Soup for the Qan ─ Chinese Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era As Seen in Hu Sihui's Yinshan Zhengyao

Hu Szu-Hui had been an imperial dietary physician under several short-lived descendants of Qubilai (Kublai Khan) during the early 1300s, and his book was presented to the court in 1330 as Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor's Food and Drink. It is mostly concerned with the medical values of foods and recipes in terms of medieval Chinese nutritional therapy. Buell (history, Horst-Gortz-Stiftungs-Institut, Berlin) and Anderson (emeritus anthropology, U. of California-Riverside) place the work in historical and cultural context, then analyze the text in relation to the persistence of the Steppe in Mongol thought, Turko-Islamic influences, the Chinese framework, Song-Jin-Yuan correspondence medicine, Chinese culinary traditions, and the social context of the book's foodway. Then they present an edition of the Chinese text with English translation. The first edition of the study seems to have appeared about 2000, and this second corrects identified errors and updates the treatment somewhat. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Paul D. Buell, Ph.D. (1977) in History, University of Washington, Seattle, is Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Horst-Gortz-Stiftungs-Institut, Berlin. He has published extensively on the history of the Mongols including an Historical Dictionary of the Mongol World Empire (Scarecrow, 2003). E. N. Anderson, Ph.D. (1967) in Anthropology, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside. A specialist in ethnobiology and human ecology with extensive field work, he is the author of Floating World Lost (University Press of the South 2007).Charles Perry, B.A. (1964) in Middle East Languages, University of California, Berkeley, is a Los Angeles-based writer specializing in the food history of the Islamic world. His writings include Medieval Arab Cookery (Prospect, 2000), with A.J. Arberry and Maxime Rodinson.