jamburiani

In an earlier post I mentioned that the English translator of one of the earliest cookbooks known made a fairly big deal on her blog about the fact that the cookbook contains Arabic recipes for sandwiches from the 9th and 10th century. It is a neat connection showing how few things in food are really unique to one place or time but to me there is a bigger surprise in al-Warraqs tenth-century cookbook; a possible source of leavening.

There are two broad forms of leavening in baked goods. You can use yeast to biologically produce carbon dioxide gas or you can use chemical leavening to produce gas through an acid base reaction. Note that I didn’t specify carbon dioxide gas when dealing with chemical leavening. Practically all of the acid base reactions used do produce carbon dioxide but there are some reactions that produce ammonia gas also though the use of baker’s ammonia (ammonium carbonate). While they have been important in the past particularly in Northern Europe and Scandinavia (and still have some use) I’m going to ignore them for now and concentrate on reactions that produce only carbon dioxide.

Chemical leavening of the carbon dioxide kind relies on reacting a base containing carbon and oxygen (carbonate or bicarbonate) with an acid. If you remember high school chemistry that means you also have a random hydrogen (from the acid) and something that forms the positive ion on the base. Hydrogen isn’t a problem and goes into forming water but you need to find a water soluble cation that is safe to have in the body. For cooking that pretty much means sodium, potassium, and calcium.

Calcium carbonate might well be the oldest of these chemicals used in food. However most of it’s use is for counteracting acidity. While it can produce carbon dioxide people don’t tend to think of it as leavening. Yet one of the known uses of chalk, calcium carbonate, in cooking is as an additive to poor wheat because it will help a yeast bread rise even with poor wheat in it. The problem is that chalk is cheaper and heavier than bread flour. Chalk isn’t harmful to the body in small quantities but it isn’t nutritious either but the economics of the situation push towards increasing using cheap, poor quality flour and “improving” it with cheaper chalk. However calcium carbonate is the active ingredient in antacids. If you add more than a little amount to the flour you will have unreacted base reacting with the stomach acids which is not a good thing. So it comes down to sodium carbonate, sodium bicarbonate, potassium carbonate, and potassium bicarbonate. Most of the time people state that these chemical leavening agents weren’t used as leavening until the 18th century but that is a simplification.

Humans have been using potassium carbonate for thousands of years in the form of lye. Soaking ashes from a hardwood fire in water generates a very alkaline solution of potassium carbonate. If you don’t use it up making soap or other more industrial uses such as fertilizer, glass making, or dyeing you can let it evaporate to get potash – potassium carbonate plus other impurities. I haven’t tried using it but mostly people claim that it has a smokey taste. In English pearlash refers to a refined or purified potash that removed the smokey taste. It is often described as the first leavening agent and it was the first commercially sold one in the 19th century.

It might have an even longer history. There are sources that point to potash as a guild secret ingredient used by bakers in the Netherlands to make a fluffy gingerbread in the 14th century. Potash has also been used in Chinese noodles especially in the northwestern regions near the Gobi desert. In noodles it isn’t a leavening agent really as there is no acid to lead to the production of carbon dioxide. Instead it provides an elasticity and yellow color (also seen in Japanese ramen). Yet if you did combine it with an acid including the lactic acid in sourdough you would gain a leavening effect. While the Dutch can lay the first recorded claim to leavening it is tempting to think that it has been used to at least some extent as a helper to make sourdough rise better for even longer.

#cooking #leavening

This is more or less the nine month anniversary of my retirement. Enough time for a baby to gestate and be born should be enough time to at least have some ability to examine the outcomes of an action. However I’m going to keep this very general and not focus on financial specifics.

The biggest change other than the retirement itself is that we have moved closer to family and into a more urban environment. Both have been positive changes. The new house means that more money is tied up in housing but the old house sold well and fast and we’ve switched to having only one vehical so the difference isn’t that huge on a month to month basis.

