Recipes, Medicine and Gastronomy in Ancient China

Short Description
Chinese recipe books change depending on. each author’s personality. They include the. very rigorous Hu Sihui, a 14th-century. imperial. dietician …

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Content
The French expression recette de cuisine
(kitchen recipe) refers to two fields which
are not independent but which must be
considered separately. The first indicates
the knowledge of procedures and
ingredients needed to make a particular
dish. The second is the recording of this
knowledge in a special style and syntax.
According to the latter, the recipe is the
subject matter of gastronomic treatises -
usually collections of recipes - as part of the
so-called fachliteratur, or “scientific
literature,” which includes cookbooks and
texts listing the formulas typical of some
arts like medicine, pharmaceutics, dietetics
and of course gastronomy.(1) All these texts
share a prescriptive approach, aimed at
introducing the reader to an activity for
which special ingredients, procedures and
techniques are needed to put together a
curative or gastronomic preparation (Sabban
1989, 79-82).
According to the scholars who studied some
Sumer texts dating back to the third
millennium BC (Goody and Kramer), it
would appear that the first written recipes
were in fact for prescriptions rather than
culinary dishes.
Similar examples can be found in ancient
China, the only difference being that the
earliest medical prescriptions, discovered
in 1973 in a princely…