translating it?
> I'm always willing to add it to the FOOD-MANUSCRIPTS section in the
> Florilegium.
>
> Or are you planning on trying to get it published as a book somewhere? Not
> wanting to compete with you if that is the case. Just interested in helping
> make it available. There certainly seems to be some interest in some
> quarters. Although as Soup for the Qan showed, a very high price can
> drastically affect the number sold. :-(
>
> <<< I've got several recipes for yeast cakes up there, which are the
> ancestor of Japanese koji, >>>
>
> Which is what?
>
> <<<<although the process is rather different.  The wheat base in the yeast
> cakes adds a soy sauce-like character that sake lacks. >>>
>
> Were these yeast cakes a period item? Do you mean by this solidified
> yeast, as in the powdered yeast sold today to make beverages or bread? Was
> this a way to store yeast? Or are you speaking of a cake made of wheat with
> yeast in it?
>
> <<< As a side note, it seems that Unicode characters do sometimes make it
> through the list - I could read Solveig's just fine.  In that light I'll
> continue to post characters when it's appropriate, but sign my name using
> ASCII. >>>
>
> The digest though, apparently unlike the list itself, has the characters
> turned into question marks. And the various quote symbols. :-(
>
> However, I'm still saving these various messages to be added to the
> Florilegium fd-Japan-msg file since I think most folks will still find the
> messages useful even without the Japanese words and certainly more useful
> than not having the messages.
>
> I certainly didn't know about wasabi. Now, I'm beginning wonder how much
> of the wasabi I've eaten really was wasabi.
> --------
> THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
>    Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas          StefanliRous at gmail.com
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/marksharris
> **** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Alec Story