A Soup for the "Qan": Chinese Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era as Seen in Hu Szu-Hui's "Yin-Shan Cheng-Yao." (review)

Paul D. Buell and Eugene N. Anderson. 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. The Sir Henry Wellcome Asian Series. London: Kegan Paul International, 2000. xiii + 715 pp. Ill. $150.00 (0-7103-0583-4).

Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor's Food and Drink is the Chinese cookbook best known outside China. It is quite atypical of the genre, but fascinating for what it reveals about the mixing of culinary cultures. Hu Szu-hui, a palace dietician, presented it to the Mongol throne in 1330, two generations after Kublai Khan completed his conquest of Cathay. Its recipes--Roast Wolf Soup, Donkey's Head Gruel, endless variations on boiled mutton--are not reminiscent of Chinese cooking; such staples of the latter as rice, millet, and pork, and the basic technique of stir-frying, play no role. It incorporates foods from all the realms of the Mongols, to display their power and ambition.

A feast was "a social message" (p. 91), with the choice of dishes its phrasing. It expressed the Khans' power--muscular, sexual, economic, political, and, in the Chinese mold, cosmic. Paul Buell and Eugene Anderson expertly trace Mongol, Chinese, and Muslim foodways to their intersection. Better informed in all three traditions than their predecessors, they show that Hu imposes on Mongol tastes techniques of flavoring that are more often Islamic than Chinese, drawing on recipes with counterparts in today's Turkestan, Iran, and points between. In the Yuan court, the ruling Mongols were a minority; their chefs had to please, among others, Turks, Tungus, Tanguts, Pakistanis, Tibetans, Chinese, Koreans, and Russians.

Proper and Essential Things is "emphatically medical" in aiming to promote the health of the Mongol court (p. 173). Most of the 219 recipes claim to cure illness, to promote health--or to lead a step beyond health, as the Chinese saw it, to immortality. By modern lights they record a heavy and badly balanced diet. The illustrated catalog of 221 ingredients details the medicinal virtues and uses of each; the medical rationales, unlike the underlying principles of cooking, are mainly Chinese.

More than four hundred pages of A Soup for the "Qan" are devoted to a complete translation of Proper and Essential Things, followed by lists of its ingredients and their frequency, and a learned essay by Charles Perry on grain foods of the early Turks. The translation is generally of high quality, much superior to previous partial versions in English. Experiments in the kitchen helped. The translators' lack of attention to syntax leads to occasional stumbles in the prefaces and other literary passages, but this rendition is pioneering, professedly not definitive.

The book is disappointing in only one respect, the one most important to readers of this journal: its discussion of Chinese medicine in Proper and Essential Things is not based on acquaintance with primary sources. Buell and Anderson depend uncritically on an odd assortment of modern writing, some good and some abysmal, ignoring many essential contributions. When translating medical terminology, they rely on a Chinese-English medical dictionary, based on contemporary "traditional" practice, that is seriously misleading for historical usage. They also bank on the opinions of "recent practitioners" (p. 138).

The result is not only mistranslations of medical content, but a mishmash of information and misinformation. As examples of the latter, the authors assert that Chinese and Arabic medicine "by and large" evolved on "the same humoral base" and both "owed a great deal" to Indian Ayurvedic medicine (p. 125); that herbal medicine "owes much to the experiments and theorizing of proto-Taoist physiological alchemy of the last centuries b.c." (p. 132...