The trend of using distillers to make various kinds of nutritious dews, called flower dews and scented dews, appeared in the mid-to-late Ming Dynasty. Thus, it became popular to use flower dew to mix with alcohol. Is this a traditional Chinese cocktail?
In China, there is a long history of infusing fragrant flowers, leaves and fruits into liquor to form flower and fruit wines full of botanical flavors. Interestingly, accordingly, a special wine-tasting habit has been formed. When having a banquet, these unique and fragrant wines were blended with more mellow yellow wine and shochu on the spot to make a mixer for the guests and hosts to ****drink. In the Ming Dynasty, jasmine wine and Jinhua wine were mixed together, while the recipe of the Qing Dynasty's mixing set mentions that Shuqi wine was mixed with papaya wine in a 50-50 ratio, and that an appropriate amount of osmanthus shochu was added to the yellow wine. This method of pairing two different wines suggests a cocktail-like mixing tradition in China.
After the popularity of huaolu, luolu, a mixture of huaolu and wine, quickly became a new category. Record: displaying wine with a little rose or rose dew per pound of wine. The wine is very fragrant when you steam the lingonberry dew. All fruits can be reproduced. Another Qing dynasty recipe also advocated blending wine with Zhu, listing as many as 34 types of perfume, including seasonal flowers such as plum blossoms, peonies, orange blossoms, and chamomile, as well as grasses and leaves such as rice leaves, orange leaves, cypress leaves, and calamus leaves. Cao Xueqin's grandfather, Cao Yin, liked to entertain his guests with wine laced with chrysanthemum dew and proudly wrote a poem entitled Jumping Top Collection.
In particular, Zhou Lianggong late Ming scholar chrysanthemum dew with wine documented a method of mixing plum blossoms with wine, which is characterized by beautiful roses can not be self-contained, and plum slices to be taught to be light. smellers drop gold straw, cut sugar cane, lay flowers and squat. Generally, the literature only mentions simple distillation of freshly picked plum blossoms, but Min pointed out that in the Ming Dynasty, the people of Haicheng, Fujian Province, adopted a unique process of cutting sugar cane into segments and placing them in iron barrels on traditional Chinese distillation furnaces, accumulating a large number of clean and intact fresh plum blossoms, which were then slowly distilled and purified by burning a small fire in the furnace.
This record is very surprising because we all know that rum, which originated in Cuba, is also made from sugarcane using the distillation technique. Haicheng, also known as the port of Guangdong, was one of the world's largest trading ports during the Ming Dynasty, and the end and beginning of American trade in the East. Was rum in its infancy moved across the ocean with the help of maritime trade?
In the rum process, bagasse is fermented by yeast and then distilled. However, Zhou Lianggong's account does not mention whether the Haicheng people fermented the sugarcane before steaming it. Therefore, we can't be sure what kind of finished product the combination of plum and sugarcane was after distillation. However, it is impossible to purify sugar if fresh sugarcane is distilled, and the practice of distilling fresh sugarcane has never been practiced in history. So the people of Haicheng at that time probably fermented the sugarcane gently first, and Zhou Liangshang, as an outsider, did not know this. If that's the case, then the finished product is Ming Dynasty Haicheng Xiangmei rum, which has a very low alcohol content.
During the Ming and Qing dynasties, floral water was often stored for a period of time after distillation. So if Haicheng Plum Blossom Manna was really a low-level distilled spirit, it would naturally have an aging process. With such a unique plum blossom dew, Haicheng people like to incorporate it into a variety of high-quality wines. Each bottle has a jug, a little bit of dew, and its aroma stays with you and tastes different. No isn't this a Ming Dynasty rum cocktail?
Even if we could t assert that the rum made by the Haicheng people was really in its infancy, at least Zhou Lianggong's account states that the Haicheng people often mixed homemade plum dew into their wine, treating such a finished product as
Today, based on the information provided by Zhou, it would be possible to make Moon Harbor Plum Rum, which could then be concocted into Moon Harbor Plum Cocktails as a special winter drink. It is also possible to recreate the Moon Harbor Rose Rum and the Moon Harbor Rose Cocktail to make the old Ming-style crème cocktail linger in the mouth, thus paying homage to the Eastern beginnings of the Maritime Silk Road.