During the first nine months I hit a new lower weight goal and have maintained it. I haven’t exercised as much as I might like but I don’t feel too bad about it. My long term health issues are more or less unchanged although it is clear that I’m drinking less beer in retirement which is a good thing.

The negative thing would be that I am not doing as much directly related to my existing hobbies. Some of that is due to things such as selling one house, buying another and general readjustment after coming back to a situation that I knew was temporary. But the move is over and I should be moving closer to a permanent situation.

I have started to set things up to start working with wood and electronics in the way I have wanted to for years but I haven’t moved as fast as I would like. Instead I have procrastinated with research on new hobbies and falling back into my lifelong hobbies of consuming books and video games. Research, planning, reading, and general learning are things that I love doing. I don’t beat myself up over doing more of the things I enjoy. But I also enjoy making things and I need to make sure that I move towards making things and using the materials I have collected. even in the face of my doubts.I need to remember to include the artistic play in my retirement routine.

#David #forestpaths

My initial post on this blog was at least partially the answer to who is Davit Jamburiani and why does he have a blog. Or at least why does he share one. But having answered why I suppose I should go through the other journalism questions.

Why did I pick a Georgian minor noble in the 12th century? Because it is a path less traveled really. There are many cultures and times that are popular within the SCA. The specific ones have varied over the years but as far as I can tell Georgian has never been a thing. Byzantium certainly and at least some interest in Persian, Arab, and Turkic but not Georgia.

Which means it is also a nice historical puzzle. Of course the SCA is a social group but it is a social activity with lots of individual activity between the social parts. You can research things, make things, and plan things. Some of these are even primarily solo activities. I like the idea of unraveling at least a little bit of a historical puzzle.

Of course that still leaves where and when as decent questions. Georgia itself is a tale of two parts. That is a gross simplification but it is enough to point out one of the big dynamics during the Golden Age. Western Georgia is a coastal region along the Black Sea and the area inland from there. The home of the Golden Fleece, Greek city states, and during the first millennium AD an area in the sphere of influence of the Roman Empire. The story of the creation of a unified Georgian kingdom is in many ways the story of the rise of one branch of the Bagrationi family in shifting alliance and opposition to the Byzantine Empire.

On the other hand Eastern Georgia, Kartli, was considered the homeland of the Georgian people. Unlike the area to the west it had stronger culturally and economically tied to the Persian sphere of influence throughout antiquity. Furthermore, with the Arab conquests starting in the 7th century most or all of eastern Georgia was at least nominally under Muslim rule until driven out by David IV.

I find this dynamic interesting. The initial consolidation of the united Kingdom of Georgia was based on the authority and prestige of western Georgia rulers who leaned heavily on their position as kings (mepe) but also on the titles bestowed on them by the Eastern Roman Empire such as kuropalates and later nobelissimos and kaisar. Their iconography was Byzantine. With the rise of David IV you can see a lessening of the ties to the Romans and the rise of both local Georgian styles and recognition that they are rulers of a multicultural kingdom that includes strong ties to the Persian cultural sphere and many Muslim subjects. There is good reason to feel that the Georgian Golden Age was able to flourish at least partially because of the First Crusade tying up Seljuk attention and allowing David IV to build up the country but it was not a Crusader state defined in opposition to Islam.

Svaneti is a highland region on the southern slopes of the Caucasus mountain range. One of the highest continuously occupied regions in Europe it is an area that is more isolated and poorer than the rest of Georgia but also a region that is sometimes promoted as being perhaps more authentically Georgian.

Initially I was thinking of a persona from roughly the 9th century and Svaneti held some interest because there were known trade routes crossing the Caucasus from Svaneti into the area occupied by the Alans. Unlike the Christian Georgians south of the Caucasus we have significant grave goods from the Alan region including the relatively famous clothing from Moschevaya Balka.

