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Book Review
| A Soup for the Qan: Chinese Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era as Seen in Hu Szu-Hui's Yin-shan Cheng-Yao. Introduction, translation, commentary, and Chinese text by PAUL D. BUELL and EUGENE N. ANDERSON. London and New York: Kegan Paul International, 2000. xiii + 715 pp. $225.00 (cloth).
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At the core of this book is a facsimile reprint of the 1456 edition of a dietary manual, "The Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor's Food and Drink," including its enchanting illustrations of kitchen scenes and foodstuffs such as rice, wheat, millet, wolf, crane, sheep, crab, and carp. It was written by Hu Szu-Hui, who probably came from a bilingual Chinese-Turkic family in northwest China and who served as imperial dietary physician to several short-lived descendents of Qubilai Qan in the early 1300s. The text, which he originally presented to the emperor in 1330, consists of three sections, the first two comprising over two hundred recipes interspersed with nuggets of dietetic advice and the third being a comprehensive materia dietetica describing the nutritional and medical properties of various foodstuffs. |
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As a fascinating, if hard to interpret, glimpse into the culture of the Mongol Court, the text has attracted much attention, mainly from Chinese and Japanese scholars but also from Françoise Sabban, a leading French culinary historian at the École des Hautes Études in Paris. The prevailing interpretation is that, although the text faithfully reflects the contemporary belief that food was medicine and medicine was food, the recipes themselves record a short-lived, indeed unfortunate, intrusion of an unsophisticated Mongol cookery based on mutton and milk products into the great traditions of Chinese cuisine. |
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