Okay, I know that the Mongols didn’t make it to Hawaii, but I was just in those warmer climes. While on a food tour, our guide and I got talking about…food - about my interest in medieval central Asian and Chinese cooking. He was interested in the redaction processes. Then when I got home, there was an email asking me about my redaction process.
So, I am going to take a slight sidetrack from my intended posts and over the next few weeks show exactly how I go about redaction. Please note that this is my way of redaction. By no means, is my way the only way to go about redacting a recipe. This is just the way that works for me. Your way of redaction may be different.
For this redaction example I will be using a recipe from Hu Sihui’s Yinshan Zhengyao as translated in A Soup for the Qan by Paul D. Buell and Eugene N. Anderson. The recipe is:
[49.] [41A] *Se-aBru [Pomegranate] Soup (This is the name of a Western Indian Food)76
It treats deficiency chill of the primordial storehouse, chill pain of the abdomen, and aching pain along the spinal column.
Mutton (two legs, the head, and a set of hooves), tsaoko cardamoms (four), cinnamon (three liang), sprouting ginger (half a jin), kasni (big as two chickpeas)
Boil ingredients into a soup using one *telir of water. Pour into a stone top cooking pot. Add a jin of pomegranate fruits, two liang of black pepper, and a little salt. The pomegranate fruits should be baked using one cup of vegetable oil and a lump of asafetida the size of a garden pea. Roast [i.e., cook dry ingredients] until a fine yellow in color, slightly black. Remove debris and oil in the soup. Strain clean. Use the smoke produced from roasting jiaxiang [operculum of Turbo cornutus and related spp], Chinese spikenard [Nardostachys chinensis], kasni, and butter to fumigate a jar.77 Seal up and store [the Se-aBru Soup] as desired.
I have not included the full footnotes to this passage at this time. However, part of footnote 76 states:
…We have tried it with pomegranate juice, the standard Near Eastern concentrate, rather than the whole fruit. It cooks down to what is, essentially, potted meat. The idea is evidently to produce a product that will store, under its oil-and-ghee preserving coating, for a long time. The fumigation of the jar presumably has a sterilizing value. Made with pomegranate juice, and far less oil and ghee, this is a rich, subtle, strongly lamb-flavored food…
Using this recipe and this section of note text, my laurel, Drake, redacted this to his ‘lamb jam’ recipe. Quite tasty, people flock to the fire when we make it. However, I continued to wonder each time we cooked the redaction if it were a close redaction. It would seem so because some of the professionals used juice rather than fruit in their redaction. So, one could conclude that Drake’s recipe is ‘good’.
Then I started to wonder how someone bakes a pomegranate. I mean, can you eat the skin? What happens when it is baked? At this point, I knew that I would need to redact this one myself.
Okay, so next week I will start my redaction notes and run it in a step by step to my process.
Until then:
If you want to build high, you must dig deep.
I’m off to research a bit more on my redaction.
~Natal’ia