Yet the multicultural nature of the kingdom in the 12th century was ultimately more interesting. Still, back in the 21st century, an SCA persona needs a name. One could quibble that some of the Georgian and Soviet ethnographic research is very nationalistic but there is also great material. It turns out that the names in Svaneti are well documented from church records and legal documents. In Georgian of course but Roland Topchishvili has collected much of it which allowed me to document both the period spelling of David at Davit and many potential surnames.

#SCA #Davit

This is a continuation of my initial post on medieval Baghdadi thin bread but also a digression into the idea of authenticity.

I picked the title of this (and the last) post for the alliteration. It sounds good. In the context of the US 2023 I can assume that most people know what a tortilla should look and feel like. Ruqaq (which I can’t even reasonably type as I do not have the proper accent mark over the a) is not so well known especially as the 10th century Baghdadi version is baked in a dome shaped oven as found all over Asia while the modern Arabic bread is more of a crispy crepe cooked over a hot griddle. Perhaps naan is a better term but it doesn’t alliterate and, from the translation I am working from, the ruqaq sounds like it should be thinner than a naan. Lavash? Dosa except that they are made with completely different flours? For all I know the ruqaq is the ancestor of the tortilla by way of al-Andalus.

So I’ve started out inauthentically. Some might even say that I’m engaged in a clear case of cultural appropriation as I take the idea of an Arabic or Iraqi food and remake verbally into a completely different food. The teacher in me thinks that I am engaged in scaffolding, building new understanding and knowledge by relating it back to already existing knowledge. The experimentalist in me says that no matter what you call it we are just mixing flour, water, salt, leavening, and heat.

The experimentalist is also still interested in the sourdough and borax questions. I need to start saving some sourdough discards to play around with. If I use discards they will have little to no leavening and mostly serve to change the digestibility of the flour and the taste. There are many recipes for such flatbreads with and without leavening. Again, I don’t claim authenticity but it would be a viable product of a medieval Middle Eastern kitchen. Perhaps more research on sourdough in the Middle East is needed! If I use a fresh, active sourdough it will provide some leavening especially as the dough is to be left for a short period of time. Again not authentic but a viable product. In one sense I feel that my playing around with the recipe I am moving beyond museum authenticity. Certainly I have moved from mere copying into evaluating or creating so Bloom would be proud.

One odd tangent that I haven’t investigated is that I have seem references to hard or dry sourdough. Mostly this has been in the context of desem bread based on covering a small lump of dough in a flour. It works by maintaining a culture of wild yeast in the old dough fed by the flour around it with everything going much slower than a traditional sourdough because there is little to no liquid and stirring to allow for more contact of culture and new flour. 2g of dry starter per 100g of new flour sounds like a small amount but the Baghdadi recipe is clearly not made for working with 100g units so it might well be a viable route.

Finally, I have picked up but not tried the potassium carbonate. I knew it was hydrophilic but I underestimated how much. Storage feels like it might be a problem. As mentioned earlier the cookbook refers to baker’s borax but I don’t think the translation means literally borax. Really the entire family of pot ash, pearl ash, soda ash, natron, baking soda, and baking powder needs it’s own post so I’ll keep this shorter and make it part three.

#SCA #cooking

I like to cook. I like to read, research, and compare. So recently I’ve been playing with food in the form of a 10th century recipe for a thin bread as part of recreating a Baghdadi rolled up chicken salad pinwheel.

The recipe is found in the Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh, a 10th century cookbook written in the Abbasid Caliphate. The English translator has made a big deal that the Arabs ate sandwiches and thus we should stop saying that the Earl of Sandwich invented the sandwich. I think that is going a little too far. Many things are invented in multiple places and I certainly never got the idea that John Montagu was being put forth as The First Person to Put Food in Bread but only as the guy who popularized it in a specific social setting and ended up giving us the word for it. But I do think it is a neat connection that over a thousand years ago people had the same idea of cutting up cooked chicken, adding salady things, rolling it up in thin bread, and cutting it so that it looks pretty on a plate.

