I know I write in a niche; I started writing my books because I wanted to read books like them and couldn’t find them in a language I’m fluent enough in.

So you could have knocked me over with one of the peacock feathers on this book’s cover when I ran into:

🤴🏽A kind, soft, middle-aged Middle Eastern gentleman who…

🫖 …loves his home’s food and culture and architecture and definitely the chai…

🧸 …and needs a break from all the obligations and expectations and thou-shalts in his life…

🐈 …and adores the thousand cats who wander around his city.

🚋 (So much that he made them a little solar powered cat tram!)

Up til that last bit there, I might have been talking about Chai and Charmcraft, but I am utterly beyond delighted by C. Quince’s Consorting with the King.

C. Quince’s solar-powered not-exactly-gaslamp edition of something adjacent to the Ottoman Empire is gently and cozily flipping the usual tropes all the way through, and I am so here for it. Instead of the white folks bringing Enlightenmnent to the brown folks, it’s clear early on that Istanbul is an old and beautiful and rich civilization even before the solar power comes onto the scene. The Western visitors have a lot of catching up to do (one of them nearly drinks out of the hand-washing bowl). The Turkish royals are better educated; they speak the handwaved-not-exactly-Saxon-that-gets-rendered-in-English with a bit of hesitation but still more fluently than the Saxon-and-Victorian-coded point of view character speaks Turkish.

And then there are the cats. And the little solar powered cat tram. And the Cinderella-inverted setup that absolutely won my heart — I can’t say more without spoilers. I knew where it was going but I didn’t mind knowing that because the ride itself was as delightful as the cat tram.

I might possibly have made an idiot of myself squeaking incoherently in his email about how madly I love this book, but I am not an AI bot or a scammer, but also I hate that I have to lead with that because I can count the number of actual humans who’ve emailed me on the fingers of one hand this year, but also I love this book. (But you can’t say that coherently without sounding like an AI bot or a scammer now, so that kind of leaves so incoherently no AI bot would have sent it, but also that may have led the human on the other end to think I’m entirely off my rocker? 😅 )

Also, C. Quince introduced his readers to beverages I’d never encountered before, so of course I was extra bonus sold!

I wish I could write fanfic without causing copyright trouble, I would love to write a crossover fanfic where our characters got to nerd out about their favorite beverages and their mutual love of cats and the rueful challenges of gently, cozily flipping the Cinderella tropes like pancakes rather than like tables.

Alas, I can’t, but at least I can research some of those fascinating beverages without spoilers or lawyers?

Kashkab and Qatarmizat from the Solar Sultan

No spoilers here, but this is a quote from near the end of the book:

“Anything cold?”

“Yes, the lemonade,” Haşim said, leading Francis to the appropriate tray of drinks. “Kashkab,” he indicated the pale-yellow drink, “lemon, mint, pepper, and citron. Or, qatarmizat,” he indicated another yellow drink, “is sweeter. Or,” he added with a smile, “my favourite. Lemon and strawberry.”

“That sounds good,” Francis said. “Why doesn’t that one have a name?”

“Well, the other ones are recipes from Egypt.”

If I were a cat you would have seen ears and whiskers lock on immediately with huge black targeting pupils and the wriggle of an impending book-pounce! 😻

Here’s what How Stuff Works has to say about it:

The earliest record of the precursor to lemonade hails from the Mediterranean coast of medieval Egypt. Kashkab was made from fermented barley combined with mint, rue, black pepper and citron leaf. Next time you’re at the juice bar, ask your mixologist to whip you up a frothy mug of kashkab! Or how about a shot of sweet and tangy qatarmizat instead? Thanks to the chronicles of poet and traveler Nasir-i-Khusraw, who wrote accounts of 10th-century Egyptian life, and to Jewish books and documents in the Cairo Genizah, we know that the medieval Jewish community in Cairo consumed, traded and exported bottles of the sugary lemon juice concoction called qatarmizat through the 13th century.

I hadn’t run into Nasir-i-Khusraw or the Jewish community recipes in research before this, possibly because these weren’t dedicated cookbooks. An hour’s research hasn’t been enough for me to track down original sources, but here’s my Taking A Guess Unofficial Amateur Beverage Hack theories on how someone might get a similar sip today:

Very Under-Researched Kashkab

(more updates if I find them!)

From the notes above, it looks like historic kashkab begins with a lightly fermented barley water. Since I personally don’t feel comfortable giving fermentation advice over the Internet because of the number of ways things could potentially go wrong (including exploding glass), I’m going to say “if you feel comfortable making small beer from barley, you do you” here.

If you don’t feel comfortable making small beer from barley, and you live in a place where Robinson’s lemon barley water is available, that could be a much simpler first step.

And if you don’t live in range of Robinson’s for sale, many Korean markets sell roasted barley packets for brewing a tea-like tisane.

Alternatively, if you want to start with lemonade rather than barley water, Rule of Tasty is right there too.

So after you have your base beverage at whatever level of barley, lemon, and/or fizz pleases you:

• Grab a fill-your-own tea bag or tea ball
• (If you’re starting with hot barley tea without lemon, add some lemon juice or zest here to taste)
• Put into it some fresh or dried mint, some cracked black pepper, and maybe a couple celery leaves for a rue-adjacent flavor with less hazards
• If starting with hot barley water, steep the tea-bag-or-ball in it for a few minutes, taste testing, and pull when you like the balance
• If starting with cold barley water or lemonade, you might want to leave the herbs steeping longer because it will take more time to flavor cold liquid than hot.
• Sugar doesn’t appear in either C. Quince’s book description of kashkab or in the historical notes, aside from whatever you need to get barley to lightly ferment. But again, I leave Rule of Tasty to your decisions.

Very Under-Researched Qatarmizat

(more updates if I find them!)

It sounds like qatarmizat is closer to modern day lemonade, and sugar from sugarcane reached Egypt somewhere between 325 BCE and 700 CE, but I don’t have documentation on what percentage of the population used sugar vs. honey over time. Sugar was definitely in common use by the 1200s, because the Crusaders discovered it and took it to Europe with them.

I can’t guess whether the bottling was also for the containment of fizzy fermentation or simply for ease of selling unit-shaped things to those who desired them.

So if you like either sweet still lemonade or sweet fizzy lemonade, both sound plausible to me on this end of time!

Pour a glass, sip, and enjoy a good book full of cats, since the book-cats will not be offended by the citrus in your glass.