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 m