Chop [cooked chicken] and spread it on ruq§q (thin sheet of bread). Let there be underneath the chicken some skinned walnut, citron pulp (Èumm§' al-utruj), nabnab (cultivated mint), tarragon, baï9aråj (basil), and salt. Roll up the bread [with the filling inside].

No mayo or cream cheese but I think that might be an improvement!

Really, my main interest now is in trying to make the thin bread. The recipe given has the proportions of 100g of flour, 2g salt, 2g of yeast, and 2g of baker’s borax plus enough water to make a dough. Roll thin and bake in a domed oven like a tandor. If you make it and ignore the borax it is a perfectly normal bread dough recipe. So far I haven’t mastered getting the rounds thin enough but there is nothing odd it is simply a matter of playing with hydration. Instead of using a domed oven some more modern flat breads with similar names are formed by spreading the dough thinly by hand on a very hot pan or by using a spatula to spread the dough into a thin layer as you put it on. This means that only one side gets the heat at a time but it is simpler to do.

More interesting to me are questions about the borax and the yeast. First off; what is baker’s borax? I don’t think anyone really knows! Right now I’m thinking that perhaps it is something that might act as leavening. Potassium carbonate (pot ash / pearl ash) is what I think I’ll try first although I suspect that the word borax might be a clue to something that was also used as a flux and that natron would be a better match. The thing is I don’t know where to get natron or soda ash.

The yeast question is also odd to me. Of course this is unlikely to be yeast in a pure sense. Yet by having a specific ingredient identified as yeast it implies that this wasn’t simply a sourdough with a continuing culture but more of an additive. The foam that rises to the top in brewing, barm, can be used in making bread and has yeast in it so perhaps this is a dried barm? For now I am going with sourdough from a starter and mostly skipping the addition of yeast.

I’ll update this and add to it when I have some results.

#cooking #SCA

How had I not heard of this Latin word for leisure both idle and productive?

I am prone to otium otiosum at times; unoccupied or idle leisure that might be thought of as wasted time. Much of my reading, video game playing, and social media falls under that general heading even if I am a fairly strong believer in the idea that time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. I strive for otium negotiosum, the busy leisure of hobbies, managing your affairs well, and such activities, but I don’t always reach it. I’ll let the readers decide which form this blog is!

Like many concepts it is easy to make connections although it is unclear how deep they really are. When I first heard of the concept my thoughts went to the fact that one of the best decisions we ever made as a family was that we would do our best to make it work with only one salary. There is much work that needs to be done in a household and having one person able to do that work as their effective job freed both of us up to our affairs well. Like many choices it had risk and opportunity costs but also reduced stress and allowed both of us to have a measure of leisure (both me time and us time in more modern terms) that we would not have had.

More generally it is neat to see that the upper class Romans had a concept that maps fairly well to the idea of vanaprastha that I have mentioned before. My guess is that the Romans would have thought of retiring to a well run farm or house in the city not a forest dwelling but the idea of time for contemplation, personal development, and service seems to be similar.

#forestpaths #David #ramblings

Davit Jamburiani is that name I am using for an SCA persona. Actually, as I mention in the pinned about post I haven’t registered the name yet but I’ve done the research to support the name as a potential historical name for a man from the Svaneti region of the Kingdom of Georgia in the late 11th / early 12th century. But what is a persona? Is it more than a name?

As far as I can tell the official 2023 answer is it depends on what you want it to be! There is a vocal component of the SCA that wants personas to be nothing more than a name. Come have fun whacking people! Dress in ALL the fancy outfits! Focusing on the persona artificially constrains you and who wants to be constrained in your cosplay. Especially when so many things make it impossible to get away from the reality of being a 21st century human playing a silly game!

