In the middle and late Ming dynasty, there was a trend of making various nutritional dew with distillers, which were called flower dew and fragrant dew. Therefore, blending wine with toilet water is very popular. Is this a traditional China cocktail?
In China, it has a long history to soak flowers, leaves and fruits with strong fragrance in wine to form floral wine and fruit wine full of plant fragrance. Interestingly, correspondingly, a special wine tasting habit has also been formed. When holding a banquet, these unique and fragrant wines are blended with more mellow yellow wine and soju on the spot to make mixed wine for the host and guest to drink. In the Ming Dynasty, jasmine wine was mixed with Jinhua wine, while in the Qing Dynasty, it was mentioned that Shu Qi wine was mixed with papaya wine at a ratio of 50-50, and appropriate amount of osmanthus soju was added to yellow rice wine. This collocation method of two different wines shows that China has a tradition of mixing drinks similar to cocktails.
After the popularity of flower dew, the wine mixed with flower dew and wine quickly became a new category. Note: When displaying wine, add a little rose or rose dew to each pound of wine. Water chestnut wine, steamed water chestnut dew, wine is very fragrant. All fruits can be copied. In the Qing Dynasty, another school also advocated blending wine with Zhu, listing as many as 34 kinds of perfumes, including seasonal flowers such as plum blossom, peony, orange blossom and chamomile, as well as grass leaves such as rice leaves, orange leaves, cypress leaves and calamus leaves. Cao Xueqin's grandfather Cao Yin likes to entertain guests with wine mixed with chrysanthemum dew, and proudly wrote a poem entitled "Climbing to the Top".
In particular, Zhou Lianggong, a scholar of chrysanthemum dew wine in the late Ming Dynasty, recorded a method of plum blossom wine mixing, which is characterized by: beautiful roses can not be separated from their own families, and plum blossom slices should be taught lightly. Smellers drop golden stalks, cut sugar cane, lay flowers and squat. Generally speaking, the literature only mentions the simple distillation of newly picked plum blossoms, but Min pointed out that in the Ming Dynasty, people in Haicheng, Fujian adopted a unique process, that is, cutting sugar cane into sections, putting them in iron drums on traditional distillation furnaces in China, accumulating a large number of clean and complete fresh plum blossoms, and then burning a small fire in the furnace and slowly distilling and purifying them.
This record is very surprising, because we all know that rum originating in Cuba is also made from sugarcane and distilled. Haicheng, also known as Guangdong and Hong Kong, was one of the largest commercial ports in the world in the Ming Dynasty, and it was also the end and starting point of American trade in the East. Did rum go to the other side of the ocean with the help of maritime trade at the beginning of its germination?
In the production of rum, bagasse is fermented by yeast and then distilled. However, Zhou Lianggong's records did not mention whether Haicheng people would ferment before steaming sugar cane. So we may not be sure what the combination of plum blossom and sugarcane is after distillation. However, it is impossible to purify sugar by distillation of fresh sugarcane, and there has never been a practice of distilling fresh sugarcane in history. So at that time, Haicheng people probably fermented sugar cane gently first, but Zhou Liang was an outsider and didn't know this. If so, then the finished product is Haicheng Xiangmei Rum in Ming Dynasty, with low alcohol content.
During the Ming and Qing dynasties, toilet water was often stored for a period of time after distillation. Therefore, if Haicheng plum blossom honey is really a low-alcohol distilled liquor, there will naturally be an aging process. Such a unique plum blossom dew, Haicheng people like to blend it into various high-quality wines. Every bottle of wine has a pot, a little dew, a fragrant smell and different tastes. No, isn't this a rum cocktail from the Ming Dynasty?
Even if we can assert that the rum brewed by Haicheng people is really in the primary stage, at least according to Zhou Lianggong's records, Haicheng people often mix homemade plum blossom dew into wine and regard such finished products as.
Today, according to the information provided by Zhou, we can make Yuegang Plum Rum, and then mix it into Yuegang Plum Cocktail as a special drink in winter. You can also reproduce the Moonport Rose Rum and Moonport Rose Cocktail, and let the ancient Ming-style floral cocktail linger in your mouth, thus paying tribute to the eastern starting point of the Maritime Silk Road.