Qimin Yaoshu and Jia Sixie

The Qimin Yaoshu (齊民要術), usually rendered as Essential Techniques for the Common People, was compiled by Jia Sixie around 544, in the time of the Northern Wei and the years that followed it, when the wheat and millet country of the North China plain, in the region of present-day Shandong, was the setting of the agriculture it describes. It is the oldest surviving Chinese treatise on farming and the household economy to be preserved nearly complete, and it stands among the founding texts on which any history of the Chinese table must rest.

Jia Sixie was an official and a landowner, and his book is ordered as a farmer's year rather than as a cook's. Its chapters treat the sowing of grain and pulses, the raising of vegetables and fruit trees, the keeping of sheep, pigs, poultry and fish, and then, in its later sections, the transformation of the harvest into food: brewing, the making of ferments and sauces, pickling, the preservation of meat and fish, and the cooking of the household. The kitchen is thus placed where it belongs in the history of the country, at the end of a long chain of work in the field and the yard. Fuchsia Dunlop, in Invitation to a Banquet, draws on the long written tradition of Chinese food to show how far back its principles can be followed, and a text of this kind is one of the points at which that tradition can be seen at its root. The cooking recorded in the Qimin Yaoshu is that of a northern, millet-and-wheat society, and it differs in many particulars from the rice cooking of the south that readers now associate with China. Steamed and boiled flour foods, soups and braises of mutton and pork, fermented bean preparations, vinegars, and pickled vegetables all have their place in it. The ferments are especially important to the history of seasoning: the book gives methods for the sauces and pastes made from fermented grain and beans that are the ancestors of the soy sauces and bean pastes of later centuries. Its practice is concrete, with quantities, timings, seasons and the stated reasons for each step, and this habit of precise instruction is rare in so early a work. The book is also valuable for what it quotes. Jia Sixie gathered passages from earlier agricultural and household writings, many of which are otherwise lost, so that the Qimin Yaoshu preserves fragments of a literature that would not otherwise be known. Later compilers of farming manuals and of encyclopaedic works on food drew on it in turn, and it remained a reference for centuries. In this sense it is both a record of its own age and a channel through which earlier knowledge reached later readers. For a book such as this one the use of the Qimin Yaoshu is limited and clear. It is cited for the antiquity of fermentation, preservation and the northern grain kitchen, and for the principle that cooking in China has long been understood as continuous with agriculture. It is not a recipe collection in the modern sense, and it should not be read as a description of the national cuisine of its time, which the text itself, concerned with one region and one class of household, does not claim to be.

The table implied by the Qimin Yaoshu is one of steamed wheat cakes and noodles, of millet, of braised and roasted mutton and pork, and of strongly preserved and fermented seasonings. Salt, vinegar and fermented bean and grain sauces carry the flavour, together with the aromatics the book describes, and sourness and savour from fermentation are already central to it. The foundations of the later Chinese seasoning cupboard can be seen in its pages.