Dear [REDACTED],
Though there is an insufficient assemblage of bees at your house (on account of Will), the first dish I selected from Qimin Yaoshu (The Important Arts of the Qi People) involves honey.
I am not one for entrance ceremony, so here is the first recipe:
To cook Ye - Section 83.3.1 - Book on Zung (Steamed rice stuff in Leafs)
Shici says that, to cook ye, you must use sticky rice flour, and filter it through bolting silk, and then mix it with water and honey - to the consistency of hard-ish noodle dough. And then, roll it to a long dough string/cylinder to rough 1-chi long, and roughly 2-cuan in diameter. Then, Then, you must “po” it into 4 seperate strings/cylinders. And then paste minced dates as well as minced chestnut onto the surface of said cylinders, from top to bottom. Then, use your oil smeared bamboo leaf, wrap said cylinders, and then steam until they are done. Remember, that only put two doughs per leaf, and don’t open the leafs, just remove the ends, and unwrap the bondage.
Why didn’t you pick X other recipe?
Something be damned, there is a lot of meat dishes and very odd things to get in our time and place! One of the many example is listed below (not translated by me)
| Chinese | English |
|---|---|
| 肉醬法:牛、羊、麞、鹿、兔肉皆得作。取良殺新肉，去脂，細剉。(陳肉乾者不任用。合脂令醬膩。) | For meat condiment: beef, mutton, venison, hare [or meat of any game] will do; always use good, freshly slaughtered meat. Pick away fats, and mince finely. (Meat aged or dried is not good; fat makes the product over-unctuous.) |
| 曬麴令燥，熟擣，絹簁。大率肉一斗，麴末五升，白鹽兩升半，黃蒸一升， (曝乾，熟擣，絹簁。) 盤上和令均調，內甕子中。 (有骨者，和訖先擣，然後盛之。骨多髓，既肥膩，醬亦然也。) 泥封，日曝。寒月作之。宜埋之於黍穰積中。 | Dry some wine starter in sunshine, when very dry, pound fine and sift. Take 10 parts of finely-chopped meat, 5 of starter powder, 2.5 of white table salt, 1 of yellow mould (pounded fine when dry and sift). Mix well in a pan, then move into a pottery jar (Pound bony parts well before adding. Marrowy bones will make the condiment greasy.), seal with mud and bake in sunshine. If made in winter days, bury the jar in millet chaff [to keep warm]. |
| 二七日開看，醬出無麴氣，便熟矣。 | Check the mixture after 27 days, and if no further gases from the starter are visible, the condiment is ready. |
This is one of the most well quantified recipes, whenever you get time, you should try to make it! But I don’t want to start it off giving your a recipe that takes \Delta27 days.
Some other reasons why I picked this steamed ricecake with fruits:
It doesn’t have neat measurements, that is true. But it is somewhat similar to a combination of modern dishs called 年糕(niangao, lit. year cake) and 粽子(zongzi, lit. lu-leaf wrapped rice things). These are sufficiently popular dishes that, even in English, the similarity should offer nice reference points to reconstruct the quantity from modern recipes. Seems fun!
Plus, it helps to build some capacity for steaming - the equipment for steaming is rather essential for many branches of Chinese cooking, and it is much easier than getting a large pottery jar to ferment meat sauces!
Actually, here is the whole book, knock yourself out!
The book. Modern transformer based translators are still kinda shit at reading between the lines in so far as middle Chinese is concerned. But for most purposes, it is sufficient to look at the rough shape of things! See the steamed rice translation when just popped into deepl.com .
with broomcorn millet rice end, silk Luo, water, honey ulcer, such as strong soup cake surface. Hands take hold of, so that the length of more than a foot, more than two inches wide. Four broken, with dates, chestnut meat up and down with the whole, and oil coated bamboo Ruo wrapped, rotten steam. Dien two, Ruo does not open, broken off the two heads, remove the bundle attached.
There are latter Chinese annotated books that have translations of said recipes into more modern Chinese (like say, People from the Song Dynasty, now looking 500 years into the past, annotating the Qimin Yaoshu for their people now that the times have changed.)