There is another group that wants to get into the persona. This can go as far as being in character as is done when visiting Duke Cariadoc’s Enchanted Ground campsites. For brevity I won’t repeat his ideas and thoughts but Cariadoc’s Miscellany has many articles about Persona that spell out the idea of his Dream. Most of his articles are really old now but the though is still valid. Or it can be more of a deep dive embracing the constraints and trying to recreate more aspects of a specific life and time.

I’m more of the living history side of things even if some people object to that term. I am not a Svaneti re-enactor because I am not attempting to re-enact any specific person or event. But I do want to recreate things with a strong focus on what Davit might have experienced. I think of it as focus not constraint. Which leads to thoughts on the issue of authenticity.

One way to look at authenticity is to think of it as different levels. I like to think there is a zeroth level when you are being medievalish – the bare minimum without real concern for whether it is medieval, ren faire, or fantasy. Beyond that you various levels of authenticity that often focuses on the museum level. The recreation of artifacts that have been curated. Which leads to a focus on the wealthy and even them to the public look of the wealthy. I hope to progress beyond that even if it does involve some extrapolation.

To go back to Duke Caridoc again there is a lot to be said for trying to get into the midset of a persona. People before 1600 were not any less intelligent or creative. They solved the issues of living and working within the constraints of their time quite well. Perfect authenticity slavishly following museum articles is a different form of constraint of course but it leads to a very distorted view and, to me, not as interesting view.

Or to put it another way; in the 21st century I find recipes to be good starting points but I almost always put my own twist on them. I expect that a 12 century Georgian would feel the same way and feel just as free to play around with the foods and flavors at their disposal within the constraints provided by cost, seasonal availability, and the limits of a medieval kitchen.

#SCA #Davit #persona

Are you a fan of sous vide cooking, smoking, sourdough or all three? This is a silly question of course. It is easy to see that all of these techniques can turn out good food. Yet I find that they take a different mindset.

Let’s talk about the first two since they are often used to cook meat. Sous vide is all about repeatability, accuracy, and control. The aim is to make the food cook uniformly so that every bit is at the same perfect temperature without the danger of over cooking. It is a conceptually simple means of cooking with very little in the way of skill that owes its consumer success to cheap PID controller technology. Smoking is in many ways the opposite. Even if you ignore the flavoring aspect of the smoke and consider it purely as a low and slow oven cooking there is much more attention required in dealing with the individual conditions involved. Overcooking, uneven cooking, and the uncertain time needed to finish cooking are all risks accepted by the person running the smoker.

These thoughts came about while I was smoking some ribs. Not really profound but interesting connections to muse on

• Smoking seems to have a connection to the philosophy of wabi-sabi in its embrace of imperfection.
• Sous vide is something that you do in your kitchen. As long as you have a kitchen you can do it and it doesn’t connect with others. On the other hand smoking requires more space, almost certainly outside, and because of the aroma tends to at least titillate others and inform them of your actions. Individuality versus community.
• While the Weber kettle type of grills that can be used for smoking blur the distinction there is also a difference in size and mass which means a sous vide set up would seem to be more suited to a situation where you plan on moving. I doubt there are digital nomads who carry one around but you could. While a small grill on a balcony could be used to smoke in some cases the idea of a smoker is less of an apartment thing and more of a house; less of a mobile life and more of a settled one.
• Technocratic control versus personal craftsmanship. I wouldn’t want to carry this thought too far especially as I use an electric smoker but the thought still arises. Could a preference for using one method or the other be correlated with thoughts on technocratic planning in politics? Modernism versus romanticism?

In the end there is also sourdough. Not a cooking method for meat but another older, inherently less controlled cooking method. I mostly included it for the sibilant sound of the s words but perhaps there is another axis to the discussion that would be interesting in how sourdough starts with the idea of wild yeast but then becomes over time a controlled situation as you keep a starter alive

#cooking

Roughly nine months ago I wrote that If someone looked out into my backyard they could be excused for thinking that I have become somewhat of a literal forest hermit. Actually I dislike yard work and hadn’t gotten around to taming a yard that was left mostly untended for four years. Today I am in a different house with a different yard. It isn’t a forest although it is still not a tamed lawn. I might even be a little less of a hermit!

Forest hermit is also a literal translation of the term vanaprastha at least according to some websites. Others say “way of the forest” would be a better fit which has its own resonances with me. In either case vanaprastha is the name for the third stage of life in the Vedic asrama system. I’m not Hindu (or Taoist for that matter) but I find a lot of practical wisdom and psychology in the philosophical thought of many religions.

The asrama idea says that for those in the highest three castes there are four stages of life; student, householder, forest hermit, and renunciate. The householder stage is the focus on the duties of maintaining a household, raising a family, educating one's children, and leading an active community and family centered social life. At some point, roughly when grandchildren are born, there is a change in role to the third stage focused more on advising, personal development, and withdrawing from some aspects of the world. It sounds a lot like work life and retirement.

Nothing really new or groundbreaking in a sense but interesting because it seems to mimic the FIRE movement in the idea of consciously choosing to shift from a focus on earning wealth to a focus on other aspects of leading a meaningful life prior to the final stage of your life. Some retirement discussions would probably match this with the “go go” and later “go slow” retirement phases but I think that there is a deeper idea. Go go and go slow are descriptive but they aren’t prescriptive. The idea of a forest wanderer (another translation) is that it is prescriptive. One should move to the third stage when your own kids are launched into their own householder stage. It implies a timeframe that isn’t the fetishized early retirement in your 30s of the ERE/MMM crowd but is not holding on until as late as possible attached to earning money and maintaining one’s position in life.

An idealized version might be the mentor trope common in spy movies. Retired. Out of the game and living a good life but not so far out of things that they can’t provide advice and aid. To cast a wide net you could think of Isobel von Schönenberg in Hopscotch, Jean-Pierre in Ronin, and both Donald Fitzroy and Margaret Cahill in The Gray Man. Of course this is the flashy, action movie view but mentorship and service to the community in ways other than purely being a part of the economic machine (with a nod to the fact that we are all part of that engine due to our consumptions at the very least) seem like good goals especially when balanced with the freedom to explore personal development. But let’s not carry the trope too far as it is 50/50 whether the mentor character lives.

Perhaps due to having been a teacher I find myself drawn more to the personal development side of things. Right now mentorship feels very close to what I have stepped away from in 2022 even as some aspects of teaching still maintain their appeal. I’m not religious so perhaps my introspection and musing on the idea of a life well lived and work well done aren’t particularly in line with the ancient Vedic ideals but no matter. As one sets off into one’s own personal forest of the mind it is good to at least examine the paths laid out by others even if you figure that you might go off on a little impromptu cross country travel.

#forestpaths #David #ramblings

In one sense this isn't a blog. I have no interest in trying to monetize it. Then again I’m old so perhaps old school makes sense. OG enough that I really don’t even think of this as a blog with chronologically organized entries but more of a hypertext document where the links between ideas is at least as important as the time stamp. Note; I am at least a little bit with the times and will be attempting to use tags in addition to hyperlinks. The purpose is to think about ideas, how they connect, and ultimately perhaps to cement some of these ideas in my brain by thinking about them repetitively as I edit entries and as I make connections between things. The method of loci crossed with a sort of personal constructivist learning..

At time I will use a forest full of walking paths as metaphor will be expanded on in future posts but it resonates with me in many ways. The way in Taoism, the stage of vanaprastha, the benefits of being in nature, and even the surreal logic of IF games where you might be in a forest path only to take one move and find something completely different. Or, since this blog has a second identity as the journal of a persona, the wanderings of a fictional creation in a fictional but lived world.

In a purely practical sense I feel that I should mention that links are never an endorsement of specific sites as authoratative. I include links because I do not want to leave people with only my imperfect explanation or lack of one but I also realize that no one link can adequately explain so concepts especially those from cultures that are not my own.

#ramblings #forestpaths